Listening and Reading
Listening and reading in Portuguese was much easier than I thought it would be for many assignments. The listening assignments online were usually very clear and slow, so it was easy to understand. I think hearing several different people speak helped me understand how to pronounce things better. When we watched videos of locals speaking in class, there was always one woman who I could not understand. She had a different accent than the others and was very different from my professor and I had trouble understanding a word she was saying. I think it would be interesting to travel to Portuguese speaking countries to see how well I understand people. I know that people speaking Brazilian Portuguese slowly would be the easiest. I would have to try a lot harder to understand European Portuguese, for example, because I really never practiced with that. What is nice to know, though, is that I can read fairly well. Knowing another romance language, Portuguese is pretty easy to read because you can ignore the accent differences and just look at the words that are similar. If I traveled to Portugal, for example, I think I would try to read as much as possible to get by.