Eu Nao falo Portugues. Eu entendo um pouco de Portugues.

"I do not speak Portuguese. I understand a little Portuguese."

The title says it all. That is of course if you can read Portuguese. I'm slowly learning how to understand what everyone is saying. It feels like an uphill battle where I'm walking bare foot in 10 feet of snow, both ways for 10 miles. Or however our parents/grandparents did it.

It feels as I learn a little I forget half of it along the way.

It reminds me of an old Married With Children episode where Kelly (the dumb blonde daughter) tries to learn a bunch of stuff but every time she learned something new she forgot something old and easy, like her name or who her parents were.

It's of course not quite that bad, but I get things confused with other things like  garfo (fork) and garrafa (bottle). And there are words such as avô (grandpa ) and avó (grandma) where the only difference is the accent over the o and how it's pronounced.

Having o marido (the hubby) pronounce similar words for me doesn't help much. It sounds the same about 70% of the time. He's a good teacher, and he has almost no Portuguese accent when speaking English, but thanks to accents over letters (which are just about non-existent in good old lazy English) and weird lh sounds (I can only say them with a y sound, like the one in the word "yeah") and the rolling r sounds (there are 3 different ways to pronounce r's in Portuguese), it's difficult.

I think that taking half a year of Spanish in high school has helped AND hindered my learning. I still want to pronounce "Olá" as "Hola" (hello) and "adeus" as "adiós" (goodbye). But it helped me get a grasp on other words that are similar such as casa de banho vs cuarto de baño (bathroom) and the really important stuff such as cerveja vs cerveza (beer) and vinho vs vino (wine).

It's a learning curve that I think I'll get around eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, but I'm starting to think I'm going to swallow my tongue first.