Portuguese always sounds like German to me (I do have German) even though I can read it as it looks like Spanish. A lot of people can’t read other very similar languages to their own they just don’t have the ‘language gene’. For me it would be like being colour blind.
To my ears Portuguese from Portugal sounds extraordinary and difficult and Portuguese from Portugal doesn’t at all. Yet it is the same written down and not actually that hard to read.
I thought this was quite interesting:
I lived and worked in Brazil in the 70s and was pretty bi-lingual. At least I thought I was, until I opened my front door to a Portuguese neighbour who needed help and could barely understand a word! All these shushing sounds he was using!
We used to have colleagues from other S. American companies on secondment, all (of course) Spanish-speaking. They could read Portuguese but used to get very frustrated not being able to understand what we were saying.
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