I love Portuguese.  I love the language, I love understanding it, and I love that I speak it.  It’s a very musical sounding language.  Lots of soft sounds–none of the guttural grunting of, say, German.  The right voice can make every sentence into a little poem.  There are things you can say in Portuguese that you can’t say in English–or at least, not as easily, or with exactly the same connotations.

That said, one of the drawbacks of learning a second language–one that few people seem to mention–is that your knowledge of your first language can, apparently, deteriorate.

I used to be an awesome speller.  I would look at other people’s writing and misspelled words would jump out at me.  Now, I swear, I find myself misspelling atrociously (took me 3 tries to get that one) in English.

Portuguese does not use very many double letters.  No “tt” no “ll.”  Very little “ss” or “rr.”  The spelling rules are completely different.  So when writing in English, I often find myself either not using double consonants where I should or trying too hard and putting them in when I shouldn’t.

So while misspellings are still a peeve of mine, I actually have less idea of when I’m spelling correctly.  It’s disconcerting.

I guess I could be relieved that all the horrible spelling on the internet doesn’t jump out at me the way it once did.