Why are you interested in Portuguese?

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Prowler
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Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Prowler » 2013-08-23, 15:09

We all have our reasons for liking certain languages over others. So I'd like to know what got you interested in Portuguese. Do you simply like the way it sounds? Does Brazil's rising economy makes you feel that it's important to learn Portuguese? Did you travel to a Lusophone country before and liked it a lot? Do you have Portuguese relatives or a Portuguese friend, husband/wife, etc? I'm curious.

Sorry if this thread has been made before.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-08-23, 15:47

Because I like it and there are a lot of Portuguese people in Toronto. I don't give a shit about the economy of Brazil.
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Levike » 2013-08-23, 17:37

The first time when I saw written Portuguese, when I was listening to a song with subtitles,
the words "eu" and "meu" caught my attention because they look exactly like in Romanian
and that was the moment when I kind of became interested in the language.
Portuguese just looks so good on paper.

And after listening to some news the sound of it terrified me.
It sounded horrible but in a weird way it made me more interested.

I already knew Spanish and Romance languages are the only ones that I can somewhat "understand"
so that gave me more courage to learn it.

I didn't know anything about the economy of Brazil.
And anyway Spanish and Portuguese are not important languages here unless you watch telenovelas.

I just like the language in general and the fact that it's a big language and a learnable one.
The only thing that I didn't and still don't like about it is the difference between dialects
which at the beginning almost made me give up.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Yasna » 2013-08-23, 18:16

For the most part because of the number of speakers and its geographic spread. It's also nice that the main country it is spoken in has made some substantial gains in development. Wealthy economies generally have more money to spend on culture.
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Prowler » 2013-08-23, 21:12

Levente wrote:The first time when I saw written Portuguese, when I was listening to a song with subtitles,
the words "eu" and "meu" caught my attention because they look exactly like in Romanian
and that was the moment when I kind of became interested in the language.
Portuguese just looks so good on paper.

And after listening to some news the sound of it terrified me.
It sounded horrible but in a weird way it made me more interested.

I already knew Spanish and Romance languages are the only ones that I can somewhat "understand"
so that gave me more courage to learn it.

I didn't know anything about the economy of Brazil.
And anyway Spanish and Portuguese are not important languages here unless you watch telenovelas.

I just like the language in general and the fact that it's a big language and a learnable one.
The only thing that I didn't and still don't like about it is the difference between dialects
which at the beginning almost made me give up.

Yeah, BR PT and EU PT are considerable different. Hell, sometimes I think it would be better to consider both different languages.

And how did you end up liking a language that initially terrified you? :hmm:

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Levike » 2013-08-23, 21:57

Prowler wrote:Yeah, BR PT and EU PT are considerable different. Hell, sometimes I think it would be better to consider both different languages.

And how did you end up liking a language that initially terrified you? :hmm:

That horrible sound made me like it more.

You know, it's like a horror movie.
The movie scares you but that's why it's a good horror movie.


I just love that sh-sh-sh-sh sound of Portuguese.

About the difference between EU and BR I never viewed them
as different self-standing languages because on paper they look the same.
But when it comes to pronunciation things really tend to go downhill.

My first impression when hearing BR was: "Is it me or are they emphasizing every single vowel?"
I imagined it like Russian without consonants.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Prowler » 2013-08-23, 22:01

Levente wrote:
Prowler wrote:Yeah, BR PT and EU PT are considerable different. Hell, sometimes I think it would be better to consider both different languages.

And how did you end up liking a language that initially terrified you? :hmm:

That horrible sound made me like it more.

You know, it's like a horror movie. The movie scares you but that's why it's a good horror movie.

I just love that sh-sh-sh-sh sound of Portuguese.

About the difference between EU and BR I never viewed them
as different self-standing languages because on paper they look the same.
But when it comes to pronunciation things really tend to go downhill.

My first impression when hearing BR was: "Is it me or are they emphasizing every single vowel?"
I imagined it like Russian without consonants.

I really can't view Portuguese as a "scary language", to be honest. I mean, I don't think we sound aggressive or anything.

As for the BR/EU differences, colloquial BR PT has several expressions that don't exist in EU PT, especially all that slang of theirs.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Levike » 2013-08-23, 22:08

Prowler wrote:I really can't view Portuguese as a "scary language", to be honest. I mean, I don't think we sound aggressive or anything.
By scary I didn't mean aggressive, I wanted to say that it's not singy-songy.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby linguoboy » 2013-08-23, 22:09

My chief motivations for learning Portuguese are chatting up super hot Brazilian men and puzzling out the lyrics to Brazilian pop songs.
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-08-25, 5:52

Yasna wrote:For the most part because of the number of speakers and its geographic spread. It's also nice that the main country it is spoken in has made some substantial gains in development. Wealthy economies generally have more money to spend on culture.
You forgot all the bunda.
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Lauren » 2013-08-25, 8:18

linguoboy wrote:My chief motivations for learning Portuguese are chatting up super hot Brazilian men and puzzling out the lyrics to Brazilian pop songs.

Like Sandy e Junior? They have a few great songs. 8-)
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Osias » 2013-08-30, 1:21

Lowena wrote:
linguoboy wrote:My chief motivations for learning Portuguese are chatting up super hot Brazilian men and puzzling out the lyrics to Brazilian pop songs.

Like Sandy e Junior? They have a few great songs. 8-)


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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Rivaldo » 2013-09-20, 9:47

Yasna wrote:Wealthy economies generally have more money to spend on culture.


What exactly you mean?

I tend to see in a quite opposite way: the more "development" a place in Brazil has, less originality it has. The most valuable things in brazillian arts usually come directly from antique, poor, many times rural cultures; even when a rich urban intellectual creates something good, it's usually taking a lot from the "folk" things. Almost all prestiged brazillian art that a person can remind have been made this way... Even in an art as aristocratic as the one of Villa-Lobos.

If the development seems to make the life of people better, cutting down a lot of possibilities of suffering, I don't see it improving culture by any means. A rich neighbourhood in any region of Brazil is just like a rich neighbourhood in any other region - and pretty much as any rich neighbourhood worldwide. At the opposite: you don't find much similarity between the places where the "development" didn't get: they tend to have each one a dismaying originality. And this originality is what produces what people in the rich neighbourhoods are crazy to read, see, hear...

This might be noticed in your country as well. The predominance of african arts in a great variety of aspects of united states arts, althought the african descendents are a small part of the population, seems to show that cultures that arrange to be out of the mainstream are usually the ones that produce the most valuable.

The development process, in Brazil(and not only) doesn't seem to improve culture, in it's differences, but to pull all different cultures in a drought and cold one. If a person can buy lots of things in the shopping mall, and buy an apartment... Why the previous life and culture should be remembered?
This means that if the economic development of Brazil keeps going on for some decades, in some decades we shall be a much more boring country, in the aspect of culture and art.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-01-11, 16:32

Sorry, I must have totally forgotten to write here, but anyway, I think I started getting seriously interested in Portuguese when my dad bought me Barron's "Getting By in Portuguese." I went through it and bought TY, too, but never really took the TY all that seriously or went through it. I guess I just thought Portuguese was so similar to Spanish that I didn't need to take all that much of an effort to study it. :? Anyway, as a result, I actually feel more familiar with European Portuguese than Brazilian Portuguese (though not all that much with European Portuguese either :P).

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Yasna » 2014-01-11, 17:04

Rivaldo wrote:What exactly you mean?

As countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. became wealthy, they started producing a lot of cultural goods with high production values that appealed to a wide mass of people. For example, Kabuki has always had a very limited appeal, but J-Pop took over East Asia before ceding ground to K-Pop.

This might be noticed in your country as well. The predominance of african arts in a great variety of aspects of united states arts, althought the african descendents are a small part of the population, seems to show that cultures that arrange to be out of the mainstream are usually the ones that produce the most valuable.

That products of African-American culture such as jazz and rap are the most valuable elements of American culture is rather debatable. I wonder how well your theory holds up for major Eurasian countries like India, China, Japan, Iran. I don't know enough about the origins of their modern culture to say.
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby ugh » 2014-06-02, 22:51

The topic you two (Rivaldo and Yasna) are talking about is quite interesting and both of you hold valid opinions, but since y'all are kind of talking about different things, it is complicated.

In the "Third World," the arts are very much debated as media of autonomy vs assimilation (often to U.S. standards, production and business models, artistic "language," etc.). Rivaldo was correct in his assertion that rich, urban intellectuals tend to err on the side of mimicking established Western policies and trends. But there are certainly groups of artists that seek to create and maintain a national identity through art (ie. cinema novo).

As far as a nation's wealth and its artistic output, it is logical to say that the wealthier a country is the more it can finance artists and exporting them (ie. South Korea and K-Pop & post-WWII France and film). But, I will say that the amount of cultural products, their production value/budget, and mass appeal do not good/better art make. I would rather see one Nelson Pereira dos Santos than 1,000 Michael Bay's.

Anyways, I'm speaking about this in very convoluted, academic terms--sorry, just took finals! But I thought the conversation taking place was very important, especially to understand a continuously modernizing Brazil.

But back to why we're interested in Portuguese... :oops:

I first considered Portuguese back when my Spanish teacher in high school told me I sounded too Slavic :ohwell: It also fills that off-beat but still usable language niche that I find attractive. Ultimately though, a language couldn't be learnt without helpful, friendly natives, which in my experience most Brazilians are very affable. They also have a fairly big presence on the internet so practicing is made even easier.

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Osias » 2014-06-03, 0:48

#bemvindo já tinha dado as boas vindas antes, você é muito inativo :ohwell:
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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby ugh » 2014-06-03, 1:40

osias wrote:#bemvindo já tinha dado as boas vindas antes, você é muito inativo :ohwell:


Desculpe e obrigado! Eu vou tentar mais ativo neste fórum. :oops:

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-12, 8:24

Yasna wrote:That products of African-American culture such as jazz and rap are the most valuable elements of American culture is rather debatable.

How many musical genres in America can you think of where "African-American culture such as jazz and rap" did not play a major role?

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Re: Why are you interested in Portuguese?

Postby Osias » 2017-02-12, 13:39

Axé, sertanejo, forró... African yes, jazz and rap no.
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