À proposito… (By the way,)
Aconteça o que acontecer… (Whatever happens,)
De qualquer forma… (In any case,)
Using short connecting phrases like these really goes a long way towards enriching your speech by connecting one thought to the next and giving it that native-like flow… At the very least, they’re good for dropping in and buying you time while you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to say next.
Well now here’s an interesting site that lists about a billion of these little phrases:
I already know many of these, but I probably don’t use them as often as I could. Others are completely new to me, like the very useful-sounding afora (“except for”). But aii, there’s so many of them! So how to get in the habit of using them? I suppose I could pick two or three of them each week and try to work them into my conversations, my weekly lessons and my writing. Or I could give myself an assignment to write some kind of persuasive speech or technical presentation, where I could use a bunch of them at once. De qualquer forma, I’m going to try to use a whole lot more of these in the future.
