The first lesson of Pimsleur Portuguese Level One challenged me from the beginning. I heard the phrase "com licença" and I wanted to say "con," with a clearly articulated "n", but I could tell that wasn’t right. Thus began my introduction to the many nasal vowels and diphthongs of Brazilian Portuguese. I had a lot of trouble with certain words, too. Usually, these were words that were similar to Spanish or English words, so I had to unlearn prior pronunciations and get them out of my head before I could learn the new ones.
"Restaurante" was one of them. Wow! First, there’s the "h" sound that the initial "r" represents. OK, was this like the "h" sound for "r" in French, as in "restaurant" or "au revoir"? Not exactly, though it sounds close. The "au" is more of an "ow" sound than I was making at first, and then the "an" has a nasalized "a," though the pronunciation did differ somewhat between the two native speakers on Pimsleur. Finally, there is the "chee" sound of the "te" at the end, which became familiar as I moved through the lessons, but took a while to get used to.
The phrase "eu tenho" was another. First, there’s the pronunciation of "eu," which sometimes sounds almost like Spanish "yo," but usually has a very definite "oo" sound at the end, and sometimes almost disappears depending on what follows it. And "tenho" has a very soft "nh" sound, not really like "ñ" in Spanish, and certainly not "ng" that one hears in the Spanish “tengo.”
It also took me a long time to eliminate the "a" between forms of the verb "ir" followed by an infinitive. This was a very hard habit to break. I'd hear "Eu vou comprar alguma coisa," and I'd be thinking "Voy a comprar algo," and the "a" would sneak in when I repeated the sentence in Portuguese.
Getting used to final "o" having an "oo" sound took some time, too. It was only after I was about halfway through the first level that I started to break old habits and develop new ones, with better Portuguese pronunciation.
And the thing was, I could really hear it when my pronunciation was off, and I could also hear when it improved. I remember laughing at the beginning, because I felt that I had to literally contort my face and my mouth and my tongue in order to get the right sounds. It was a real challenge.
The best remedy for my struggles with pronunciation was to repeat the troublesome words or phrases over and over again. I used the iOS app "iTranslate" to help with this. This wonderful resource will translate to and from a variety of languages, including Brazilian Portuguese. You can either type or speak what you want to have translated, and the app will print what it heard you say, and then translate it. Like all artificial translators, it sometimes comes up with some rather clunky translations, but that's also good practice for the learner. If you can tell that the sentence doesn't look or sound right, you're on the right track.
The voice recognition is quite good, so you can use it to practice your pronunciation. At first, it recognized my English, French, and Spanish pronunciation, but had a really hard time with my Portuguese. So I knew that it wasn't a problem with the software, it was my inability to articulate correctly. Also, my spoken Portuguese was a lot slower and more deliberate, and the software does a better job of recognizing speech at normal speeds, which I simply wasn't able to reproduce at first.
Once I had made it through lesson 15 or so of Pimsleur, "iTranslate" started to accurately pick up what I was saying in Portuguese. The first time I got it to accurately print "restaurante" after I had spoken it, I felt that I was finally getting somewhere.
The other area that was problematic for me were the nasal vowels and diphthongs. I cannot say that I have mastered these yet, but I'm sure doing a lot better than I was at first. The first time I heard the Portuguese word "americano," I thought, "Why does the final 'a' sound like the 'u' in the English marker 'uh'"? I did my best to duplicate it, but again, my mouth wanted to pronounce it as if it were the Spanish look-alike "americano," where the "a" sounds the same in both positions. Only after doing some reading did I learn that any vowel that is immediately followed by an "m" or "n" becomes nasalized, and in the case of "a," this changes the sound of the vowel itself. Once I got this through my head, it helped me to understand why Portuguese "antes" does not sound like Spanish "antes," and why Portuguese "banco" does not sound exactly like Spanish "banco."
It was helpful for me to read that the endings "-am" and "-ão" have the same sound. Since Pimsleur doesn't provide written scripts or even vocabulary lists, I was getting confused about the way a word would be written. I also read that one is not supposed to pronounce the "m" at the end of a word, but in one lesson, I thought that I could hear the faint sound of "m" at the end of the word "com" in this sentence: "O meu irmão é casado com uma brasileira." The best I could do was to make the word "com" very nasalized, so that it didn't disappear into the word "uma" which follows it, and that seemed to get my pronunciation closer to what I was hearing.
Another helpful strategy for dealing with Portuguese nasals came from the author of the amazing website Hacking Portuguese, which I mention in another post. She suggested that I apply my knowledge of French, pronouncing "bom" almost like the French word "bon," "um" like "un," and so forth. This helped me to get past whatever issues I was having with the "m" at the end of a word.
Another helpful strategy for dealing with Portuguese nasals came from the author of the amazing website Hacking Portuguese, which I mention in another post. She suggested that I apply my knowledge of French, pronouncing "bom" almost like the French word "bon," "um" like "un," and so forth. This helped me to get past whatever issues I was having with the "m" at the end of a word.
It sounds like you've got a great handle on the nasal sounds. Some random thoughts:
ReplyDeleteThe French R in "restaurant" and the Portuguese R in "restaurante" are indeed very similar! To my ear, they are pronounced in the same place in the back of the throat, the only difference is what in phonetics is called 'voicing'. The French R is voiced, meaning your vocal cords are vibrating as you pronounce it. The Portuguese R is unvoiced, sounding more like the ch in channukah. Your vocal cords don't start vibrating until the vowel after the R kicks in.
There are also plenty of Brazilians in the south of Brazil who will pronounce that R just like a Spanish R, even rolling it into a trill. So Spanicizing it certainly isn't wrong, it will just make people think you're from Rio Grande do Sul :-)
-am and ão are both nasal and pronounced pretty similarly, but -ão is always stressed at the end of a word (falarão, they will speak), while -am is always unstressed (falaram, they spoke). So ão tends to have a longer, rounder "ow" sound, while -am often disappears into the "uh" or "ang" sound.
"com" is tricky... very similar to French "quand" except that the vowel is a pure nasal O. It's almost like you're saying "cong" - your soft palatte rises at the end like you're about to say "ng", but you don't quite say it.
In general whenever a word ends with -M or -N, you don't actually pronounce the M/N, it's just there to indicate that the preceding vowel is nasal. But! In words like "cama", "uma", "cana" where you have the pattern vowel-m/n-vowel, the first vowel is nasal, just like usual, but you do actually bring your lips together to pronounce the M or N. I don't think this actually happens across words though: in "com uma brasileira" pronouncing the M would be wrong.
That was me, btw - I haven't yet succeeded in figuring out how to make my name show up at the top of the comments.
ReplyDelete- Lauren
Hi Lauren,
DeleteThank you so much for stopping by and for your pointers on pronunciation. Your insights about pronunciation have helped me understand some of the finer points more effectively than anything else I've read. I really appreciate that you're able to explain it concisely, with examples that make sense. I *thought* I was hearing something slightly different in the "-ão" and "-am" endings, and now I know why.
Is it accurate to say that the Portuguese initial "r" (and double "rr" within a word) should sound less guttural and lighter than the French initial "r"?
Yes - the French R sounds like you're gargling, which you don't want to do in Portuguese.
ReplyDeleteWith the Portuguese initial R (and double RR within a word) you really have a variety of options, because the sound varies widely across the different regions of Brazil and Portugal. Listen to the various ways speakers say "restaurante" on Forvo:
http://www.forvo.com/word/restaurante/#pt
1) the most 'standard' way, and the way most students should probably learn, is a gutteral "h" sound. Thicker than the English "h", but not as heavy as the Greek "x" or the hebrew "ch". The first, second and fourth speakers pronounce "restaurante" this way, with varying thicknesses you could say.
2) another option is to pronounce it as in Spanish, i.e. as a tap or flap, or even as a rolled trill. In this case, it is voiced. This is the platinense accent from the far south of Brazil, where Uruguayan Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese mix together. Some people from Portugal also do this. The third speaker on Forvo pronounces it this way.
3) yet another option is the paulista accent spoken by people in the rural parts of São Paulo state. Here the R sounds a lot like an American R - strident, nasal, more in the front of the mouth. It has a caipira (hillbilly) connotation in Brazil. Listen to Michelle Lima's R's in Tá Falado. It's unmistakable.
Also notice the difference in the final syllable between the four speakers. The first speaker almost makes it disappear into a barely audible [t] sound. Typical of Portugal.
The second produces a more standard [tshi] sound, where she both palatalizes (t -> tsh) and raises the vowel (e -> i). This is most common in Rio, and it's how I've taught myself to speak.
The third neither palatalizes nor vowel raises, producing a Spanish-like [te], typical of southern Brazil.
And the fourth doesn't palatalize but she does vowel raise, producing [ti], typical of the northeast of Brazil.
So much variation that it's very hard to speak Portuguese with a 'wrong' accent! That one thing I really like about the language.