These points really make me update my beliefs on the importance of learning Chinese. Thanks for that.
What am I missing by not speaking Portuguese?
Brazilian speaks with the body, so you are not missing that much. Haha just kidding (although it’s true that body language plays a big role here). But there are 250 million total portuguese speakers, and by just knowing Portuguese you will understand Spanish easily, because there is 89% of lexical similarity. I can understand Spanish with no problems and I never studied it. If you know how to search, there is a vast and extensive Brazilian music that you wouldn’t like to miss. The literature written in Portuguese remains untranslated, except for very few authors, so you would be able to read very good books (if you like certain genres). Also, Brazil is about half of South America, and is a fantastically interesting place to travel. When new people come here, the reception is warm. Music, cooking, sports and memes here are a real thing. Knowing Portuguese would make you able to connect with our culture and you would be able to access very good content on a lot of subjects. But I am fully biased and mostly looking into the bubble (mathematics, physics and computation) and you don’t lose much by just using English sources for these subjects.
For example, this channel is specialized in non verbal behavior analysis and I never found anything better than that on any language. This channel is the best on musical content (how to play drums, guitar, acoustic guitar, etc, how to sing, compose, etc). This on comedy, this on history and science. I mean, if you keep looking, you will always find a lot of good content on very different subjects. You will miss all of this by not knowing Portuguese, as with any language.
If you look on the science side, you can check Brazil here (tables from page 4~9).
There is no good translator from Portuguese to any language yet, and your best tool to date would be DeepL, in case you need to translate Portuguese info to English.
These points really make me update my beliefs on the importance of learning Chinese. Thanks for that.
Brazilian speaks with the body, so you are not missing that much. Haha just kidding (although it’s true that body language plays a big role here). But there are 250 million total portuguese speakers, and by just knowing Portuguese you will understand Spanish easily, because there is 89% of lexical similarity. I can understand Spanish with no problems and I never studied it. If you know how to search, there is a vast and extensive Brazilian music that you wouldn’t like to miss. The literature written in Portuguese remains untranslated, except for very few authors, so you would be able to read very good books (if you like certain genres). Also, Brazil is about half of South America, and is a fantastically interesting place to travel. When new people come here, the reception is warm. Music, cooking, sports and memes here are a real thing. Knowing Portuguese would make you able to connect with our culture and you would be able to access very good content on a lot of subjects. But I am fully biased and mostly looking into the bubble (mathematics, physics and computation) and you don’t lose much by just using English sources for these subjects.
For example, this channel is specialized in non verbal behavior analysis and I never found anything better than that on any language. This channel is the best on musical content (how to play drums, guitar, acoustic guitar, etc, how to sing, compose, etc). This on comedy, this on history and science. I mean, if you keep looking, you will always find a lot of good content on very different subjects. You will miss all of this by not knowing Portuguese, as with any language.
If you look on the science side, you can check Brazil here (tables from page 4~9).
There is no good translator from Portuguese to any language yet, and your best tool to date would be DeepL, in case you need to translate Portuguese info to English.