It is hard top know where to start, Portuguese is so similar to Spanish that it is quite easy to learn. On the other hand almost every word has a little trap in meaning, spelling or pronunciation that makes it different. Sometimes a word has all three differences. There are quite a few words in both languages that are not shared at all.

Brazilian pronunciation is quite different from Portuguese Portuguese and several people have told me that they do not understand much when a Portuguese person talks. The reverse is not true, there is a lot of Brazilian culture in Portugal, mainly cinema and TV and so they are used to the accents of their former colony. It is much the same but less extreme with American and British English. When I get stuck here I talk in Spanish with varying degrees of success.

Flavia’s friends and family mostly speak at least fairly good English – I am not sure that it is a good thing for me to expect them to speak it much.

Flavia´s daughter Jana

Outside of the professional and educated classes very little English is spoken and they tend to look a bit blank when I try my European style Spanish with an English accent.

My studies were going quite well until Flavia arrived in Europe in late April. Since then there has not been much time for reading or the iPod lessons – and I have been a bit lazy. I had hoped to find a Portuguese class for foreigners here but there do not appear to be any. There are few foreigners here and they are mostly working for multi-national organisations who have their own in-house training. There are individual tutors but that is a very expensive way of learning a language. I need to find someone learning English and spend an hour or two helping each other a couple of mornings each week.

I can get the gist of most conversations, read a newspaper and understand a lot of TV programs like news broadcasts and documentaries. I am totally lost with soap operas, jokes, slang, complicated language structures and different accents. It is getting a bit easier each day. I am not talking much yet.

The victim will be my Spanish. I don’t think that I will be able to speak both languages and the two will slowly merge and I will talk something called Portañol in both countries. The important thing is to be able to communicate.

Brazilian Portuguese can sound very strange to an English speaker. Take my name: like the Spanish they do not start a word with a ST sound so it is Esteve. Except that most of their T sounds are pronounced TCH so now it is Estcheve. But they do not end a word with a V so finally my name is Estchevey.  Welcome to the Internetch. The Formula 1 racing driver Emerson Fittipaldi sounds much less glamorous when he is called Fitchipaldgi.