How Do You Say "Huh?" In Portuguese?
While I had grasped Spanish enough to get by, I was unprepared for Portuguese. Sure, it looked similar to Spanish words, and I had written down a few choice phrases from the internet to help me out, but pronounciation was an entirely different matter. I had only just managed to reconfigure my English pronounciation inclinations to Spanish, so I was completely taken aback at how Brazilian Portuguese sounded. I had never heard it before then.
Take the city name, Recife, for example. Initially, I had pronounced it in the very gringo way "Reh-seef". After learning a bit of Spanish, I thought "Rrre-see-feh" was better. No, of course not! In Portuguese, it is closer to "Heh-see-feh", though sometimes I heard it as "Heh-see-fee".
Similarly, the word "internet" is a little different. While in Spanish pronounciation you would only slightly roll the R, in Brazil, if you say "inch-netch" or "in-che-netch", they will know exactly what you're talking about. And even the country's name, "Brazil" is pronounced "Bra-siw". Huh?
I had written down in my notebook, the basic greetings of "Good morning" and "Good afternoon", "Bom dia" and "Boa tarde", respectively. In my head, I had been pronouncing them in Spanish; "Bom dee-ah", "Bo-ah tarr-deh". Then I actually heard them in Portuguese... kind of like "Bom jee-ah" and "Bo charge". There are a lot of ch, zh, dj and sh sounds in Portuguese so that it almost sounds like a mix between French and an Eastern European language.
Fortunately, "yes" was similar to Spanish's "sí" since people seemed to drop the M quite often when they said "sim", but "no" was a different matter. "No" is not "no" in Portuguese. It is "on", while não, pronounced "now" is actually "no". Phew! I either had a lot of learning or a lot of charades to do.
Take the city name, Recife, for example. Initially, I had pronounced it in the very gringo way "Reh-seef". After learning a bit of Spanish, I thought "Rrre-see-feh" was better. No, of course not! In Portuguese, it is closer to "Heh-see-feh", though sometimes I heard it as "Heh-see-fee".
Similarly, the word "internet" is a little different. While in Spanish pronounciation you would only slightly roll the R, in Brazil, if you say "inch-netch" or "in-che-netch", they will know exactly what you're talking about. And even the country's name, "Brazil" is pronounced "Bra-siw". Huh?
I had written down in my notebook, the basic greetings of "Good morning" and "Good afternoon", "Bom dia" and "Boa tarde", respectively. In my head, I had been pronouncing them in Spanish; "Bom dee-ah", "Bo-ah tarr-deh". Then I actually heard them in Portuguese... kind of like "Bom jee-ah" and "Bo charge". There are a lot of ch, zh, dj and sh sounds in Portuguese so that it almost sounds like a mix between French and an Eastern European language.
Fortunately, "yes" was similar to Spanish's "sí" since people seemed to drop the M quite often when they said "sim", but "no" was a different matter. "No" is not "no" in Portuguese. It is "on", while não, pronounced "now" is actually "no". Phew! I either had a lot of learning or a lot of charades to do.
Comments
Post a Comment
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Don't forget to choose Name/URL from the drop down menu if you are not logged in.