Portuguese and Spanish

I am in Ilha Grande at the moment, but it is raining none stop now, so I have nothing better to do than sit in an Internet cafe and rant about something.

I decided to try to learn as much Portuguese as possible during my stay in Brazil, I started by buying some books : a phrase book, a pocket dictionary and the Alchemist in Portuguese. I found that reading the Alchemist in Portuguese was not that difficult, Portuguese is very similar to Spanish in writing, and the language Paulo Coelho uses in this book is very simple.

The differences between the spoken Spanish and Portuguese is much larger though, for starters the pronunciation is different , e.g. "gente" in Spanish is pronounced as "khenty", but in Brazilian Portuguese it is pronounced as "jentch", generally speaking Spanish pronouncement system is regular and quite simple, while the Portuguese system is much more complex. In addition to the pronunciation the melody of the speech is quite different between the two languages.

Though Spanish is one of the easiest language to pick up , still there are some difficulties for English speaker. One such issue is with the verb "to be" in English, which translates into two different verbs in Spanish, "ser" and "estar". Generally "ser" is for things that are permanent and estar is for things that tend to change (although there are many exceptions), e.g. "I am Wael" translates into "soy Wael" , while "I am here" translates into "estoy aqui". Another feature of the Spanish language is that in addition to the simple past tense, there is the imperfect past tense, generally used to describe actions in the past that are continuous. Now if you combine these two features, the verb "to be" in the past tense, you get four possible translations in Spanish, e.g. "it was" can translate into "fue", "era", "estuvo" or "estaba", depending on what you are describing, choosing the right one is by no means an easy task for a Spanish novice.