While university professors Barry Olsen (Monterey Institute of International Studies) and Gláucia Silva (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth) were traveling in Brazil in 2012 with IIE’s International Academic Partnership Program (IAPP), they saw a great opportunity to help speakers of Spanish in that country to sound more Brazilian. The one-week university study tour provided the two with a broad perspective on Brazilian higher education and the current opportunities and challenges to increasing academic collaboration. Language was a recurring issue, but provided a logical opportunity for Olsen, a linguist, and Silva, a Portuguese language teacher, to create a practical language tool. Together with Earl Brown (Kansas State University), the three spent 18 months researching linguistic corpora of Portuguese and Spanish to identify 54 of the most common differences and pitfalls between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. The result is the app "Sound Brazilian!" which helps fluent speakers of Spanish learn how to avoid the most common mistakes in Portuguese for Spanish speakers and jumpstart their Portuguese conversational skills. 

 

Sound Brazilian! provides more than 50 of the most tricky words and phrases in Brazilian Portuguese that have been carefully selected from the 500 most frequently used words in Portuguese, as found in the Corpus do Português, a database of authentic language maintained by Professor Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. Each tip explains the difference between Portuguese and Spanish and provides real-world examples that can easily be incorporated into your "portuñol" to make it sound more like Brazilian Portuguese.