New language frontier

Left behind most of the warm clothes I bought in Quito, and arrived in Rio last night. Trying to adjust to the much higher cost of living and new language here. Feels like I've jumped in the deep end and now need to learn to swim. I'm buying a little time by staying at a hostel where some of the other guests speak English and some speak Spanish. There's a group here from the south who's filming a music video this week and others from all over the world and we're having fun trying to teach each other our languages.

This is the first time I've been around Portuguese and thought it would be easier to understand from the similar spelling of many words in Spanish, but the pronunciation is very different - r's pronounced like h, d's like j, t's like sh, g's like the French j, etc. Surprisingly for me, I've heard that in Rio there may be more people who speak some English than Spanish. Still not many speak either.

written by

cjones on April 12, 2008 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

from the travel blog: so-journ

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