Did my first speaking exercise on livemocha for a while and scored 5*. There are still a few errors with my pronunciation such as pronouncing 'lh' as 'i' and not saying 'rr' correctly, but apart from that everything seemed okay. It was a nice little confiance booster and makes me want to keep on studying Portuguese even more. Yet again, I still have a lot of work to do to diminish my accent but that will come with time and lots of practice both speaking and imitation through extensive listening. Speaking of listening, I was listening to a nice song the other day when I found the phrase 'lobo em pele de cordeiro' which is the first idiom I studied whilst looking at animal vocabulary last week. It was nice to see a phrase which I thought would be useless until I have a much higher level of Portuguese being used in some context only a week after studying it.
I also studied the present subjuctive in Portuguese today which, to my delight, is the same as the imperative tense which I learnt two or so weeks ago. It was a nice surprise because whilst learning French two years back, there was always such a big fuss over the subjuctive tense and how to use it and even how to completely avoid it. Now I'm starting to wonder what the big deal was. Sure, it's rarely used in English but there are set conditions and set phrases after which it should be used [when expressing doubt, uncertainty, probablity etc] which in my opinion makes it quite easy to deal with. If I see someone who wants to try to avoid it in the future, I would tell them to at least be able to recognise it because, like it or not, it is a part of the language.
Update 22:37
Just finished unit 19 of FSI Portuguese. It was much more interesting than other lessons because it was much more informal with sentences such as 'O que há com o professor' [What is it with the teacher/What's up with the teacher] and 'é mesmo?' [Is it really?]. Apart from teaching some informal sentence constructions, it mainly focused on the present progressive tense [the tense that ends in -ing in English] which was nice revision. It also taught a few good pronunciation pointers such as the final vowel before the -ndo in the progress tense [falando, saindo, fazendo] is nazalised. Not only this but the 'm' in 'com o professor' [with the teacher] shouldn't be pronounced otherwise it sounds like 'como o professor' [like the teacher]. Anyway, it was a nice change compared to the previous boringly repetitive lessons and I hope the next lesson like this one.
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