Why you feel silly
At first, you are going to feel silly mimicking Portuguese sounds. Perhaps more so than you would mimicking other foreign languages. The root of this discomfort lies in the nasal vowels. Every language has its own group of sounds that will feel strange to you, but the Portuguese nasal vowels will feel particularly strange to you at first. But why?
The reason might not be politically correct, but it's the truth: English speakers feel silly mimicking Portuguese nasal vowels because we associate nasal speech with the hearing impaired and mentally challenged.
Both groups of people are characterized by their failure to flex the velar muscle and direct all the airflow out of their mouth for English speech.
Hearing-impaired people do this because they cannot hear the difference (also, they can physically feel more vibration for nasal speech, and since they can't hear what they are saying well, this vibration is re-assuring). Mentally challenged people do it because they lack the mental capacity to perceive or care about the difference. Remember, nasal vowels are sort of the "default" sound you get when you just leave your velum relaxed.
In other words, the only reason you would learn to flex this muscle is because you mimicked the people around you, who were speaking primarily with oral vowels.
The reason might not be politically correct, but it's the truth: English speakers feel silly mimicking Portuguese nasal vowels because we associate nasal speech with the hearing impaired and mentally challenged.
Both groups of people are characterized by their failure to flex the velar muscle and direct all the airflow out of their mouth for English speech.
Hearing-impaired people do this because they cannot hear the difference (also, they can physically feel more vibration for nasal speech, and since they can't hear what they are saying well, this vibration is re-assuring). Mentally challenged people do it because they lack the mental capacity to perceive or care about the difference. Remember, nasal vowels are sort of the "default" sound you get when you just leave your velum relaxed.
In other words, the only reason you would learn to flex this muscle is because you mimicked the people around you, who were speaking primarily with oral vowels.
Why You Should Feel Silly for Feeling Silly
You learned to speak with only oral vowels because you learned language by mimicking the people around you. So to you and your fellow English speakers, anything that is NOT English-sounding sounds strange.
Languages are completely arbitrary. There's no intrinsic silliness factor of nasal vowels, nor is there an intrinsic non-silliness factor of oral vowels.
If you were born in Brazil, the nasal vowels would sound completely natural to you. If you were Brazilian and you hear a foreigner speaking with no nasal vowels THAT would sound silly to you as a Brazilian.
So the same way you think "that sounds strange," whenever you hear an plenty of nasal vowels, Brazilians think "that sounds strange" whenever they hear an absence of nasal vowels.
When you're doing these drills and developing the nasal control that is needed to master Portuguese flow and you feel silly because your are making sounds that remind you of handicapped people (in your own English context), you need to ask yourself a very important question:
Would I rather feel silly to myself doing Nasal Bootcamp in privacy of my own room for two weeks, or would I rather sound silly to thousands of Portuguese speakers by speaking with a poor accent in front of them for the rest of my life?
If you can't get over the initial "silliness" of Portuguese, then you won't be able to master the Flow of Portuguese or learn Portuguese through mimicry. So reflect on any English-speaker biases you might have and get them out of the way now so that you can get the most out of this course.
Languages are completely arbitrary. There's no intrinsic silliness factor of nasal vowels, nor is there an intrinsic non-silliness factor of oral vowels.
If you were born in Brazil, the nasal vowels would sound completely natural to you. If you were Brazilian and you hear a foreigner speaking with no nasal vowels THAT would sound silly to you as a Brazilian.
So the same way you think "that sounds strange," whenever you hear an plenty of nasal vowels, Brazilians think "that sounds strange" whenever they hear an absence of nasal vowels.
When you're doing these drills and developing the nasal control that is needed to master Portuguese flow and you feel silly because your are making sounds that remind you of handicapped people (in your own English context), you need to ask yourself a very important question:
Would I rather feel silly to myself doing Nasal Bootcamp in privacy of my own room for two weeks, or would I rather sound silly to thousands of Portuguese speakers by speaking with a poor accent in front of them for the rest of my life?
If you can't get over the initial "silliness" of Portuguese, then you won't be able to master the Flow of Portuguese or learn Portuguese through mimicry. So reflect on any English-speaker biases you might have and get them out of the way now so that you can get the most out of this course.
Two Less "Silly" Drills
Part of the silliness you feel doing the Nasal Bootcamps drills lies in the fact that you are not saying any real words. So I have two drills that I like to use to help you bring Nasal Control into real Portuguese practice. The Portuguese word for "saint" is nasal. The two drills below are repeating the names of St. Paul and Saint Salvador.
Once you are comfortable with the material on this page, you may move on to the next - Submission Page.