Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Portuguese Pronunciation (and Dominican Spanish)

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."

Portuguese on YouTube Resources

There are three YouTube channels I follow for learning Portuguese: Learn Portuguese with Dri and Lud Português com Marcia Macedo Street Smar...