Portuguese
I’m trying to learn Portuguese for the trip in March. So far I suck. I can read it pretty well and even understand it more or less, but as it turns out, the audio files I was using to try to learn are for Brazilian Portuguese, and I need peninsular. So I got a book that seems to have a pretty good pronunciation guide.
So far, this is what I have gleaned: it’s more or less like Spanish, except o is pronounced “oo” instead of “oh,” and a is pronounced “uh” instead of “ah.” That “uh” is hard for me to do, because it sounds so much like what my former Spanish students would say when they were speaking Spanish with horrible American accents: “Bway-nuhs dee-uhs” (flashback to Jan Hooks’s role in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure). Yuck. But I’m working on it. Oh, also there’s a lot more “sh” and “zh” in Portuguese than in Spanish, which kind of makes it sound like Italian. It’s all rather confusing. It’s fun, though. A lot of the food sounds really good, such as piri-piri.
