One of the biggest sources of conflict in my household is pronunciation. What I met my companheira, I spoke little Portuguese, and she hated my Louredo accent that I picked up from neighbors. So we mostly speak English. But many times each day I simply cannot understand what she's saying, or I mishear the words. Since I am also hard of hearing, she too often insists her pronunciation is correct but I just can't hear. But the vowels are way off.
I use speech to text software for Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese on the hypothesis that it the software can interpret my babble correctly, a native shopkeeper or other can probably get what I'm saying. That seems to be the case.
One of the biggest helps for pronunciation I have found for European Portuguese is the way audio exercises are done by the Practice Portuguese team. Usually things are recorded two ways: a careful "teacher's voice" and a recording of some random native who swallows so much that at first it's hard to tell that it's the same phrase or sentence. Listening to the differences has taken me a long way towards understanding how to mimic natives better.
A young couple I know at church have not been married more than a year, and one day the wife pulled out her phone and brought up a long list of her husband's pronunciations that annoy her and asked me to comment on them as a phonologist and dialectologist. She was surprised to find that sometimes it was her pronunciations I found weird.
I do have to be careful with my corrections sometimes, and think if this might be something correct that she picked up at the British Institute 60 years or so ago....
One of the biggest sources of conflict in my household is pronunciation. What I met my companheira, I spoke little Portuguese, and she hated my Louredo accent that I picked up from neighbors. So we mostly speak English. But many times each day I simply cannot understand what she's saying, or I mishear the words. Since I am also hard of hearing, she too often insists her pronunciation is correct but I just can't hear. But the vowels are way off.
I use speech to text software for Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese on the hypothesis that it the software can interpret my babble correctly, a native shopkeeper or other can probably get what I'm saying. That seems to be the case.
One of the biggest helps for pronunciation I have found for European Portuguese is the way audio exercises are done by the Practice Portuguese team. Usually things are recorded two ways: a careful "teacher's voice" and a recording of some random native who swallows so much that at first it's hard to tell that it's the same phrase or sentence. Listening to the differences has taken me a long way towards understanding how to mimic natives better.
A young couple I know at church have not been married more than a year, and one day the wife pulled out her phone and brought up a long list of her husband's pronunciations that annoy her and asked me to comment on them as a phonologist and dialectologist. She was surprised to find that sometimes it was her pronunciations I found weird.
I do have to be careful with my corrections sometimes, and think if this might be something correct that she picked up at the British Institute 60 years or so ago....