Hi all, glad to say it's the second year of this blog, and my motivation for making serious progress in the languages I'm learning is higher than it's been for a while. The only thing I need to do is check my enthusiasm, so I don't get ahead of myself, which is always my downfall.
I know I kept mentioning I would discuss my pronunciation of Portuguese, and will keep it brief by simply saying that when listening to the two BP accents recorded here, I was better able to match the second female contributor (mistakenly placed under the EP text) when speaking along.
Switching to espanhol, here's a little info about Dominincan Spanish you may find interesting...
(The link where I got the following is dead, but wanted to keep the info)...
Dominicans speak a Spanish that they describe as "morcha'o", or cut off.
There is the tendency to simplify certain consonant combinations, especially -ado, and to level c, z, and s such that cazar, casar and cacer might sound similar.
Unlike Mexican Spanish, for instance, Dominicans emphasize the vowel sounds.
Dominicans truncate or aspirate their final s es such that "Vamos a las dos o a las tres" sounds like "vamo a las doh o a lah treh."
Like our Puerto Rican and Cuban neighbors, the /r/ final may be flattened into an /l/. In fact the pronunciation of the final r is indicative of regionalism: people from the Cibao speak with the "ai," the south with rolled /~r/, and the east with the flattened /l/. The Cibao ai is a uniquely identifying linguistic habit. Mujer sounds like mujeai, and "algunos" would be pronounced "aiigunos."
The Dominican Republic is a tuteo country, which is to say that the form of the familiar second person is "tu."
