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If you learned French and Italian, your pronunciation should be pretty decent for Portuguese.

That is a very hard language to speak. I can read it and understand it just fine - but speaking it, no way.

Looking at the English language - it’s probably one of the easiest languages to learn and understand. There’s no gender in the articles we use and the tenses are not that confusing.

If you go into Europe, it’s actually better to ask somebody “Parlez vous Anglais?” or “Sprechen sie Englische?”, then try to use the native language, unless you’re fluent. I got the impression, when I was over their, that my attempts to speak native were irritating to them. They would simply respond in English.

The pronunciation of the ão sound was the toughest for me. The nasalized m at the end of a word, like ordem, was a close second. The unstressed o sounding like u was easy, because it’s the same in Sicilian.

Problem with English is the verb conjugations just suck. Yeah, there’s not many different endings, but that’s the problem. If you don’t use the pronoun, you don’t know what conjugation it is, let alone the tense. And there’s almost no subjunctive, as it were (pun intended).

I do find myself annoyed when folks use the past definite in English to voice the subjunctive, but, for most English verbs, that’s all you’ve got.

In Brazil, it’s the Carioca dialect that throws me. I can even understand most Mineiros, but the Carioca is just too thick for me, e.g. “as maos” in Carioca is pronounced “ash maosh”

My most used expression in Brazil was, “Uma palavra por vez, por favor.”

Looking at the English language - it’s probably one of the easiest languages to learn and understand. There’s no gender in the articles we use and the tenses are not that confusing.

English is actually considered one of the harder languages to learn. Exceptions are the rule - there are so many exceptions to grammar and spelling rules, there's not much point in many English rules. English, especially American English, is chock full of idioms, colloquialisms, phrasal words (run is entirely different than run in, run over, run something by you, etc. Adding a proposition or adverb or auxiliary verb can change the meaning of the main verb.), and so on. English is Frankenstein monster: it's a hacked together dictionary with words from French, Germanic, Latin, and bits and pieces from a hundred other languages. So learning some words doesn't help with understanding others. Spellings/usages are often difficult, both "There, their, and they're", as well as dough, tough, and bough (doe, tuff, bow), or say bat the stick, bat the verb, bat the animal. Lots of words like these three above. Then slang, we have a lot more of it than most other countries. For spoken word, emphasis on different words can subtly change the meaning of a sentence. "WE did this" is different from "We did THIS". Not every language allows for that. Synonyms aren't always swappable. You can see or watch a movie, but you don't see TV, you watch it. And of course, as mentioned above, articles are pretty hard to grasp when your native language doesn't have them.