Estou aprendendo Português!

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I love learning languages and know a smattering of French, Spanish, and Latin (with a handful of Russian words thrown in, just to break the Romance language monopoly...)

My husband is fluent in Portuguese and loves the language. I asked him to teach our future children Portuguese because I thinks it's a priceless gift you can give your children -teaching them a language when they're young and soak it up like a sponge. (They may choose to ignore him, but hey, at least we're giving them the opportunity, right?)

But I'd like to know what they're talking about too and I just love learning languages.

Then I thought, Sweet! I've got a dedicated and eager live-in language tutor!

I did pretty well learning Spanish by just listening to my co-workers several years ago so I'm trying to replicate that. I need some context, though, in which to place the words so we're reading the scriptures together in Portuguese and English.

I first read a few verses in English and then he reads those same verses in Portuguese. I'm starting to get random Portuguese words stuck in my head, which I see as a good sign. Because if I can get my tongue used to saying them then I can eventually put them together to make sentences. And I'm starting to remember words ending in "m" actually make a "ng" sound, like "bem" (good) sounds like "beng". Or that most words ending in an "o" make a "u" sounds.

What I find fascinating is the plethora of Latin cognates. I'm often able to understand Kevin (if I have a context) due mainly to cognates in French, Spanish, or English.

English is Germanic, but over the centuries we adopted many French words (mostly starting in 1066 AD thanks to William the Conquerer), which is why we often have two words for the same thing- like beef and cow.

For example morte is "death" in Portuguese. An English word with a similar root and meaning is mortality. So it helps me catalog and remember or understand new words.

I'm expecting this to be very slow and arduous, but hey, any word or words I learn is better than nothing!