I feel that Portuguese Pod 101 is mainly focused on speaking the Portuguese used in Brazil. If they both speak Portuguese, is there a difference between them? 100% yes! If you ask me which one you should learn, I’ll answer if not both, then Brazilian Portuguese.
You now may ask why Brazilian Portuguese is the better Portuguese to learn, and for this there’s a lot to say. It’s important to know that on Portuguese Pod 101 you also have material where you can learn Portuguese as it is spoken in Portugal.
The main reason why it is good to learn Brazilian Portuguese is because an European Portuguese speaker can better understand a Brazilian than the other way around. In Portugal, Brazilian films and dramas are played all the time, so with that, Portuguese people can easily understand Brazilian speakers of Portuguese. The oppostie doesn’t happen in Brazil, where it’s rare to have dramas and films from Portugal featuring.
The difference between Brazilian speakers and Portugal speakers is mainly in pronunciation, for example, the –l at the end of the syllable in european Portuguese is spelled in a very similar way to english. In Brazilian Portuguese the –l at the end is read as –au. Very different in terms of pronunciation. Brazilian people usually say that Portuguese people talk really fast too.
Students of Portuguese tend to say that Brazilian Portuguese is easier, I’m not sure if that’s true but Portuguese Pod 101 can help you with that. The majority of all the videos and podcasts are in Brazilian Portuguese, except for a small chapter in the Video Lessons -Beginner’s Level, with 25 videos all in Portuguese from Portugal.
This chapter of Portuguese Pod 101 is called Learn with Pictures and Videos: European Portuguese. It is based on the vocabulary that you’d have to know if you moved to Portugal. This is a really interesting extra where you’ll not only learn new vocabulary but also test out your listening skills. The other factor to think about Brazilian Portuguese is that no matter where you are in the world, it’s a much more global language owing to the amount of Brazilians both in and outside Brazil. Brazilian Portuguese is definitely one of the top languages to learn!