In terms of understanding, its very hard for me, as my only exposure for it is announcers for football matches. To me, they don't enunciate well and swallow a lot of vowels. Everything seems repressed. It throws me off and I have a really hard time trying to follow. Even for news shows.
@Mengão86 As a native, how hard or easy is it for you to understand heavy accents and way of speaking from the other regions of Brasil? What about from Portugal?
I never had an issue with any of the Brazilian accents, even living outside of the country for a long time (and leaving little). I was exposed to "roceiro" accent from a young age, so I never had difficulty with that. There's other "uneducated" accents that can be tricky at first, but not a big deal. The accent from Portugal threw me off and it took me a few minutes to adjust to it when I first heard it. It still take me a few seconds to adjust to it whenever I hear it nowadays. I agree with your description of it above, to an extent.
I'd say it's similar to the different regions in the US to be honest. Portuguese from Portugal throws me off too.
Another thing I forgot to point out is you'll rarely hear isto/este/esta, disto/deste/desta , nisto/neste/nesta unless used formally. People usually use only isso/esse/essa, disso/desse/dessa, nisso/etc in everyday speech. You'll see it more used in print, but even in print people regularly use isso, nisso, disso. I also agree with your last statement for those who are learning. A general tip is opening your mouth more and exaggerating the movements of the sounds. With our english, we are used to being more stiff in our speech. Another huge difference is we tend to put more emphasis in our consonants, and depending on the region of the US, we have different ways to pronounce the same vowels in the same words. Portuguese places more emphasis on the vowels in words. So when speaking to brazilians as a beginner/intermediate speaker, make sure you emphasize the vowels and not treat them like we would in english. Learning a language is extremely slow if not immersed by necessity, but entirely doable. Just remember there is no rush and no one ever regrets learning.
One thing that is really confusing about Portuguese are the pronouns with the way we use "voce" How about "voce" vs "tu" and the difference between "seu" and "teu" ? It was pointed out to me recently that it's confusing and I agree. Never even thought about it before.
I'm loving lately how when practicing listening I have been encountering things like Xô ver and ce ta indo pro mercado. I figure them out eventually but it's frustrating for something I'm doing mostly for fun. It's like practicing basketball all week and going to the court and you can't even dribble let alone improve on your game.
Lawson, one more recommendation: http://www.englishexperts.com.br/fo...f27.html?sid=1c675f47b13191eef65110198533daa1 It's a forum and blog for brazilians to learn everday english speech, including slang. Someone posts their doubts/questions and others answer it. So whenever I wanted to look up some slang, other ways to say something, etc I'd search the forum and 95% of the time someone has already asked the same question but reversed. I used this site a lot as a reverse reference. There are a lot more brazilians trying to learn English than americans learning Portugues, so I found this way a much better alternative than using the shitty learn portuguese sites and blogs that exist.