In general, yes – Portuguese speakers from Portugal are able to understand Brazilian Portuguese. However, there are some important notes on their mutual intelligibility:
- Vocabulary and grammar are essentially the same, with just some regional differences in words or expressions. Core communication is easily understood.
- Phonological differences can pose a challenge at first for Portuguese listening to Brazilianaccented speech. Consonant sounds especially take getting used to.
- The prosody (rhythm, stress, intonation) of Brazilian Portuguese may sound odd to European Portuguese ears until familiarized with it.
- Less standardized regional varieties within Brazil can introduce further unfamiliar slang or pronunciations that may puzzleg even Brazilians from other areas.
- Comfort with Brazilian Portuguese improves significantly after just a short period of exposure and immersion through media, travel or language exchange.
- Younger, educated Portuguese speakers tend to have an easier time comprehending Brazilian variants through increased global exposure.
So while initial understanding may be imperfect, with minimal exposure mutual comprehension between the two varieties is very high overall. With patience and immersion, Portuguese quickly adapt to Brazillian norms. Communication works well in both directions with effort and familiarity.
Yes, they do. Apparently lots of Brazilian telenovelas were transmitted there, so they can understand us much better than we can understand them (which is a bit hard, honestly). But nothing that some time of chatting and some patience from them doesn’t solve. One thing that happens though, is they have a hard time understanding some of our subtetly. Portugueses are very straightforward and phrases like “Você pode chamar um táxi para mim?” in a hotel is answered with “Sim, eu posso.” and nothing else, while we are pretty much asking for a taxi to be called. There are a few Brazilian Buzzfeed posts with examples of those happening. I asked a portuguese friend to comment, he really couldn’t understand what was the issue in some with make me laugh like crazy, of course.
