Start each word and then decide it’s not worth the effort and trail off
“Eh you got the gist, let’s move on to the next word”
It’s really weird for me as a spanish speaker. I can nearly read french since a lot of the words are cognates but when i hear it spoken i might understand one word in twenty. Their pronunciations are fucked.
Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.
Honestly same for me with italian.
Can I ask what you think of portuguese pronunciation? I can read it but its not possible for me to understand it when spoken… In comparison I learned spanish at school and it was the easiest langage to learn thanks to my french.
I’m not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.
LangFocus has a video about that effect. It’s called something like “Why does Portuguese sound like Russian”. There are quite some phonetic and phonotactic similarities
Link: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA
There’s actually a lot of totally separate parallels here, I guess they just hit a certain critical mass when combined.
Written portuguese is fairly easy to read for me. Every now and then I’ll respond to brazilians in spanish when they have a funny meme and they’ll write back in portuguese. Yay mutual intelligibility.
Spoken portuguese is damn near impossible for me to understand. I know a few phrases and words because my buddy is fluent and says them every now and then but the language sounds like spanish while holding marbles in your mouth. I will say that spanish also sounded unintelligible to me before i learned to speak it so maybe I just need to go live in Rio de Janeiro.
French phonology was heavily influenced by Germanic languages, unlike Spanish and Italian.
For better or for worse, the orthography (writing system) did not really keep up with the changes.
So instead of French being half way between Italian and Spanish, like you might expect, it’s really it’s own thing when it comes to pronunciation.
I don’t know how big this effect really is but French changed their orthography during the renaissance to make it more Latin like
The woes of a rather conservative orthography and an aggressively evolved phonology.
They begin to pronounce words, then suddenly go on strike.
It looks impossibly dainty written down, but when spoken, is just a stream of subtly articulated grunts
“Le chateau” is French for “the chateau.”
you have 11 letters. You pronounce 4 of them
The remaining letters are recycled into English. Pronunciation is still based off the same 4 letters you used in French, except you don’t have access to them anymore.
And Portuguese is a mix of French and Spanish, but if it was mixed together by drunk who didn’t know either of those languages
I’m struggling learning Portuguese is what I’m trying to say
I usua’y joke that it’s like Ita’ian but whẽ’ you just woke up ã’d your tõ’gue did not, so you prõ’õu’ce thĩ’s mostly the sã’ except for a few missĩ’ cõsõ’ãts.
[I usually joke that it’s like Italian but when you just woke up and your tongue did not, so you pronounce things mostly the same except for a few missing consonants.]
Serious now. If you want some help feel free to ask. I’m a native speaker.
That’s actually pretty accurate lmao
My girlfriend speaks Portuguese natively so she helps me with it, but there’s only so much she can do when my body also isn’t accustomed to the nasal vowels, and I’m also an idiot lol
You probably aren’t an idiot, it’s just that language learning is harder than it looks like.
If you have a really hard time with the nasal vowels, worst hypothesis it’s fine to simply pronounce an oral vowel + [ŋ]. You won’t sound native, but it sounds less off than simply omitting the nasalisation or using [m] or [n] instead.
Watch out for the vowel height of /ã/; depending on the dialect it’s between [ɐ̃] and [ə̃], but it’s certainly not [ã].
Nasals are easy, just raise your hands, position two fingers around your nose, and press it shut.
It’s a bit tiring but exactly the same results as closing the air passage between your nose and throat.
Portuguese is my native language and I struggle with it. Hell, I have an easier time with english. German tho, is impossible to learn in one lifetime
German here. Can confirm.
Portuguese is like catalan which is like occitan (southern French). If you know one of the Latin languages, Portuguese shouldn’t be too hard, really.
Portuguese shouldn’t be too hard, really
To read? Absolutely. To understand, even though I speak some other Romance languages? Just no.
Ah yeah that’s fair enough. But then again that’s true of all the languages I’ve learnt.
Learning spoken English with the BBC accent and then landing in Ireland and dealing with all the local accents… that was some craic alright!
Just learn 3-4 latin languages, and latin ofc and you should be ready to go
Tabarnak.
That’s Canadian french!
Non, c’est du français Québécois ;)
Argh, t’as bien raison, tabernak !
tabernak
Non non, ta-bar-nak.
Bordel de crotte.
Tabarnak!
I learned french in the late nineties, years were hell.
Kids these days have it good, not needing to count past 25.
The last one. The french writing system in its roots.
French is what you get when your Spanish skills are so good that you speak it in fractals.
“you got peanut butter in your mouth or something?”
ils schtroumpfent
It’s Italian with a mouth full of shit.
I usually say “Spanish with a mouthful of pudding,” but it amounts to the same thing
Le wee wee
