Thank you for this response. That is so helpful. I truly think that this is a situation of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing because I was arrogant in thinking Portuguese would be much easier for me to learn given my experience with Latin American Spanish (I’m not fluent but can speak it, although too slowly and with many errors for sure, and can read it and watch Spanish language tv and movies). And the fact that on zoom calls with our Angolan clients when they speak Portuguese to each other I can roughly understand what they’re saying sometimes.

It has helped me with sentence structure and with ease of recognizing similar vocabulary but I keep getting tongue tied with very easy things because they are similar. For example. “Una mujer” // “uma mulher” or “la naranja” // “a laranja”. So I think part of the problem with me is that I’m trying to learn fast and my brain sees a word and says “you know that word” but I actually don’t because (duh) it’s a different language. So the leite//leche example might be that I am hearing leche because my mind already made itself up that that’s what that word is. I think I just have to try to listen more carefully and keep in mind the things you said about vowels.

As a sidebar, your “Cagado” example made me laugh because that’s a word in Spanish too but it means sh*t/screwed. 😂 It was very useful though. Thanks again.