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Excellent podcasts for learning pronunciation
I've been working with a series of podcasts called Tá Falado that are really good. Although it says they are designed for spanish speakers, the explanations are all in english and I think anyone can get good use out of them. In each lesson they have a dialog that is used to teach specific sounds in brazilian portuguese, many of them quite subtle, like open 'o' versus closed 'o'. They then translate it into spanish and compare the sounds between portguese, spanish, and english. Even though I don't know that much spanish, I think a lot of us in the US at least have a decent knowledge of how spanish sounds. My own tendency when first learning portuguese was to pronounce everything like it was spanish, with those nice consistent vowel sounds, so this podcast really helped me hear the difference. Plus I like that they occasionally bring in speakers from other parts of Brazil, so you can hear for example how the sound of 'r' changes from region to region. The accompanying pdfs are very helpful also.
I think my portuguese pronunciation has improved quite a bit since working with these.
The English language has made it all possible. If you know English you can learn any other language on the planet, English is the universal language that unifies all the other languages, that’s what our private sat tutor used to tell us. Now I realize she was so right.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Molly.
Teaching these sounds is one of the biggest challenges for us, teachers. Many students find it hard to differentiate the open "o" to the closed "o" as in Vovó and Vovô. In this case the accentuation helps them to distinguish the words, since the acento agudo (´) makes the vowels' sounds open, and the (^) acento circunflexo makes the vowels' sounds closed.
However, some words do not have any "acento" and the students need to be attentive to how native skpeakers pronounce them. Just yesterday I was talking to a student about some words that change the sound when we have the plural form, such as:
Porco /pôrkoo/ (pig)- closed sound for the first "O"
Porcos /pórkoos/ (pigs) - first "o" is open
Here are few other words that follow the same rule: Ovo (egg), Novo (new), famoso (famous)
Exception: Cachorro (dog), gorro (bonnet), morro (hill)
Being an active listener and an iquirer is the key to grasp these rules. :)
obrigada,
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing. Phonetics can be challenging and it is good to learn from as many different sources as you can.
Luciana Lage