17 Comments
The pronunciation is a problem, because if you want to speak portuguese rather than just read it, you don't know whether to mimic the robot or not. There could soon be an army of duolinguists out there speaking Portuguese that can only be understood by other duolinguists. Or robots.
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The words are "tripping" over each other again. It is difficult to tell what the first two or three words are.
I don't like these computer recordings either, but it is correct in this case. The article "a" and the first "a" in "aranha" should not be pronounced separately. It should, and does, sound like one "a" pronounced for a bit longer than normal.
It's more than that, it sounds like a couple of robotic tones. I couldn't understand it even after doing fast and slow repeat 10 times. Meanwhile they got a real human to record "obrigado," so...
I have noticed with certain words that the sounds run together, at least according to the audios...for example, "uma maca" (I don't have the accents on my keyboard) always sounds like mah-muh-suh...and "eu nao tenho um cavalo" always sounds likes eu no ten-uhm cavalo...are there certain rules for this?
Try to join the words, the vocals. It helps a lot.
1) 'Tenho um' = 'tenhoum' 2) 'Uma maca' ='...mamaca'
I love this program, but wow, I'm really struggling with understanding the Portuguese pronunciation.
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Try Bing or Google Translate. Copy the sentence there and listen to the (differences in) pronunciation. That gives you another tack, and you can also spot when DuoLingo is wrong. Which happens. Of course, you cannot do this in the "listening exercises," but you get the idea.
I wish the pronunciation of all the words in this program were more clear. Learning a new language requires you to know how to pronounce the words, otherwise how will a native speaker understand you? They should fix these pronunciation problems.
I'm struggling a little with the pronunciation of -nh in Portuguese. In some words, like "aranha" here, it's pronounced as an ñ, but in other words, like vinho, it's pronounced as an n. Is there a rule for this?
Stick to the ñ sound in Spanish. They're pretty much similar.
Here's how I was taught to pronounce it, to kind of make an N sound then roll your tongue back, but don't let it touch the top of your mouth. It takes some practice. Portuguese definitely works the mouth more than English does.
I understand it now, but thanks :) I'm fine with the pronunciation, but the Duolingo bot pronunciation threw me off a little.
