Brazilian Portuguese

I spent 6 weeks or so before coming down here studying Portuguese. By studying, I mean I listened to lessons on podcasts for a 20 minutes a day a few days a week when I had time. But those lessons gave me a basic understanding of the pronunciation, and coupled with the fact that I speak Spanish pretty well for a gringo, enable me to get around pretty well since much of the vocab in Spanish and Portuguese is the same. I do not have any trouble communicating what I want to people here, using the Portuguese I know and defaulting to Spanish when I do not know (the people understand Spanish pretty well). The trouble is understanding what they come back to me with. When the r´s are pronounced like h´s (sometimes), the d´s like j´s, the t´s like ch´s (sometimes), m´s on the end of words are not pronounced at all really, but cause you to elongate the preceding vowel with a nasally noise, and the j´s like zhay, it can get tough sometimes. Buying a plane ticket at a travel agency on the airline Webjet, I was a little confused when the young lady, while presumably referring to my flight, said something to the effect of vabe ZHAY shay. After I asked her to repeat herself a couple of times I finally figured out she was saying Webjet. Do not get me wrong, the language sounds fantastic (especially when spoken with that kind of flair from a young woman), but the richness of sound does not make for easy comprehension or imitation. And no, even the travel agency people do not always speak English. You can find some English around, but not a lot. Brazilian schools seem to do about as well at actually teaching students to communicate in foreign languages as schools in the US do.