Thread: Portuguese
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Old August 19, 2013, 07:54 PM
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Villa Villa is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zuma022 View Post
Has anyone here studied Portuguese after studying Spanish? I'm planning on a big South America trip in about a year and would love to visit Brazil as well and I'm thinking about studying Portuguese. I love the sound of the language.

I'm worried I will confuse the languages. So I thought that my Spanish should be on a pretty good level before I attempt to add another similar language, but I was wondering if anyone else has tried it and if you have any tips or recommendations.

Thanks.
I learned Italian first, then Spanish and then Portuguese. A long the way I also learned French. I lived in Italy for two years and have been to France four times. My point is I see similarities in all these languages. If you speak one Latin language you can learn anyone of the others or all of them as I have.

Portuguese is closest to Spanish of the other Latin based languages. Spanish and Portuguese are some 80% the same.(Italian/Spanish 70 some % the same. However Italian is easier to pronounce because it has the exact same vowel sounds as Spanish. Spanish and Italian have 5 vowel sounds while Portuguese has more than 5. Maybe this is why they say it is even easier for Portuguese speakers to learn Spanish then visa versa. I taught ESL to adult Spanish speakers and then started getting a lot of Brazilian students. They would come in the class speaking no Spanish but then after only a couple of weeks they were speaking Spanish just from being around the Spanish speakers with no studying of Spanish per se.

Just today I was talking to an Ecuadorian friend who speaks fluent Spanish, pretty fluent Italian and is learning Portuguese on her own. She was saying how she sees the similarities in the 3 languages Spanish/Protuguese/Italian and was giving me examples.

Here are just a few examples of Portuguese and Italian similarities:
Posso is both the same
in Portuguese and Italian. Posso=puedo=I can

Hoje=hoy=oggi The letter h is silent in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Just another example of the similarities.
In Italian we spell it oggi but it is pronounced the same in Portuguese.

Hoje posso ir o ginásio. Oggi posso andare in palestra. Hoy puedo ir al gimnasio.

Last edited by Villa; August 20, 2013 at 11:28 AM.
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