Sport Lisboa e Benfica

[Cloughie]

Benfica with JJ never lost a game in January.
Best game of the season, imo.

Between this one and against Guimarães is hard to choose.

This one, because our rival won the game a day before and because visiting Barreiros is always one of toughest matches of the season.

[Maxi_14]

Yersterday. Unfortunately it seems that he didn't understood very well. 

[Faliro]

Add this to famous 'Hulke' interview after that game!   

Samaris really needs portuguese lessons.

[cipri_slb]

Add this to famous 'Hulke' interview after that game!   

Samaris really needs portuguese lessons.

Portuguese lessons is not enough for understand JJ ....

[Eddie_]

I think that gif is very important to explain why Samaris had so many problems adapting to our tactic. And that can explain some "less good" performances.

Someone said to me he didn't talk english when he arrived and of course no portuguese either so the language barrier was really a problem (and we can see that still is)

He's in Portugal for about 4/5 months now, which i think is still few time to understand new language as portuguese is very hard language (and our coach is not language master...)

I believe his performances will keep getting better (and he's now much better than he was when he arrived) till he completely understood what coach wants of him.

[Covenant]

I think he speaks english. At least he is very good friend of Pizzi for example.

[Maxi_14]

He speaks english. And I think Faliro said that he know a lite bit of spanish because  is Michel's language.

[Faliro]

He speaks English. Most the TV in Greece is English (films, american series etc). Most Greeks speak good English.

He seemed to speak very basic spanish also.

Portuguese.. nothing.

[H]

He speaks English. Most the TV in Greece is English (films, american series etc). Most Greeks speak good English.

He seemed to speak very basic spanish also.

Portuguese.. nothing.

I'm surprised by this, as most Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian speak awful English!

[HJDK]

He speaks English. Most the TV in Greece is English (films, american series etc). Most Greeks speak good English.

He seemed to speak very basic spanish also.

Portuguese.. nothing.

I'm surprised by this, as most Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian speak awful English!

u speak da tru

[Festivus]

He speaks English. Most the TV in Greece is English (films, american series etc). Most Greeks speak good English.

He seemed to speak very basic spanish also.

Portuguese.. nothing.

I'm surprised by this, as most Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian speak awful English!

The Portuguese are generally better than the Spanish, French and Italians at English. And for the same reason as the Greeks. Small country with a useless language and also with no tradition of dubbing everything. You could argue that the Dutch and Scandinavians are great at English due to their languages being Germanic as well, but the native language of Finland is not even Indo-European and yet they're pretty good at English. Greek is quite different from English, and hell, the overwhelming majority of European languages as well, and they don't have trouble with English either. It has to do with exposure at the end of the day. Per example, Portuguese people learn both English and French at school. French is a lot closer to our language than English is. But how many people here graduate HS speaking French fluently? Not many, since they're not exposed to the language except during class.

And ofc, then there's the idiots who think they can speak Spanish or even Italian fluently just because "it's almost the same". And then all you hear is them speaking Portuguese with a funny accent.

[H]

That actually makes sense Festivus, although I always considered dubbing movies to be quite ridiculous, as illiteracy is practically non-existent nowadays (at least on Latin countries). I confirm that Scandinavians and Finnish are particularly good English speakers, but the Dutch... nhé. Both in Netherlands and Flemish part of Belgium, I was surprised to witness that people didn't grasp English that well, especially in Belgium. While some young people in Portugal tend to speak it well, most speak macaronic English and with that dreadful Portuguese accent, only beaten by the Spanish accent, which is absolutely dire.

[H]

Now that I think of it, the Greek girl I know actually speaks perfect English, we were bragging a while ago that we belonged to the 8 Group (concerning the IELTS exam), though she has been living here in the UK for a year now, which makes your English drastically improve.

[Festivus]

That actually makes sense Festivus, although I always considered dubbing movies to be quite ridiculous, as illiteracy is practically non-existent nowadays (at least on Latin countries). I confirm that Scandinavians and Finnish are particularly good English speakers, but the Dutch... nhé. Both in Netherlands and Flemish part of Belgium, I was surprised to witness that people didn't grasp English that well, especially in Belgium. While some young people in Portugal tend to speak it well, most speak macaronic English and with that dreadful Portuguese accent, only beaten by the Spanish accent, which is absolutely dire.

You know, Dutch people have a reputation for speaking English quite well. In fact, a common stereotype about them is "they all speak English". But many Dutch people themselves claim that most of them aren't really that great speakers and that they find Scandinavians to be better English speakers. This isn't exactly easy to gauge, especially when it comes to pure anecdotal evidence. And hell, school grades don't mean much either. But maybe you're onto something there.

I think the worst English speakers I've met were the Italians. Even worse than Spaniards. But it's not like I've met hundreds of them or spent enough time in both countries to get to know people quite well.

And speaking of school grades, even the people with the lowest grades in English class seemed to understand the gist of English songs. And those aren't translated at all. They struggled at communication but not so much at understanding the language verbally or in written-form. I'm currently in university, pursuing a degree related to social sciences, which requires you to read quite a lot, many of the texts being in English. About half of my classmates claim to struggle at English and yet they manage to pass. And I seriously doubt they're checking the dictionary every 7-8 words. I guess they just have a passive knowledge of the language. And, as we all know, language subjects at school always place over emphasis on grammar. And not everyone can get a firm grasp of grammar, not even in their own native language.

EDIT: And I wouldn't worry much about accents. Foreigners are supposed to have them. Some have thicker ones. But as long as you know the rules of the language and can express yourself fine to the point of people understanding you, it doesn't really matter to me if your accent is noticeable or not.

[H]

Well maybe I could have been unlucky, the times I was both in the Flemish part of Belgium and Netherlands, but I had some trouble in there sometimes when I needed to get to some places, because people couldn't help much. The worst one was when I got totally hammered on Belgian beer and then lost myself in Ghent. It came to a point where I just told myself: Forget about it, just keep walking until you find a bus stop, somewhere.

I don't worry at all, I just find it amusing sometimes that people can speak the language perfectly, in terms of sentence construction and all, but then have that thick native accent. Take Sofia Vergara for example: I really can't tell if it's just her that doesn't want to learn of if she simply can't do it.

I try to make some sense out of it but I can't. To me, once one has managed to tame the language, it should be easy to get the accent right as well, because you've reached a point when you don't have to bother about which words you need to put next, because it's already an automatic process and therefore the only thing that might put more work to your brain could be "how" you say it.

I'm not a perfect English speaker, far from it, as I still put a lot of my brain work focused on phrase construction, but I can speak with English, American, Australian accent, a bit of Scottish, Irish and have been learning passively Northern Irish accent as well. Even within England, I've been learning a lot from different accents such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, Norwich or York accent, and to me it feels very natural to employ the accent to a word as soon as I learn it, but maybe people have different sensibilities, in terms of language learning. The fact that I've started learning it since I was 5 years old could be an explanation as well, but for example with Russian, some people that I talked with in English (but with which I tried some Russian words every once in a while), told me I had pretty good accent as well and I never had classes, all I learned was from watching the movies or from the classic books that had original words and then translaation at the bottom of the page.

I actually really likes languages, I would probably study and work on that if I didn't like Film even more.