Notes from Self study

There are a few native speakers who speak sufficiently slowly to actually teach Portuguese in Portuguese, if you already speak Spanish, as I have had no trouble understanding a few teachers in particular, whose names I will not give in order to avoid copyright or other issues, and also because after about 7 or 8 videos, they all start demanding a paid version of some kind to see the next videos in the series, at which point I find other videos or go back to my library books, of which there are many designed for the young learners in middle school or early high school level which work perfectly fine now that I can understand basic Portuguese (and yes, I will admit that it would have taken me much longer had I not already spoken both Spanish and French…), and so reading has become much easier since I finally went back and reviewed the alphabet and pronunciation (in Spanish), and some short videos of people in northern Portugal explaining the differences in various Portuguese language accents.

Right now I am watching a lady from (the north of?) Portugal discuss her particular method of teaching by dividing up about 30 words in to several groups, while she demonstrates various words like o menino, a menina, a bota, and a uva, and when the vowels and syllables are more open or closed, again recalling the Cuban gentleman on how the letter o sounds like an U when it falls in the end of the word, and how the letter V is strongly like the English V. The word ‘rato,’ for example, is a difficult one, and she goes to much effort to explain how the palate forms each word, demonstrating the use of the muscles in the throat, cheeks, tongue, and even nasal vibrations should feel when pronouncing different parts of the various words. You can see the similarities with Spanish in words like ‘o palhaco’ in particular. I like how she uses words rather than just the alphabet, to explain how the various letters are pronounced depending on where they fall, like the letter S in particular, in a given word. It is a bit boring, which is why I can take these notes in real time, watching this video all over again, but I will admit that this second viewing helps.

o peixe, a chave, a escada all have the ‘sh’ sound in common, making Portuguese not unlike English in terms of having many variations on spelling vs. pronunciation.

Certain words are very difficult to pronounce if you use this particular system, but turn out to have a good deal of variability depending on where the speaker comes from, as even different regions of Portugal, and of course from Brazil, have rather different ways of saying the same word, some of which are easier. Nasal words are apparently more common and stronger in Portugal than in Brazil, because I often wonder if Brazilian speakers are actually speaking Spanish, since I can understand them so well, until I concentrate and realize that they are actually using words that I have learned already, in Portuguese, but so much more clearly and with a more open palate that it is more understandable. The words ending with ‘an’ and ‘am’ are nasal particularities that hit me as not at all very different from French, like the ‘en’ and ’em’ earlier.

Then we have prepositions, which are much more confusing in Portuguese than they ever were in either Spanish or French. It may be that many of them are definitely ‘false friends’ between Spanish and Portuguese. Here are two obvious combos:

por + a = pela

por + o = pelo

Obvious because the word por translates pretty much directly into PT from ES. But there are a couple of prepositions that are traicioneras, like a couple of words that I forget at the moment, but discovered the hard way that they were not the same as I read a story, assuming that I’d be able to figure it out without any need for translation, and finding that I had been a bit arrogant, as the sense was not at all obvious, mostly because of these prepositions. Unfortunately, this particularly long video explains a rather simple preposition, so I’ll need to find a different person to explain the prepositions with which I was having difficulty.