Why Learn Portuguese?
If you speak Spanish, you have 60-70% of portugues. They are so close that a colombian man can speak Spanish with a brazilian friend, and the brazilian one speaks in portugues. Despite no one of them has studied the other language, If they speak slowly, the understanding rate is above to 90%.
Why Learn portugues? Because Brazil is the smile of the world!! You must to meet the brazilian people to know what's the real "joie de vivre" (i don't know the exacts words in english). See the brazilian Torcida in the soccer matches and you understand
In addition, You have almost 200 million people to practice, wonderful and important cities to visit (Lisboa, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Curitiba), another not so beautiful but very interesant, like Manaus (in the heart of the Amazon Forest), the biggest carnival in the whole world...
Another powerful reason: The soccer.
If you are a biologist, ecologist or anthopologist, Brazil is a very importnt country to do a doctorate or a master title. if you are linguistic and love the languages, you can learn dozens of them spoken by the brazilian communities indigenous.
You're business is import/export? you have in Brazil a very big market, and some of the most demanded products: Sugar, Coffe, Oil...
Another powerful reason: The music. Brazilian music is very beautiful, varied, and invite to dancing inmediatly.
Why not to learn portuguese?
I agree with you soñador, it's a very esasy lenguage to learn for a spanish speaker and viceversa. Well i think i don't need to learn it, just go 6 months to Brazil and you got it without effort or just watch films, tv shows, tv news,dvds portugues selected lenguage with portugues subtitles (subtitles are very important to learn a lenguage i have noticed with my english and my poor french, read + listen is great).
Now i'm trying to self-learn french with tv, dvd, computer program, read on line, google translator, etc... i can't stop french and switch to portugues now. I promise to start portugues after i reach a reasonable french level.
I think children one year school exchange between spanish and portugues countries will success in learning lenguage without no effort at all.That will be
interesting.
¿Porque hablamos en ingles si el portugues o el español son mutuamente inteligibles?
Spanish and Portuguese are useless languages. Let's learn English, French or Chinese. In South America you can always use sign languages..
Reality, you are wrong. Let me explain to you:
English and Chinese are really important, but French is not yet important. The last one is a medium size language like Urdu or Tamil.
Spanish and Portuguese are not only spoken in South America. Both languages are spoken in USA, Central America, Caribbean, South America, European Union, several African Countries, Timor and Philippines.
You can understand +700 million people around the World and some 200 million of Internet users.
Spanish is also spoken in central america, caribbean and north america (mexico, western usa states and south Florida). And surprise, It's also a very studied lenguage by anglos in USA and Canada, you can comunicate with them.
You can use just english and sign languages all around the globe and you'll survive but that will limit yourself a lot.
i have to work and i have no time at all, but i try to learn new lenguages to improve myself. I choose latin language because they are more easy for a native latin language speaker than asian, arabic, slave or german one.
Have you seen spanish + portugues language map? it's very, very, very big, isn't it?, and a lot of population too, more than 1000 million people around the globe in 25 years (native and non native).
You don't have to learn Portuguese, it's to difficult and no practical use.
All Brazilians understand Spanish, so you can do quite fine without a word of Portuguese in Brazil.
O Brasil é o país do futuro… e sempre o será!
Viva Brasil!
"You don't have to learn Portuguese, it's to difficult and no practical use.
All Brazilians understand Spanish, so you can do quite fine without a word of Portuguese in Brazil."
No. Brazilians understand Spanish but not without misunderstandings, and even that I think not everybody does. It's the same as in Portugal.
There's a practical use in learning Portuguese. Being fine in Brazil without a word of Portuguese depends what you want to do in Brazil. To go on holiday? Yes, you can go without a word of Portuguese and with plenty of misunderstandings.
To live in Brazil? Then, Portuguese in necessary.
Portuguese is spoken by 200 million people in the world. It's impossible to not have a piratical use of a language spoken by so many people.
Try to live in Holland or in Dutch speaking Belgium only with knowledge of similar German or English. You can, but your life will be very limited. In Belgium you won't go anywhere because the Flemish really demand knowledge of Dutch for everything.
I mentioned this parallel example because you posted as" meijse" which means girl in Dutch.
Around here Argentinian expats are famous for never learning Portuguese. Many (if not most) of them have been living here for decades and never really learned the language, they get by just fine with improvised Portunhol.
{Try to live in Holland or in Dutch speaking Belgium only with knowledge of similar German or English.
}
In fact a friend of mine is living in Rotterdam and she says you can live in the Netherlands w/o having to speak Dutch at all: most people speak English and with ease!
How does Portunhol seems and sounds like? Can you give some examples?
"How does Portunhol seems and sounds like? Can you give some examples?"
There's no way to say how it looks and sounds like, since it is written and different people will mix the two languages differently. Perhaps in the border regions Portunhol/Portuñol has a more distinct and clear grammar and pronunciation, but in general Portunhol is, like I said above, improvised. You make it up as you go. Depending on contingent contextual factors you just mix Portuguese and Spanish pronunciation, grammar, morphology and vocabulary.
ERRATA: i meant "...since it is *NOT* written..."
"In fact a friend of mine is living in Rotterdam and she says you can live in the Netherlands w/o having to speak Dutch at all: most people speak English and with ease!"
Not true. Many people Dutch people speak English, but mostly in Rotterdam it's poor English. Some Dutch people even either do not speak English at all or refuse to do it.
It happens that Rotterdam is mostly an industrial town where most of the jobs available for foreigners are manual jobs. So, one can often have a job without knowledge of Dutch, or with limited English or by mixing English with Dutch with one's native language (most of the cases).
But what about paying taxes, buying a house, studying, running a business, etc. Knowledge of Dutch is necessary.