Its seems I couldn't have lighted on a more appropriate time to be learning medical words in Portugese, because I spent the whole day today lying on our living room couch com tosse (with a cough) e com refriado (with a cold). By o jantar (dinnertime), I started to feel better, and after eating I decided to go out for a bit. I headed up to our local Borders bookstore and eventually wound my way to the foreign language reference section.
Just for kicks, I picked up a different Portuguese textbook, the one in the For Dummies series. I'm generally skeptical of using For Dummies books to learn languages because, when I checked out Russian for Dummies many moons ago, I noticed the book never bothered to teach the Russian alphabet--the whole book was in phonetic transcription!
Well, I got a different kind of surprise looking through Portuguese for Dummies. In this one, the words are given with a phonetic transcription, and I quickly realized I was pronouncing nearly everything wrong. I guess I'm going to have to spend more time with my CDs working on pronunciation practice; I've tended to skip them for the time being, as I'm more focused on getting to the point where I have a modicum of vocabulary.
Here are some of the crazy things I can tell you about Portuguese pronunciation:
1) Os brasilieros e o portugues (the Brazilians and the Portuguese) seem to be every bit as allergic to the letter r as British people. In some situation it's pronounced as an h, in others as a d.
2) The combination -ante is pronounced "an-chee" and comes at the end of quite a lot of important words: estudante (student), estante (bookcase).
3) De is often pronounced "jeh". Some verbs in Portuguese require de (of) after them, so this sound gets used a lot.
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When two sources disagree, find another source, peferably one that is a primary source, like a speaker of Brazilian Portuguese, rather than a seconday source, like a book.
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