Why is it so hard to learn european portuguese?

Question

are there any sites where i can learn european portuguese? i've tried and tried, but the only portuguese offered is Brasilian. Europen portuguese just sounds cooler to me. I don't want to settle for Brasilian Portuguese but am afraid i may have to. Now i know that people say that it doesn't matter what Portuguese i learn because Brasilians and Portugues people can understand each other, but the people who say that always seem to be the people who don't even speak portuguse!

Answer 1

Portuguese and Brasilian people understand each other because they are native speakers. Some foreigner who'd learn BrasilianPortuguese as a foreign language will be at pains in Portugal because of the terrible phonetics and accent of European Portuguese. So concentrate on conversation and oral speech practice.

Answer 2

Eoredd, thank you very much for saying that I -- as Portuguese -- have a terrible phonetics and accent. That is a very narrow minded comment and there are other ways of saying that foreigners that don't have enough exposure to European Portuguese (EP), find it more difficult to understand. Now to say we have a terrible phonetics is the same thing as saying British English sounds terribly, just because most people are used to American English. That was a very rude remark!

Moving on, David if you want to learn EP, I advise you to join a group in Yahoo Answers - Awful Portuguese.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/awfulportu...

We teach both Brazilian (BP) and EP, if you already know some Portuguese it will be easier for you to learn EP. Don't worry if you can only find BP, as it will be quite easy to mold it to match the European version. I am part of that group and I helped a lot of people to mold their Portuguese and I don't mean just spelling and expressions, but also regarding accent.

I really advise you to join our group, it is free, you will have access to loads of links that will teach phonetics, spellings, etc and you'll have fun.

In case you don't want to join our group, here are some useful pages that will help you learn EP:

Buxilala has more lessons, just click on her profile and you'll find loads of lessons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgT8Yedg...

BBC languages is very good.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/portugues...

http://www.instituto-camoes.pt/cvc/guiad...

Now as for those that say Brazilians and Portuguese understand each other are wrong. We can understand them, as we have a lot of contact with their accent, phonetics, expressions, etc. The opposite is not true, they struggle to understand, we tend to speak very fast, our accent is different than theirs and they have no or little exposure to EP. And if you don't have contact with something on a regular basis, it becomakes more difficult to understand it.

I hope these helps.