Ricky Martin's Portuguese Etc.

[aindreas]

I ran across this video of Ricky Martin being interviewed in Portuguese:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt8T_iQ-mOYI'm a Spanish speaker and have had a lot of interaction with Portuguese speakers, but really don't know much about the language. For the most part, in my experience, if I speak reasonably paced Spanish to Portuguese speakers, they

Comments

[eavanmoore]

I had a Brazilian friend back in high school who said they'd had visitors from Spain and she was really pleased to discover she understood Spanish -- until she found out they were speaking Spanish-accented Portuguese. I think she couldn't actually understand Spanish.

[pseudohistorian]

Martin is actually speaking Portuguese in the interview--you can see he struggles a bit with the vocabulary, and asks a couple of times about how to say a Spanish term in Portuguese, but he is actually speaking the language with a Brasilian accent/dialect. (Shakira is similar in this regard in Portuguese-language interviews.)

My personal experience is much like what you described being told by other Lusophones--I can read Spanish easily enough, and I don't have too much trouble understanding spoken Spanish as long as it's spoken slowly and clearly without a lot of slang which doesn't translate.

[03_arruinarse]

I'm a Spanish speaker, and I always thought that you could listen slow paced Portuguese (I'm talking about brasilian Portuguese, tho) and sorta get the gist of most simpler sentences and topics, meanwhile reading it gets more tricky. But I'd never dare to say is at a level enough to affirm you're understanding it on the go; and really, it flows very hand in hand (heh) with heavy gesturing along.

I'd think is that the structure of things usually doesn't differ as much, or is easily "rearranged". But it's also dangerous in that while some words are a lot alike, there're cases they mean different things and trick you into thinking you're understanding something you really don't.

[arrowwhiskers]

I'm a non-native speaker of Spanish (as I'm assuming the OP is as well?), so maybe we have a similar perspective on this that might differ from native Spanish speakers. But, when I was in an advanced Spanish class, someone came in to inform us about an accelerated Portuguese course for Spanish speakers. The entire spiel was in Portuguese and even knowing 0 Portuguese I understood it fine. I ended up taking the course which was also taught in 100% Portuguese and I never felt like I didn't understand what was going on. So while I ended up studying Portuguese and now obviously understand it, I definitely remember that I could understand it somewhat without having studied it, too