Dance and Travel

Portuguese/Spanish Flags Although Portuguese and Spanish are closely related to the point to be somehow mutual intelligible, there are also important differences between them, which can pose difficulties for people acquainted with one of the languages who attempt to learn the other. In this article, I will focus on the Portuguese learner’s point of view that approaches to the Spanish language. He always has to pay attention to “ false friends ”: In Spanish “estar embarazada” means ‘to be pregnant’. In Portuguese “estar embaraçada” means ‘to be embarrassed’ or ‘to be entangled’. Nevertheless, Spanish has the term “embarazoso/a “meaning ’embarrassing’.’Pregnant’ in Portuguese is “grávida”. Portuguese/ Spanish False Friends: Embarazada Spanish “vaso” means ‘drinking glass ‘, while in Portuguese “vaso” means toilet (from “vaso sanitário”). A ‘drinking glass’ in Portuguese is “copo”, while Spanish “copa” is a wine glass. Here a top ten of the most frequent errors done by...

When I approach first the Portuguese language as Italian speaker, I was thinking to a single unitary block. I already expected some dialectal influences, in particular in Brazil, due to the fact that is composed of many federal states. However I could never expect that Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese could differ in grammatical, syntactic and lexical forms. We are not talking about British English and American English, we are talking about almost two different languages and cultures. Of course also for the people who do not know the syntactical and lexical differences, it seems to be evident the musicality of the Brazilian variant, due to the different pronunciations of the words. Pronunciations: Ex. Sauda d e, felicida d e, aon d e, d epois (“d” sound for Portuguese, while “gi” sound for Brasilian variant) Ex. Noi t e, gen t e, sen t ir  (“t” sound for Portuguese, while “tch” sound for Brazilian Portuguese) Besides, I recollect 10 different expression...

It was in 2009 the first time that heard about Portugal and it is in my heart since then . I was almost 19 and it was my first time living  far from my family. You might know that it is not so common for Italians to go to live far from their parents so early. The most of us love living at home almost till 30, someone also more than it. Anyway, I went to Genova to study and I lived in a student residence. There I met one of the most important person of my life. She was Polish and she had 7 years more than me. At that time she had already traveled a lot. For her everything started with an erasmus in 2005 in Portugal. We spent our evening talking, in English of course, and  learning, a least I have lerned a lot from her. It was a new language, a new culture, a new perspective . My first big discovery: there was someone living outside my country which could understand me much better than people from my own country . She was the first one who thalk me about Portugal and Lisbo...