I bought the lifetime subscription and am taking the Portuguese (Portugal) course. Just started it. My hearing is not that great, and I’m having difficulty with the pronunciation of words. For example:
" saúde!" sounds like “sah-wu-zee” when the guy in the video is saying it, but sounds like “sah-wood-dee” when I click the speaker icon. The speaker icon sounds closer to the spelling. Anyone else having this difficulty? Which one do you believe? Are the both right? How do you handle these differences.
A more extreme example is in " até logo". Sometimes people on the videos say “ah-teh-lohg” and others say “teh loh”. Very confusing! I would really appreciate answers from both native Portuguese (Portugal) speakers and from learners who have advanced to higher stages in the Memrise course. How do I resolve these differences? Or do I just accept and memorize all the various pronunciations?
This is just normal dialectal variation. I would recommend looking up and researching a particular dialect/accent, for example, that from Lisbon, and get familiarised with the individual sounds and the way they interact in that dialect/accent.
It would be useful to memrorise various pronunciations so that you can get used to hearing the difference which will help you understand when you do hear those various pronunciations.
The reason for which you hear até logo being pronounced as a-te-log etc. is because in Portuguese unstressed syllables change pronunciation, become reduced, or just get deleted all together. This is the reason até is at times just te or logo can at times be pronounced as logu or log.
Once you start memorising other accents, you’ll be able to identify what sounds the accent you’ve learnt has compared to the sounds the other accent shave, which will help you recognise and understand people better.