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Comment by gib444 | Hacker News Reader

Curious that the editor specifies American English, but not Brazilian Portuguese

Arguably the difference between Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese from Portugal is much bigger than between American and British English

I'm not sure it is. My intuition (Brazilian living in the UK, with lots of friends and family from or in Portugal) is that it's somewhat bigger but it's still close to 100$ interchangeable and understandable across speakers of either. Most Brazilians who have trouble understanding the Portuguese is because of accent, not language. Of course it helps that all Portuguese speaking countries have an orthography unification accord, and the grammar is pretty much the same.

Interesting! I thought it was universal - well at least for me Portuguese from Portugal is very hard to understand (especially the pronunciation). I learned Brazilian Portuguese ok, so I’m not really good at it, just basic conversation. If I was a native speaker or really fluent it would maybe be easier to understand Portuguese from Portugal as well.

It's understandable if you have the option to stop the other person and ask what random words mean.

It's not very understandable in asynchronous written form. But the Portuguese have much more trouble understanding Brazilians than the other way around.

In async form it's usually very easy to quickly search for the meaning of an expression.

> But the Portuguese have much more trouble understanding Brazilians

I never had that issue. Some expressions don't translate but most are understandable just fine. Also with the spread of Brazilian novelas and music in Portugal, they're not only getting more familiar but are even starting to adopt a lot of our jargon.

I guess that's because you're unlikely to mistranslate from either variant of both languages, so an English or Portuguese translation is fine, but you do need to specify which variant you're translating to.

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