learning Portuguese

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Dear All

Does anyone here know Portuguese? Does anyone have any advice for anyone interested in learning it? Thanks!

I very much want to learn it. planning to enroll on some course to get me disciplined.

Maybe you should conbsider Spanish instead, it's much more common. They're pretty close, if you know Spanish you should be able to understand Portuguese.
But that's just my opinion.

Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, except for some nasal sounds.

I've read that contrary to popular thought, the two languages are NOT mutually intelligable, and that most Portuguese speakers don't appreciate when others consider their language nothing but a offshoot of Spanish.

Does anyone know of good websites, books, etc?

I'm sort of planning to move to a Portuguese-speaking country one day, so I guess I'd rather start with it and then maybe also learn some Spanish.

I've been told that I have a good Portuguese pronunciation, a lot of sounds are very similar to those in my native Polish and the overall sound of it is very similar.

Which country do you have in mind? The pronounciation varies throughout Portugal, Brazil and Africa. On New Year's Day, an organisation of Lusophone nations adopted a single offical spelling system, based on Brazilian Portuguese. But all language analysts believe that'll take years before the entire Portuguese-speaking world follows in day-to-day writing.

I have no idea if my pronunciation is good, and which nation it resembles. But I'll learn one day, and I'm determined to do so.

Btw, I had no idea that Polish and Portuguese have similar sounds. It's interesting how two different languages can be so similar. I learned the other day that Japanese and Chinese are completely different. I can testify to this. When I was a kid, I tried to teach myself Japanese, and noticed that every word in that language ends in either a vowel or the letter n.

In the mean time, you guys might like this page:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7807116.stm

Hope it helps!

I'm thinking of moving to Cape Verde. it's a bunch of volcanic islands off the west coast of Africa, quite desolate and not much tourism (yet), but with good connections with Europe.

it's quite funny how Portuguese and Polish sound similar, I have a friend from Portugal and he's always amazed that when he comes here he feels like back home because of all the sch-ch sounds (kind of whispery-like). he also has very good Polish pronunciation.

grammar and vocabulary are totally different though.

I've heard about Cape Verde, and it has its own dialect. I know the English Wikipeida has an article on it. What I find strange is how everyone around me insists that Portuguese and Spanish are the exact same, when I've had no idea about this misconception. (I guess that's the AS kicking in.)
I also know that the Russian alphabet is not that different from the English one. A third of the letters are completely the same, another third sound the same but look different, and the last third are completely different. (But even that last set is of sounds like 'ch' and 'sh'. So the sounds themselves aren't foreign, but the letters are.)

spoken Russian is kinda similar to Polish, but there's no way I could ever read it. the letters are tricky because even if they look the same they might mean a totally different sound, or even a whole syllabe.

there's a Creole dialect that is used in Cape Verde as well as Portugese, but hopefully I'll learn that too once I'm there.

Have you tried the foreign language forum inside WrongPlanet? There may be people there who could have a conversation with you there. I know I tried to start, albeit to only limited success, a Yiddish language thread there. I know this is a strange segway, but aren't there a large number of Voodoo practicainers on Cape Verde?

To my knowledge, where there's Creole, there's usually some Vodoo presence. I have a Cajun step-grandpa, and he encountered some stuff like that when he lived in Louisiana every now and then.

Hi! I'm from Portugal and I can tell you that Portuguese is actually very similar to Spanish, although I think Portuguese sounds much more like the root language (Latin). Also, Spanish speak very very fast. My advice to you is that you should learn European Portuguese (I still don't understand why it is call "European" instead of "of Portugal", that's what I call it), because the Brazilian one has phrase constructions that don't sound very well. For instance, when you want to "join" a pronoun to a verb like "I love you", in Brazil they say "Eu te amo", but it should be "Eu amo-te" like in the european portuguese (I should also tell you that in spanish is "Yo te amo").
With the evolution of the language, some letters just dropped and became mute, like in the word "óptimo" (you don't read the "p"). Brazilians don't write like this anymore, they write "ótimo". But now, because of them , we have to change it too. It's the new orthographic accord (Acordo Ortográfico de 1990). New... from 1990... And the maximum date to change all writings is 2016!

The whispery sound you hear is just like "ch", you write it like that ("ch") but when you say it, you drop the "t", so instead of tch is just ch. And in portuguese that sound can appear in many ways: plural "s", some middle word "s", "ch" and some cases of "x".

There are only three accents in portuguese: ´ (acute), ` (grave) and ^ (circumflex). They are used to indicate the tonic syllabi. Grave is only used in "a" to indicate a joining of words like to+the = to the, in portuguese: a+a (2nd "a" is equivalent to a "female the") = à. Acute is used in all vowels and makes them shorter. ^ is only used in â, ê and ô and makes them longer. There is also ~ that makes the vowel sound nasal: ã and õ. We also use a Ç to make ca, co and cu sound like sa, so, su (ce and ci don't need the cedilla (in portuguese "cedilha"). After all this, I'm sure you can at least read portuguese.

I've never been in Cape Verde (which in portuguese is Cabo Verde, translated would be "Green Cape") but I know that there are a lot of problems related to water because the country is essentially made of volcanic islands.

The past March (2012), I went to Poland in a Comenius Project with the theme "Asteroids". I loved it. It is really interesting hearing that language. I learned that single consonant words have meanings: "w" (sounds like "v") means "in" and "z" means "with". I don't think that Polish and Portuguese are alike. It is very beautiful to hear but a could only get this: brzcrzthfremzrc szcz żż. (sorry!)

To finnish: I always sign my name in papers for school with all Alphabets. An Alphabet, for me, means a conjunction of letters used by a language system and the first two letters being similar to Alpha and Beta. There are only three alphabets: Latin, Greek (the first one) and Cyrillic (the Russian and Serbian and so on), and they all derived from Phoenician.
Me and my aspie things: now I know all these alphabets, can read (though I have no idea of what I'm saying in Greek or Russian) and I can use them phonetically.

This is Good Bye in Portuguese (similar to the spanish "Adiós")

Adeus
Αδευς
Адэус (Or something like that)[i]

Portugese and Spanish are NOT the same. But they are similiar.
And Brazil is an up and coming power so learning Portugese could well be growth stock for anyone.

Im sure they teach courses in your local community college. And Im sure Rosetta Stones has self teaching software for it for your computer.

They say that Portugese speakers can understand Spanish better than Spanish speakers can understand Portugese.

This may be due to the fact that Spanish is more emphatic than Portugese. Portugese is a gentler and more laid back language. Place names are similiar but differen.
The city we americans took from Mexico is called "San Francisco" but the river in Brazil named after the same saint is the "Sao Fancisco"( sao is the lazier tongued portugese equivalent of san for saint).

There are rules for that: when the name of the saint begins with a vowel, then you use "Santo" [this is due to the liaison of the letter "t" with the first vowel of the following word, example: Santo António de Pádua (Saint Anthony of Padua); some saints even join the name with "santo(a)" using the apostrophe: Sant'Ana (Saint Anne)]. "São" is used when the first letter of the following word is a consonant: São Pedro (Saint Peter).

True, Portuguese speakers tend to communicate better with Spanish than the other way around. This is due to the fact that the Portuguese language is much more similar to Latin than Spanish. As of the difference between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, the Brazilian one isn't quite understandable for me. The accent and the way they say some letters is very weird and sometimes I can't even recognize the language. And I think that the European Portuguese is for Brazilian Portuguese what British English is for American English: more polite and sophisticated.