Excellent news! After a month of lounging around here because a small (and, I should add, entirely unrepresentative of their homelands) band of Finnish fuckwits got me sent home on trumped-up- nay, nonexistent- charges of pyromania and being too smart, I am pleased to announce that I'm getting transferred to Brazil. I got my fingerprints done for the visa application today, things are moving quickly, eu tenho já començade estudar o português, and I should be on a plane to Rio (or São Paulo, or Brasília) before Thanksgiving.
Congratulations! Brazil is supposed to be awesome, just don't go into the forest. Seriously, fucking spiders everywhere (from what I'm told.)
Luckily, wherever I'm going (I get a choice of four cities, but which ones haven't yet been revealed) is on a Southern Hemisphere school schedule. This has two benefits: firstly, I get summer vacation right off the bat (and get to stay longer because fall term doesn't end until July), and it means I am not going to Amazonia, which is on a Northern Hemisphere schedule. Oh, and a third: I don't have to get any immunizations, and who knows how many I'd have to get for Amazonia.
As for the Portuguese: at first, I said that Portuguese is what Spanish would sound like if Spanish weren't ugly (which is quite true), and then that it sounds like a cross between Spanish and French (which is true, and it is a complete poser doing it, since it isn't Catalan, which actually is a cross between them).
Then I figured it out: Portuguese sounds like a drunk person speaking. I'm not even going to quantify that with "a drunk person speaking [Spanish, French, Catalan...]". It just sounds drunk. S's at the end of a word are transformed into sh. L's at the end of a word become w (so the canonical pronounciation of "Brasil" sounds like a three-year-old is trying to pronounce it). Nasal vowels everywhere. T and d become ch and j before i and e. Double and word-initial R has the widest range of surface forms of any sound in just about any language I've ever seen- anything from a French R to a German ch to an h to the h in "huge" to
nothing at fucking all because it up and disappears. Would you guess that "as telenovelas" (meaning "the soap operas") is pronounced "ash chélénuvélash"? Or that Rio de Janeiro is approximately "khiu je zhanéru"?
I adore Portuguese.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 15798015 times)