It's a bit hard to explain a sound through text, particuarly if you can't read IPA. So have you never heard someone speak Portuguese, or just never identified that sound as the tilde'd vowel? If you've ever seen Love Actually or listened to any good Brasilero music (Jobim, for example), you can hear the sound. There's a good, understandable description of nasalized vowel sounds here (http://www.garretwilson.com/education/languages/hindi/devanagari/lesson5/candrabindu.html) (though it's for a different language, the concept of nasalization is the same -- check out the third paragraph).
If pressed, I could tell spoken Portugese from spoken Spanish, but what kind of Portugese or Spanish would be beyond me. And I sold my Getz/Gilberto CD cuz I was broke. Gah.
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Aye lassie, tis a frightening prospect, that.
</shudders>
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;-)
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Does that help at all?
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