Returning to the US last December after a semester in South America, I felt comfortable with my ability to converse in Spanish. I listened to podcasts and read the news in Spanish to retain as much as possible as I went through a semester and summer with little practice and no Spanish classes.
Now, for the 2009 fall semester, enter Portuguese.
I’d been to Brazil for ten days in high school and had found that if I added a funky accent to my Spanish vocabulary, I could get by well enough such that people could kind of understand what I was trying to say. Reading was no problem, but when it came to comprehending the words coming out of a native speaker’s mouth (and actually correctly pronouncing the language), I was lost.
Come the first class of PORT 2090 two Thursdays ago, I had minimally prepared myself by a) occasionally listening to the weekly BBC Brasil news podcast in Portuguese and b) having remembered to bring my Lonely Planet Brazilian Portuguese phrase book up to Ithaca. Our first several 75 minute classes have been devoted entirely to the pronunciation of vowels, diphthongs, and some consonants. Easy enough, I assumed, as someone who’s developed a decent Spanish accent.
But no. The sounds that letters and combinations thereof can make is mind-boggling. Our class of 18 has about half native English speakers and half native Spanish speakers, yet both parties seem to encounter some issues when trying to correctly distinguish between an a, an â, an ã, and an á. Add to that the fact that a simple change in accent mark on one letter can change the entire meaning of a word, and you have a recipe for confusion. That’s why we’ve spent four classes so far covering the basics, without even touching on the most basic of vocabulary. For example, the whole concept of nasalization (or, in Portuguese, nasalização) is new to all of us and requires the use of parts of the nose, mouth, and throat that English and Spanish have never dared to make sounds with.
My goal for the end of the year in this (year-long) course is to be able to return to Brazil one day and encounter many fewer furrowed brows.