Piedmontese, First day impressions

Today is the first day of the 6 Week Challenge, and I've already used up my 1-hour allotment for the day.

I spent about a half an hour going through the first three lessons of the Nòste Rèis course. If these first three lessons are any indication, I'll get through the course very quickly. There are only 19 lessons and a couple of reading exercises at the end.

I then spent another half an hour going through some grammar notes, found on Libero's site.

Learning to read piemontèis will not be a problem. Speaking, however, is already proving to be a bit more challenging than I had expected. Since I'm coming at this from an Italian and Catalan frame of reference, some of the constructions are the opposite of what I'm used to. Take prepositions and how they are contracted, for example. The word for "di" (of) in piemontèis is ëd. When ëd follows a word ending in a vowel, it's contracted to 'd. So, for example, if I wanted to say "Do you also sing?", the colloquial way of saying it in piemontèis is It cante 'dcò ti?  It means I need to get used to eliding the words cante and 'dcò. My brain's not used to it. So I'll have to work on that. Even more unsettling is the same rule being applied to definite articles. For example, if I want to say "I'm going to get milk from the dairy vendor", it's I vado a pijé 'l làit dal marghé. These rules are simple enough to understand, to be sure. I just have to adjust my brain to accommodate them.

Other pronunciation problems I'm running into are the differences in the sounds for u and ù, and their different pronunciations (French influenced) depending on whether they follow an a, as well as o, which is pronounced like a u, unless it's an accented ò, when it's pronounced as an Italian "o". None of these sounds are difficult to produce in isolation, but if I string a sentence together that contains a combination of any or all of them, I get tripped up. For example: Un pò ‘d salada, doi chilo ‘d tomàtiche e dontrè limon (A little salad, two kilos of tomatoes and some lemons). I'm sure that with time, it'll become more natural, but right now I need to make a concerted effort to get good pronunciation.

I've been able to check my pronunciation by comparing it with what's on the Vivaldi site.

Overall, I'm having fun with this language, and I think I'll be able to get to a decent level of speaking within six weeks.