Portuguese

Since I can speak Spanish pretty fluently and since the Portuguese class I'll be taking is designed for speakers of romance languages, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be expending too much effort to learn what seemed, at least initially, to be like Spanish with a few weird accent marks (like ç, ã, and ê). Boy was I wrong.

Written Portuguese isn't too bad. I'm more or less capable of reading and comprehending the articles on Portuguese Wikipedia--like this one about marriage equality ("casamento homossexual") in Portugal!

Unfortunately for me, however, while the written forms of both Spanish and Portuguese are pretty similar, the spoken forms of the two languages are actually ridiculously different--something my good friend and budding Portuguese major, Konrad Coutinho, warned me about.

Some of the weirdest things for me as a Spanish-speaker are:

- The Portugese "R" is pronounced a variety of ways. Sometimes it's like the Spanish "R" but other times it's like an English "H" sound. For example, Rio de Janeiro would be said like Hee-oh jee Zhuh-nay-roo. This also makes me wonder whether my name's going to be pronounced differently once I'm there.

- The "L" at the end of a word makes a "W" sound. So the name of the country of Brazil is something like Bruh-zeew.

- And then basically everything in this article.

Lucky for me, everyone who's taken this class seems to love it. And I've recently discovered that a (surprisingly large) number of my friends falam português! I think the major pitfall in my Portuguese-learning experience is just going to be nerves. I don't even like speaking English with people I don't know so it's really going to take a lot of effort to just jump right in and make the plunge and speak Portuguese with all the Brazilians. Wish me luck!