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Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

I knew my accent was strong, but I didn't expect to get 100% Portuguese, which is strange since Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish. Maybe it considers both accents to be Portuguese?

A fun fact: When using Whisper by OpenAI, there seems to be a ~1% chance that all my text, which was spoken entirely in English, is automatically transcribed and translated into pt-BR without any prompting. It happens more often when I am not paying too much attention to pronunciation.

The weird thing is that all the words were transcribed correctly (beyond being entirely in a different language)

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> Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish.

Surely you mean the opposite? Portugal is literally next to Spain and both languages have coexisted since they were both born following Rome's fall. Both Galician and Portugal's Portugese are likely similar to each other and closer to Spanish than Brazil's Portuguese

As native Portuguese / Spanish, they are right.

You are right regarding Galician, but Galician isn't Spanish, rather original Portuguese, where some words changed throughout the centuries.

The way we both speak is rather different than the native Spanish speakers, that never have been exposed to native Portuguese/Galician speakers.

In fact, even native Catalan speakers have easier time understanding Galician/Portuguese speakers, than Spanish speakers do, probably due to the French roots in Galician/Portuguese carried by the crusades involved in the founding of both regions and naturally influeced the language evolution.

It caught me off guard too, portugese from portugal do sound somewhat slavic if you're not familiar with either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdDQEHL7i44

Even my slavic gf was tricked for a few seconds and wasn't sure if it was some kind of eastern language she wasn't aware of.

And for the explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA

He is correct.

I've heard it described as if a drunk russian was trying to speak spanish.

One cool fact is that Galician sounds closer to Brazilian Portuguese. It also has much of the same vocabulary (with the notable exception of the days of the week which it borrows from the other Romance languages while Portuguese has its boring days of the week)

No. I literally thought people in Portugal are speaking Russian at first!

Presumably each training speech sample is labelled with native language. For Portuguese there would be two distinct clusters: Portugal and Brazil. If your speech is in either cluster, it would just tell you that your native language is Portuguese without being any more specific. Sure, it's a missed opportunity but it doesn't distinguish Jamaicans from Australians either.

I presume there's enough difference between English spoken by Portuguese and English spoken by Russians for those also to be distinct clusters.

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