Jocelyne Rodriguez
Journal Entry 4
Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don't exist in English? Provide several phonetic transcriptions of important words.
There are sounds that in Portuguese that do not exist in English. Luckily, prior study of Romance languages has helped me with some of these sounds. For example Portuguese uses rolled ‘r’ sounds like the ones used in Spanish (e.g. the word for interesting: interesante- ĩteɾezˈɐ̃tʃi) along with ‘r’ sounds similar to the ones used in French (e.g. the word real (Brazilian currency) is pronounced ‘xiˈaw’) On the other hand, there are still many other sounds for which I have no background. The best example of this is the use of nasal sounds, which have been very challenging for me. Although French incorporates some nasal sounds in some words like ‘Printemps’ (spring), nasal sounds like the ones commonly used in Portuguese are not commonly used in any other Romance language. The word não (no), for example is pronounced ‘nˈɐ̃w̃’.
What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Have you identified resources and textbooks to promote your task-based objectives? Why or why not?
The grammatical structure of Portuguese is very similar to the grammatical structure used in Spanish which has really facilitated my understanding of structure by giving me a better starting point. Nonetheless, I have been completing exercises from a textbook called Pois não as well as using exercises from Babble to reenforce my study of Portuguese sentence structure.
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