Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at lea

Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners. I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans. Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.