Volodymyr reacts to "Why Does Portuguese Sound Like Russian?! (or Polish)" LANGFOCUS 

How similar do you find these languages?

When you said "felizmente" PERFECTLY my european portuguese self was So happy!! That was so awesome!

I'm a native european portuguese. In my experience, from all the immigrants in Portugal who learn Portuguese as a second language, the ones coming from Eastern Europe are the ones who most resemble a native portuguese speaker. Sometimes, I can't even tell for sure whether the person is native or nor, whereas for all other immigrants it normally just takes a few words to immediately realize that he/she is not native. But Eastern Europeans are usually more difficult to detect this. It's as if our sounds are natural for them and they can learn it more easily and more accurately.

One thing is certain Slavic people learn Portuguese easier than other countries. We've a lot of people from Russia, Ucrain, Latvia, etc here in Portugal, and they learn Portuguese fast

I am Portuguese and the amount of times I've been called Russian while speaking either portuguese or english is in the hundreds.

The most funny thing about this video is that to me, as a Portuguese, you sound like a Portuguese speaking English (a good speaker, don’t worry)! And your pronunciation of Portuguese words is most times almost perfect. So I guess the guy is right after all... 😂

Native portuguese married to native Russian-speaking wife , yeah, it sounds similar. Except half of your vowels have a Y before it. YI, YE, YA, etc. There have been many funny moments when a standard portuguese word sounded like something naughty in Russian haha.

when he tries to repeat the words in Portuguese in the video he speaks perfectly. i'm portuguese, so i can confirm.

I was once in a bus in Montréal speaking Brazilian Portuguese to some friends I was with and an older gentleman overhearing us asked us if we were speaking Russian. It was the first time I was introduced to the idea that the two languages could sound similar to people who speak none of the two.

I'm a native Portuguese(european) speaker, and I know Russian also because I am from Moldova, and never thought that they are similar or sound similar. But now I can see the similarities. This is very weird for me right now.

As a native portuguese, I noticed that in movies, when they had a russian character speaking in the background, it sounded like portuguese. Sometimes i really had to pay attention to realize that they weren't, in fact, speaking EP. The english accent of russians is also very similar to the accent of a portuguese english accent.

I speak português (Brazilian) and I have Russian friends. A lot of times I hear her speaking and there are some words that sound like Portuguese. The biggest thing for me is that I can tell when someone is Brazilian speaking in English due to their accent. Whenever I’m wrong they are Russian. Both Brazilian and Russians English accents sound the same. Crazy! I know

As a portuguese person who loves your videos and is learning russian, this video made me very happy, keep up the good work!!

I speak Polish natively, Russian to some extent (grocery shopping level, not poetry reading level). One time I sat on a train and two guys in front of me were speaking this weird language that I couldn't quite grasp (and they were talking rather quietly, while the train was loud). "It's Russian! No, but this sound weirdly Spanish! Now it sound Russian again!" Then the ticket control came and they pulled their Portuguese passports. I have to admit I was quite shocked.

I am a native Polish speaker. I admit that many years ago before I've seen these video, at many occasion I rode a public bus in an american city, noticing passengers around me talking among themselves in a language I first recognized as Polish. But when I approached them closer it appeared they were either Brazilian, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, Azoreans. It happened many times.

I’m Brazilian. I was shocked how perfectly you pronounced the word "felizmente". To my Brazilian ears, it sounded like a real Portuguese.

As a Brazilian person, I gotta admit your pronunciation is high-key likewise any of my lusophone comrades'

I’m a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker. In 2011 I was 14 and living in the US I had a Russian friend and one day I realized that when he spoke Russian it sounded like gibberish Portuguese to me. Ever since then I’ve noticed that Portuguese and Russian sound like gibberish to each other

My cousin who is Brazilian was speaking on the phone in Portuguese while traveling through Poland and she was told not to speak Russian in Poland

I like how you find it funny that "vsplesk" has only one vowel, while "splash" is sweating nervously in the corner.

I am a Filipino and I found that European Portuguese really sounds like Slavic like Russian language.

You have a good Portuguese accent when you read the words he presents.

Tha same happens: Greek-Spanish Portuguese-Russian

Hey vlad, love from Brazil, I`m a native Portuguese speaker and I just started learning Russian recently and found out that there are many words that sound very similar if not almost identical in the way we pronounce then, and they also share similar or the same meaning, maybe showing some of these words could be a great ideia for a video!

As someone who speaks Portuguese I’ve never thought Portuguese sounds like Russian.

This is probably, the reason why all Slavs learn to speak such a good Portuguese. As Portuguese native, I can tell...

I’m Brazilian and I really don’t know if the languages sounds similar, BUT when Russian people speak English, for example, and us Brazilian speak English the accents sound very similar.

The most curious think in this video: the guy promounces the words in portuguese perfectly. It's impressive. He sounds like a portuguese guy. (I am from Brazil)

The devoicing of муж only happens when the ж is at the end of the word or syllable, so when you add a suffix, like мужем, the consonant is voiced back, especially due to the presence of the vowel е.

“Sounds like Polish” 😱 When he realises he also thinks portuguese sounds like polish

I am a native Mexican Spanish speaker and to my ear Spanish and Portuguese sound remarkably similar but Portuguese has an accent that is more nasal. That may be what people hear when they find similar sounds to Slavic languages.

Loved the video. I’m a Portuguese from Portugal who speaks a fare bit of Russian and really don’t see the similarity 😂🤷‍♂️ your pronunciation of “eles” e “felizmente” is amazing!!! 👏👏👏👏

I'm from Portugal and there any some 30.000 immigrants from UKraine in my country, and most of them can speak perfect portuguese without any accent just for living 3-4 years in Portugal. Maybe bacause the sounds of portugueses are familiar to them and they can easly reproduce

I speak neither Portuguese nor Russian but I have often felt they sound similar. How? I guess to me they both sound "soft" and FULL of the kind of shushing sound zh, zh, zh and with few vowels. Interestingly I do speak Spanish and it's so clear in writing that that Spanish and Portuguese are closely related, so much that you can grasp a good deal of the meaning, still it's hard for me to pick out the meaning of Portuguese when spoken. Anyways. I think both those languages are beautiful.

At 09:20 when Vlad tries to say faz três it reminded me that Vlad cannot roll his 'r' - lol

"Shwa" is a neutral, open sound in IPA (international phonetic language), that is a tool to write down most of world's languages phonetically - how they sound like. It is not concerned with spelling, only with the pronunciation of the words. When it comes to Russian and Polish, i find IPA to be not ideal at best (classical singer here, trained in IPA, Polish native). Shwa is a bit similar to Polish vowel "y", but lighter and not as much in throat. If you know any French, shwa is the sound commonly found on the ends of words, for example "lune" - the "e" is not a full pronounced E, but rather a neutral, difficult to describe sound.

I'm Portuguese and when I travel people think I speak Romanian or Polish... I don't get a lot of Russian. Something to note, we have a lot of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants and they pick up the language really fast and they don't have a hard time pronouncing Portuguese words (normally people struggle with Portuguese). Even you in the video pronounced the words really well :)

There's a brazilian-russian couple that have a youtube channel called Wally e Dasha. The woman is russian and her accent in portuguese is perfect. I think it have to do with the similar sounds in both languages

I'm Romanian - living in the East, close to the border, in Moldavia. Our dialect includes sounds that are similar to Russian and Portuguese, but it's still Romanian. In 1992 I spent two weeks in Wales. Our host used to listen to the radio and one day he found a Russian channel. Hearing Russian in Wales, all of a sudden, was so unexpected that we laughed a little. Our host asked, "What are they saying? On the radio." We shrugged. "No idea." "What?! Don't you speak Russian?" "No." He had been under the impression that Romanian was a Russian dialect. (!!!) Ok, we say "da", but even in this case the pronunciation is slightly different. In Russian, d is softer, warmer, and the a is somewhat longer. In Romanian, "da" is crisp. There are some clear influences - in terms of sounds and vocabulary - from Slavic languages, but Romanian is not a dialect of Russian.

Dude, you nailed the European Portuguese pronunciation!!!!

Once I was on a train in Italy and heard two Brazilian girls talking (I'm br), but I could not recognize their accent even when I was paying attention to them. It took like one whole minute to realize they were Russians, not brs.

as a portuguese "volya" sound like "folha" ( leaf ). When i speak english some people say that i sound a russian trying to speak english

12:32 that's beautiful. love when you discover, or see other people discover, the allophony in your language that you don't think about, but that's exactly why it's allophonic. 13:06 also (and I don't speak Russian) if that sentence uses the word му́жем (or whatever the proper spelling is), then the ж isn't at the end of the word anymore, which is why you're be pronouncing it as voiced. basically, its normally voiceless in муж and voiced му́жем.

The first time I heard someone speak European Portuguese I definitely thought it sounded sort of Slavic. But I don't speak either language so...

Every time my sister and I spoke to each other in Portuguese(we're brazilians) in public in New York, everybody thought we were speaking Russian

I speak Russian and a little bit of Spanish, and I always said that Portuguese sounds like someone is speaking Spanish with a heavy Russian accent.

When Brazilians speak Spanish, they tend to sound just like Slavs speaking Spanish.

I'm a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker and this has ALWAYS been something I've noticed as I've interacted with many other immigrants, and I'm often trying to understand different slavic languages. Then I heard Portuguese and I'm like, wtf, why does this sound so familiar even though it's totally different? As he describes, it's a much stronger effect if you're not completely paying attention or have some distance from the speaker. For decades I didn't understand why such different languages could ever sound similar, but even today when I hear Portuguese, my Ukrainian and Russian language brain takes about 1.5 sentences to realize it's not intelligible.

13:37 - In polish, last consonants also become voiceless. f.e. Lekarz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаж), would become Lekasz (Cyrillic script: Льэкаш). The same thing happens to "муж". You just don't realise it when you normally speak.

My first language is Portuguese (from Brazil). When I hear a Slavic language from a distance, or say, in a noisy caffe, the phonetics are indeed similar to Portuguese. Also, a Polish person heard me speaking Portuguese and she told me I sounded Polish! I find these similarities really interesting. 🌻

as a native portuguese, I can confirm that russian sounds a lot like portuguese at a distance, I discovered this while playing cyberpunk where I was listening to a conversation between 2 npc and was like, "wtf is that portuguese from portugal?" but it was russian

I don't know if Portuguese sounds like Russian or Polish, but when I speak Portuguese in front of people who have never heard the European dialect of Portuguese, many ask me why I'm speaking Russian.

I'm a native portuguese speaker from Portugal and i honestly never thought russian and portuguese sounded alike. But when you said some of the portuguese words, they sounded really like an actual portuguese, more than if an english speaker tried to pronounce those words.

There's a big Ukrainian community in Portugal and it's impressive how good they speak, in general, after only one year, specially accent wise. Btw, your "felizmente" was really spot on! Great video!

I like when you said 'shuba', because that exactly how northern portuguese say 'chuva', which means 'rain'.

I am a portuguese national and when I worked with russians and ucranians , when they spoke among themselfs ,from a distance ,I had to tell myself that it was not portugues.,like the general noise was really familiar somehow .

I am from Portugal, and I can say that the people from Lisbon (capital of portugal) tend to shorten the vogals a lot more than the people from other regions, but we all do it a bit, you know, accents...

For Information The Portugues word PÃO (Bread) is what gave the Japanese Word for Bread (PAN パン ) Greeting FROM MAGHREB, MAROKKO MARROKO MARRUECOS MOROCCO, (WHAT EVER YOU CHOOSE)

When you said "shuba" it sounded like "chuva", it means rain in portuguese.

The way you said "felizmente" proves the point, sorry. Case closed.

There is some words in Russian and Portuguese that are similar and basically are pronounced the same way. Like leader for example. Also both languages are harsh and loud languages.

You prounouced PT-PT words VERY accurately. Almost any person who don't speak Portugal's Portuguese (Yes, "European Portuguese" concept sucks tbh) can't prounouce as good (excelent) as you. You just nailed it perfectly!!!!

I am Portuguese and when I went to France with my sister the wife of a Polish man asked if we were Polish while we were shopping. We don't think of the similarities of the languages because we are used to earing them but watching how easily you could say tenho and trabalho shows that those similarities makes it easier to pronouce. I can't make French speakers say BACALHAU correctly instead of BACALAU even at gunpoint hahaha

About муж : I think the main point is that, when you speak fast, it tends to become voiceless, if it's at the end of the word. In the sentence you say at 13:06, I think you say мужем, and in this case, the ж isn't at the end of the word, so it stays voiced. Don't worry, though, it's hard to analyze our own language; I've often tried to analyze how I pronounce things only to then become self-conscious about it and being unsure of what I actually do when I don't think about it lol

I was in Portugal for vacation in 2019 and it sounds like Polish from longer distance, it's truth. I would not say Russian, but Polish. It's full of ŠŽ sounds, everything is softened. But you must hear it from longer distance, from close distance you ofcourse know it's not Polish. I think schwa is something not pronounced clearly or 2 sounds mixed together if I understand it correctly, we don't have such thing in Czech, but someone said that Y on end of word in Polish is schwa after I said they pronouncing it like combination of Y and E. As a Czech, I can clearly hear that when Polish person says "dobry" there is not clear Y, it's more like Y+E together which was very confusing for me when I was in Poland, I didn't know if I should saying dzień dobry or dzień dobre, after some time in Poland I started saying it somewhere between because that's how I hear that from native speakers. D/ T and S/Z or Š/Ž are very often swaped in slavic langauges, it's not schwa, it's just about what is easier to pronounc, try to say muž really with ž, it's not easy, say muš is much more easy, same like votka, not vodka, you just can't say vodka really with D, that's why it's pronounced with T. In Russian you can say MUŽ because of their accent makes word longer, in Czech we can't say MUŽ, you would have to say separately MU and Ž. But most importantly, we don't use word muž much often in spoken language. LH in Portuguese sounds like Slovak softened L to me, as a Czech, I can't pronounce that.

It's not that hard to believe. When I spoke Portuguese in front of my friends they said I was speaking Russian hehe😂

Fun fact: I've met people from Ukraine and Moldova in Portugal, and it's fascinating how quickly you guys pick up Portuguese! I also know an Ukranian I work with in Toronto, that used to live in Portugal for many years and speaks Portuguese fluently. Not that common to see that in Toronto :)

There's a video on Langfocus comparing Greek and Spanish phonology. Worth give it a try!

I lived in Czechia for two years and learned Czech. Then when I was in Milan one day I heard a group speaking and I asked them if they spoke Czech. I was embarrassed when they said 'no we are from Brazil.

You’re so close to 20k Vlad!!!

Just to let you know, a schwa is a neutral sound, like when your mouth is relaxed. It changes slightly depending on the sounds before or after, but more or less sounds like an "ah" when alone.

I’m liking the video before watching it ❤️

portuguese is my second second language and I do find a lot of similarities in the sound. sometimes people are speaking Russian or Ukrainian and it sounds like portuguese from afar somehow. also your pronunciation on the portuguese words were actually really really good!

Hello, i am from Portugal and you said "felizmente" really well! Cumprimentos de Portugal! x

My parents still laugh at me about something I said 20 yrs ago. I was asked if I can speak any French (we are east coast Canadian) and when I said yes, they asked me to prove it. Here’s what I said and what they poke fun at me for. “I can’t speak French when I have a head cold”. It’s such a long running joke between us that even if I sneeze, one of them will bring it up

I'm Portuguese and Russian is in no way shape or form near Portuguese in any aspect except that both languages like others (german for example) are spoken from the throat, still curious as to how a slav might think about this... btw 13:00 when U say husband in Russian a Portuguese speaker is hearing the Portuguese word MUGE which means MOO (from a cow)

One major thing that you are forgetting. From Portugal many people were kicked out of there in the 16th century. They were told become catholic or leave the country. Many people said they became catholic but really didn’t. My family was part of that. I am Jewish, and some of my family didn’t wish to stop being Jew. Thus many people back then moved to Poland, Ukraine and Russia. That is partly why Russian sounds like Polish/Russian.

Really cool crossover. I follow the both of you

Im portuguese and i was so happy when i heard you speaking my language!

The joke for us Spanish-speakers is that Brazilians sound like Russians trying to speak Spanish hahaha! All love tho!

To me, Russian soft consonants sound like there's a slight "i" after the consonant. But now that I saw this video, yeah, totally sounds like Portuguese "nh", "lh" and so on. Btw, Tom Scott also has made some interesting videos on language, and here's one if you wanna know more about "schwa": ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qu4zyRqILYM.html

My guess is with the /ə/ he's referring to how a word is spoken versus written in a language. The schwa comes from the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is a vowel that is produced in the middle of the kids the and requires the least effort so it becomes a common pronunciation in many words despite the lack of a letter for it in many languages. For example, in the word definite, it is pronounced in american English as "defin-uh-t". In the root worse "finite" both 'i's have short vowel sounds like in the word "igloo". However, "def" is stressed in the word definite, so the 'i' becomes reduce to the /ə/ (which sounds like 'uh' sort of). And this rule applies to many languy outside of English. There's a wonderfully really short vid by Tom Scott on /ə/ on RU-vid titled - "ə: The Most Coming Vowel in English". And again this is just me deducting, idk for sure what the guy ment in the video. TL;DR the /ə/ refers the vowel pronunciation when SPOKEN, not just straightforward spelling

i find more similar the portuguese from portugal because of the pronociation

Hello, I got here in this video from an RU-vid suggestion, because of the videos about languages ​​that I have watched. I'm from Brazil, and I have a curiosity to share here. I sing in a group that sings songs from all over the world. As one of the conductors of this group is married to a Serbian, we sing many songs from the Balkans. And when singing, I never noticed this fact. But once, I was watching a volleyball game between Brazil and Serbia, and the microphone caught the speech of the Serbian coach. I couldn't understand a word of what he said, but at the same time, it seemed to me that he was speaking Portuguese from Portugal. In fact, it sounded like Portuguese from Portugal. But, of course, contrary to what happens when I hear Portuguese people talking, I was not able to understand anything that that technician was talking about.

I am Brazilian and some years ago I have heard a mother talking to her daughter in a ´misterious` Slavic language. For my suprise, she was talking in European Portuguese and I remarked this after some time...

Howdy Vlad... First, you cannot "hear" the sound of your native tongue, not generally. Here your brain is already conditioned to capture the words, the phrases, and their meaning, and the abstract sound of the language is no longer discernible to you. The same goes for a foreign language that you may have mastered fully. To me Brazilian Portuguese sounds more like Russian than European Portuguese. It's because of how they pronounce "L." It often sounds like Russian "Л." With "МУЖ," yes, you pronounce the "Ж" like "sh," in some cases. Try "МУЖCКИЙ." When Ж is followed by a vowel, you say "zh." For example in the declension, "МУЖA." But when it's not followed by anything, e.g., at the end of a sentence, you say "sh," e.g., "КРАСИВЫЙ МУЖ." Is this not so?

As a Brazilian, I’m baffled! I also couldn’t hear any resemblance between them before the video. It would be cool if you had a Portuguese speaker (European or Brazilian) to break down how Portuguese is pronounced to you, like you’re doing with Russian. Great video!

I'm brazilian, and once I was listening to a music thinking it was portuguese from portugal. When I couldn't understand a word I realized it was russian

This topic is very common and it makes sense. This is very accurate its just a matter of sounds but the vocabulary is completly diferent. Portuguese basicly have every type of sounds thats why portuguese people learn foreign languages easily. One i hear all the time is that portuguese sounds like a mix of polisch and german.

I'm português i cant see it but i have friends from different country's from Europe and they say i sound Russian.

This is a lovely video

Hey Vlad. The reason you think you disagree with him on the pronunciation of "муж" is because when you put a grammatical ending on the word, like how you said "мужем", the vowel that's now following the ж is a voiced sound and therefore throws the ж back into being voiced. In other words, the ж only stays pronounced like ш when there's no sound immediately following it or another unvoiced sound.

Once I was abroad in the back of an Uber with a friend and he was talking Portuguese on the phone with his mother and then when we asked the Uber driver something in English he said "yes" in Russian. We were so confused lmao

Discovered your channel yesterday and think you do a great job. Funny in a good way and solar personality. Yeah understand the phonetics of the explanation which are accurate. but have a trained hear for foreign languages and don't think they sound that similar at close range. Cheers Vlad.

Well, I'm from Brazil, therefore I'm a brazilian portuguese speaker - and sometimes I consider particularly hard to understand perfectly european portuguese (and thats because european portuguese is a stressed timed lenguage while brazilian portuguese syllable-timed). So, with a little bit of goodwill (lol) I can see why some people think european portuguese may sound like russian. As a matter of fact, last years I was tripping around Rome with some brazilian friends and, of course, we were speaking portuguese when a russian girl (at least I think she was russian lol) who was passing thru heared us and asked: - Russian? And we answered: - No, we are brazilians. And she: - Oh, ok, sorry....

I am portuguese from Lisbon. A couple of months ago i was zapping on tv and ended on a channel i first thought was a portuguese one. I paid attention for some minutes, thinking what new channel is this? And then i realised that i wasnt understanding a single word of that "portuguese". I was wathing a BULGARIAN channel !!! It sounded just like portuguese! 😂🤣😂😂

Они похожи только когда слышны издали, нечётко. Та же фигня происходит с латышским и финским. Они же из разных языковых групп! Но... когда я бывал в Хельсинки, то несколько раз ловил себя на том, что вроде бы слышу латышский, но, когда приближаешься к говорящим, эта иллюзия пропадает. То есть есть нечто похожее в произношении и ударениях.

You did really good pronouncing the Portuguese words, sounded native 😱

Ha ha, when I heard despresar's pronunciation I was like "yeah, that sounds like something that could be Polish, but not Russian". We're psheki afterall ;)

I just realized as I watched this video that "vsplesk" SOUNDS somewhat similar to the swedish word for "splash" which is "plask" I should say that I am not speaking any slavic languages at all. But it does make kind of sense that north-germanic languages have been closer to slavic languages more than any other germanic language, I mean... It's just across the Baltic Sea xD But to think these small things can go back so far and have such a significance... o.o It's truely fascinating to me. :)