hi everyone, my name is Seb and welcome back to Pra Caramba, a podcast I created to help you improve your Brazilian accent, one episode at the time.
If like me, portuguese isn’t the first latin language you’re learning, you know how much of a double-edged sword it is. More than any other aspect of this, the trickiest for me when talking portuguese, especially when I first started learning, was to make sure my brain wasn’t going down the spanish road. I was really fearful before even starting learning portuguese because I had no idea how I would separate the two. one of my main preoccupations ended up being the solution: the accent. I had worked so hard to perfect my Argentine accent in spanish and I really liked the Brazilian accent, which I was hoping to master. So, for the first month, I was speaking really slow and piece-mealing it to make sure I was intonating and pronunciating in the most Brazilian way that I could and turns out it was a great way to blaze a new dedicated path in my brain for portuguese. It was also really hard. Psychologically, going from being fluent with a good accent in Spanish to being super robotic and sounding unnatural in a language that’s almost the same as spanish on paper really tested my resolve. But in less than a month, I found my brain drifting less and less towards spanish. So another facet of the method I’m sharing with you in the podcast is that it ultimately gives you back brainpower when you end up talking in portuguese. Not only do you get back the energy it’d otherwise take to think about pronunciation but it also dug a deeper path for portuguese in your brain, a dedicated mental mode, one that prevents you from thinking in another language, because the accent has been tightly wound to the language in this mode.
if this is your first time listening, my method is very simple: i’ll say a sentence, give you some time to repeat out loud, then we’ll do that three times for each of the sentences. All the sentences are in the episode description so that you can read along. If you’re having trouble with a sentence, hit pause and repeat it as slowly as possible until you get closer, then continue the exercise. As per use, don’t forget to focus on perfecting, not on trying to be perfect.
LET’S GO.
- Cada passo é um aprendizado incrível.
- Quem espera sempre alcança.
- Quem não arrisca, não petisca.
- Mais vale tarde do que nunca.
- Quem canta, seus males espanta.
- Eu sou o chefe, aqui quem manda sou eu.
- Quem semeia vento, colhe tempestade.
- É uma grande aventura que vale a pena.
- Eu sempre sigo em frente, não importa o que aconteça.
- O amor verdadeiro transforma a nossa vida.
- O tempo é o nosso bem mais precioso e deve ser valorizado.
- É preciso levar em conta a pobre e triste condição do homem.
That’s it for today. As always, I recommend sticking to at least one episode per week, repeating it twice a day, back to back, everyday of the week. Let me know in the comments if you’ve encountered this problem with speaking more than one latin language and any tips that helped you. Thank you so much for listening, see you next time!
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