Great free EU-Portuguese learning resource

[Jan_D]

For those who are interested in learning a bit of European Portuguese, I've recently come across this wonderful series of podcasts. Very useful as it seems most free language stuff online is of the Brazilian variety. Carla and Marlon are a young married couple, originally from Alentejo, now living in the UK. They have made a podcast every week for the past 50 weeks: each consists of a dialogue transcript, which they go through slowly explaining the meaning of all the words along with tips for pronunciation, etc. They also bring in 'guest stars' like their own mums and family friends, so you get to hear different accents and speaking speeds.

The link here is for podcast 2 (the first one is mainly introductions, etc):
https://portuguesewithcarla.com/podcast2/

p.s. I'm a few podcasts in, and I think the main thing I've learned is that Portuguese is definitely NOT just a version of Spanish with more "sh" sounds

 

[jungleboy]

Thanks for starting this thread. Another recommended European Portuguese podcast is Practice Portuguese.

As a student of Portuguese and Spanish, I can say that European Portuguese has a difficult accent (compared to the more open Brazilian version) and Portuguese in general has some difficult sounds for non-native speakers. However, I'm sure Portuguese people you meet on the Caminho Português will appreciate it if you make an effort to say a few words in Portuguese and they probably won't appreciate it if you speak Spanish to them.

While Portuguese and Spanish are close to each other in the grand scheme of world languages, they are not as close as people often think as @Jan_D mentioned. As a general rule, both in Europe and in South America, Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish more than Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese. And camino pilgrims might know that not only are they separate languages, but there is another defined language (not a dialect) 'between' them: gallego, or Galician Spanish, which is the immediate parent language of Portuguese.

 

[Jan_D]

Hi, yes I'm finding the accent quite difficult! I speak French and Spanish, but for some reason the Portuguese isn't 'sticking' as easily.... the sounds are very subtle; it's a very beautiful language but also quite challenging to learn (especially if one knows Spanish, as it's very tempting to switch)... Anyway when I was on the caminho portugues last month I tried out some of my beginner Portuguese and it went down very well! The Portuguese people are incredibly friendly in general, but even making a bit of an effort with the language opened up some amazing doors (literally - I was actually invited into people's homes!)