Welcome! / Bem-vindos!...

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog!... Or I may as well say "olá!", one of the most common ways to salute someone in portuguese. Well... speaking of it, let me introduce my mother language, ok?

"Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th and 16th centuries as Portugal established a colonial and commercial empire (1415–1999) which spanned from Brazil in the Americas to Goa and other parts of India and Macau in China. It was used as the exclusive lingua franca on the island of Sri Lanka for almost 350 years. During that time, many creole languages based on Portuguese also appeared around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Today it is one of the world's major languages, ranked 6th according to number of native speakers (between 177 and 191 million). It is the language of about half of South America, even though Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. It is also a major lingua franca in Portugal's former colonial possessions in Africa. It is an official language in eight countries (see the table on the right), also being co-official with Cantonese Chinese in the Chinese special administrative region of Macau. There are sizeable communities of Portuguese speakers in various regions of North America, notably in the United States (New Jersey, New England, and south Florida) and in Ontario, Canada.
Today, Portuguese is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal (http://www.mundo-luso.blogspot.com/), São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique. It is also one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea (with Spanish and French), the Chinese special administrative region of Macau (with Chinese), and East Timor, (with Tetum). It is a native language of most of the population in Portugal (100%), Brazil (99%), São Tomé and Príncipe (95%) and Angola (60%), and is the most widely spoken language in Mozambique (40%), though only 6.5% are native speakers. (...)"
(Source: Wikipedia - http://www.wikipedia.org/ )

Quite interesting, huh? So, If you aren't a native portuguese speaker but always wanted to learn it, this blog may be a good tutor (I hope so), with clear and practical explanations, including some grammar tips, differences between its "dialects" (or variations) within Brazil, my homeland. I'd like to show the "real portuguese", that is, that one spoken in everyday life. So, you'll become used with the colloquial language, and thus, you'll be able to interact with people in real situations, in every (or most) portuguese-speaking countries.

Since I was born in Brazil, and, as being a portuguese descendant, I'm gonna focus on these two variations, although sometimes Portuguese spoken in Portugal may be harder to foreign people to understand or imitate, once some letters are literally "swallowed" sometimes when they pronounce it . Also, there are some differences in writing between both variants, as it can be seen in the word for "fact" (fato/facto). Notice the add of a "c" in the middle of the word, very common in Portugal. Of course, sometimes, we can also have two distinct words for the same thing, as seen for eg. in the case of "socks" (meias/peúgas). The same occours between American and British English variants as well, f. eg: elevator/lifter... Anyway, let's consider the brazilian dialect as the standard dialect and the main focus of this blog.

In order to bring the learner into the brazilian lifestyle, I'll try to give an overview of the country and it's culture. I'm a real believer that we can't separate language and culture. In fact, a language IS part of one's nation culture, right? As for detailed information and stuffs about Portugal, just check out my another blog (see link above).
(more coming soon!)