Coming from learning French and all it's intricacies of pronunciation, and just being fascinated with linguistics, it's really cool to see a lot of similarities. Some of the nasal stuff is pretty much the same, like bom and bon in French are pretty much the same, and the rr sound is really similar to the French r in the back of the mouth. Even the vowels have a lot of similarities with the open and closed forms.

Yes, lots of similarities...the way people in Rio pronounce some of the "r" sounds is very similar to French.

Well, I'm a Spanish native speaker but I guess that having learned french pronunciation previously has kind of helped me with these nasal sounds, thanks again for this video!!

@@maraj8215 A lot of the nasal sounds are very similar to the French ones!

I’m struggling with (em) and (an) sounds… is the vowel (e) in (en) an open nasal or an open one? (bebo) - e- is closed (bebe) - e- is open So (en) to which one it is closer? Thank you

Glad it was helpful! Yes, that is a tricky one for sure! Not all words that end in AM will have the ÃO sound, but most will. 3rd person plural verb forms for AR verbs that end in AM will have it.

Thank you so much Harish, I appreciate that!

Thank you so much, so glad to hear the videos are helping you on your Portuguese journey! 😀

Awesome!!! Keep it up!

Appreciate it Alex, so glad you're finding the videos useful!

Appreciate it! obrigado a vc, John

So glad you found it useful David!

Ão is my favourite sound in Portuguese too! Andrew, your videos are a revelation. I can't thank you enough. So many clear, logical explanations. Absolutely amazing. Muito obrigada 🙏

the open/closed vowels is definitely a huge challenge for any Portuguese learners since it isn't always obvious from the spelling!

Glad you found it useful!

awesome! yes, I recorded this a year ago and have definitely learned from that since then...if you watch my latest video you'll see that I say everything twice :)

Glad it was helpful!

glad you found it helpful!

obrigado!

obrigado!!

Great to have you here!! Maybe I can find a way to fit parts of that song in a lesson, we'll see! :)

Have you seen my video about the FSI course? It's a good course for what it is (especially since it's free), but you have to keep in mind that it was produced in the 1970's for US diplomats so you will learn some outdated/useless language. It is pretty much all Brazilian voices in the recordings, but it can be confusing because they all have very different accents (would've been better if they just stuck to one accent IMO). You can tell they try to be sort of a middle ground between Brazilian and European, but it's definitely much more Brazilian-influenced. People have asked me about creating a course, which I'm a little too busy to work on at the moment, but if and when I do, it will incorporate a lot of the elements and drills in the FSI program and completely modernize it to teach contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the spoken language. So I do believe in the methodology, it's just that the material is outdated.

@@DecodingWordswithAndrew Thank you for your insight, Andrew. And I'm sorry - I should have checked if you had made a video about the course. I guess I'll take the course, but I'll only focus on the pronunciation, not the language/expressions themselves. Wish you all the best!

@@mateuszpatua3016 100%

@@mateuszpatua3016 Definitely still a useful resource....you can learn about the many differences between standard textbook language vs the modern street language by watching my videos :)

Most textbooks will just break down the alphabet letter by letter and teach you a bunch of pronunciation rules, which I think is a horrible way of approaching it--if you turn pronunciation too much into an intellectual exercise, you'll never develop the automaticity to actually use it in a conversation. Just go through the exercises in my pronunciation videos until you know it like the back of your hand, because it forms the basis for everything else in the language. What you can do to really supercharge your learning is to transcribe the words in the video. Without looking at the screen, try to write out the word that you hear me say in the video. Then pause the video, and check to see if you got the spelling correct. Do that for all the words in the videos, learning from your mistakes with each word you write down. From there, you can start transcribing simple sentences (I personally would use my Anderson Silva and Neymar videos since they speak really clearly) and then gradually move on to transcribing longer clips of audio. This isn't sexy, but it's one of the most effective ways of developing your listening...it'll quickly reveal any gaps in your abilities. I'm going to make a video about this, but I swear by it and I've used it to learn several languages.

Obrigado mermão! Eu realmente precisa ajudar, mal posso esperar ver!

you'll see a lot of bossa nova references in my videos...this is an area I will definitely be exploring more in the future