Does Russian sounds like Portuguese?
Aszykbajew, I don't know. What I know is that we do not have strong accents when we speak foreign languages.
If you're a native Slavonic speaker you can tell that better than me.
Anyway, I met a Polish living in Lisbon and I see from the Ukrainians and Russians living here that they have their eastern European accent.
that's what you think Joao. We all do have an accent when speaking a foreign languages, but it depends on a language we're speaking.
for instance, if you were danish, you would probably speak very well swedish.
if Dutch, than english would be really nice coming from your mouth.
if Croatian, your Polish would be excellent and so on...
but i really doubt that portuguese people sound nice when speaking french or spanish. to be more precise, i've already heard them speaking and everybody would've noticed a heavy foreign accent.
John, I said: we do not have a STRONG accent. I did not say we do not have accent. Everybody has an accent, of course.
The accent varies. I've heard people from the north speaking English with a homehow Italian accent, while people from Lisbon have a "José Mourinho" type of accent.
The accent also varies according to the level of practical command one has with the foreign language. One thing is for sure. It's not the sharp accent of other nationals.
A Dutch usually speaks English with their Dutch accent. They also tend to pronounce the "s" as "sh". They also tend to speak in a Germanic stiff way. I speak Dutch and I lived in Holland, so I know how it is.
Their English doesn't sound nice to me. Sometimes, they mix English with Dutch with can be confusing if one does not speak Dutch.
European portuguese sounds like albainian and brazilian portuguese kinda sounds like italian.
"It's mostly that most people do not think that Portuguese sounds like any other major Romance language. No-one would say that Portuguese sounds like Spanish or Italian. It does, strangely enough, sound like a Slavic language."
It's not the pronunciation that puts a language in a family of languages. It's the grammar and the origin of the words.
Listen to Flemish Dutch and Dutch from the Netherlands. They really sound like completely different languages. Dutch sounds like German while Flemish sounds like either Swedish or Czech.
But it's basically the same language.
Soft Swedish sounds completely different from hard German. The wagging spring sounds of English are completely different from any other Germanic language. Yet, all of them belong to the same language family.
Inside the Romance family, French sounds also very different from the other Romance languages. For me, Romanian, a Romance language, also sound like a Slavic language. I do not understand anything of Romanian, despite knowing that there are many words in Romanian coming from Latin.
Cape verdean creole is African or Romance? The grammar is African but the lexicon is mostly Portuguese...
<<Romanian language
The lexical similarity with Italian is estimated at 77%, followed by French at 75%, Sardinian 74%, Catalan 73%, Spanish 71%, Portuguese, and Rhaeto-Romance at 72%.>>
<<Since the 19th century, many modern words were borrowed from the other Romance languages, especially from French and Italian (for example: birou "desk, office", avion "airplane", exploata "exploit"). It was estimated that about 38% of the number of words in Romanian are of French and/or Italian origin (in many cases both languages); and adding this to the words that were inherited from Latin, about 75%-85% of Romanian words can be traced to Latin. The use of these Romanianized French and Italian loanwords has tended to increase at the expense of Slavic loanwords, many of which have become rare or fallen out of use. As second or third languages, French and Italian themselves are better known in Romania than in Romania's neighbors. Along with the switch to the Latin alphabet in Moldova, the re-latinization of the vocabulary has tended to reinforce the Latin character of the language.
In the process of lexical modernization, many of the words already existing as Latin direct heritage, as a part of its core or popular vocabulary, have been doubled by words borrowed from other Romance languages, thus forming a further and more modern and literary lexical layer.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language
Romanian "buna seara"-Italian "buona sera" etc.
Yep, but yet I do not understand anything of Romanian. It's my ignorance don't worry.
I am Portuguese and I also have trouble understanding the Italian words if I haven't studied the words first.
I know that you still have Slavic words mixed. "Yes" in Romanian is "da" just like in many other Slavic languages, from Slovenian to Bulgarian or Russian.
Romance languages have interesting mixes:
- Spanish and Portuguese have words from Arabic, South American Tupi, English, French, some German and at least one word coming from Dutch. Portuguese has a few words coming from Angola (Africa) also.
- French has German, and Dutch influences.
- Romanian has many Slavic influences.
- Italian? Well influences from the countries around, and in the origin or Latin, some Greek influences perhaps.
I'm from Russia, and when I went to Portugal, I spoke there with different people, like servers, maids, drivers... I was surprised at some of their grammatical mistakes, but then it would always turn out that they came to Portugal from Russian or Ukraine 1-3 years ago! I did not detect an accent at all/ So yes, Portuguese and Russian pronunciation is very close from my experience.
Thank you for your comments, Jelena. I wonder if the Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian and Albanian foreros/foreras would agree to the statement that the Portuguese guys from Lisbon can learn their language with a thin/slight accent to accentless way of speaking.
Many Eastern Europeans say that I have a very good pronunciation when I try to say words in their mother tongue.
It's probably true.
The Eastern Europeans living here have accent. It's a clear Eastern European accent, although often not that strong.
Funny that some Russians speak like Angolans. Either they have contact with Angolans or there is similarity in the intonation.
I've never heard Albanian in my whole life. It's not a Slavic language anyway.
What is a forero/a?
Joao, forero or forera means someone who participates in the forums.
I'm aware that Albanian is not a Slavic language, but it shares some features with Lithuanian and the Slavic languages, though some vowels share features with Greek and the Germanic languages, making it a distant relative.
However, to untrained ears, Albanian can sound like a Slavic language with the y sound of German and two r's: the r of British English and the trilled r of Slavic languages.
So you find the Eastern Europeans about 95% understandable when speaking Portuguese from Portugal?
Probably the Eastern Europeans have not so many people studying their language?
Can you tell me specifically what Eastern European tongue did you try to speak? Polish? Russian? Ukrainian? Romanian?
Just a few words in Polish, Russian, Czech, Ukrainian and Bulgarian.
I think that Czech and Bulgarian are the easiest languages to learn. Czech because of the simpler pronunciation rules and spelling. Bulgarian because it is probably the only Slavic language without those terrible case endings, and the pronunciation and spelling are easy as well. The Cyrillic is not a problem. It's quite easy.
have you seen Czech grammar, morphology??
I saw Czech grammar, and it has those case endings Joao finds terrible. Most Slavonic languages have nearly identical grammar.
I just need to group the Slavic languages with similar grammar:
Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish (Russian has cruder grammar than the rest, but all have case endings)
Slovak, Czech (difference is just with vocabulary)
Slovene, Upper and Lower Sorbian (they retained the dual)
BCS (Standard Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian have the same grammar)
Eastern Serbian dialects, Macedonian, Bulgarian (they lost case endings, but have more difficult verb conjugations)