Hi,
I wanted to know if the Portuguese used in Clozemaster is European or Brazilian. I’m currently learning European Portuguese.
The Portuguese used in Clozemaster comes from Tatoeba, which does not produce separate language collections for Brazilian and European Portuguese. Sentences can be tagged at Tatoeba. However, of the 404,000+ Portuguese sentences at Tatoeba, only 110 are labeled Brazilian Portuguese, 35 are labeled Portuguese from Brazil, and 89 are labeled Portuguese from Portugal. My guess is that the tags are ignored when importing the sentences into Clozemaster.
There’s no easy way to search the contributors of Portuguese at Tatoeba, but I know that there are Brazilian contributors among them, and I’m not aware of European contributors (though that doesn’t mean there aren’t any). However, even if most or all of the contributors were Brazilian, it’s possible that only a small number of their sentences are distinctively Brazilian, much in the way that only a small proportion of the English sentences at Tatoeba have features (spelling, vocabulary) that make them distinctively UK English or US English.
My answer in short is that I can’t answer your question definitively, but I’m guessing that most of the sentences are contributed by Brazilians, but may not be distinctively Brazilian. I’d be curious to see what people with more knowledge of the language variants can say.
UPDATE: I’ve done some reading about the differences between the two variants of Portuguese, and I can see that they’re greater than I thought. I also did a search for “estou trabalhando” (which, from what I’ve read, is more characteristically Brazilian) and “estou a trabalhar” (which is more European). I found 76 instances of the former and only 1 instance of the latter. I also found more instances of the Brazilian “esporte” (103) than the European “desporto” (27), though the difference is not as pronounced.
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