Yes, I am becoming fluent in Portuguese, so it’s time to apply that one simple trick that everyone should do when they are learning a language: turning the phone into Portuguese.
Time to talk about politics
The proficiency of a language is measured on the complexity of the structures one can use and the amount of vocabulary he can use.
Once one’s vocabulary is rich enough and they know the syntax and grammar well enough, it’s about fluency and complexity of topics.
Thus, once our level of proficiency in a language increases, we should move to more diversified and complex topics.
If we don’t, our language proficiency will fossilize around a miserable B1 and maximum B1/B2 level. This is typical of those who speak an Erasmus English, that is an English that nobody cares to speak correctly.
Once a language is fossilized, it becomes hard to correct the mistakes and those uncorrected mistakes will give life to new mistakes and the decadence of the proficiency of a language will accelerate.
In our case, we are trying to conquer a whole new language in one month. That’s why we have to move to a faster pace every single day.
For this reason, after merely two weeks, I am already listening to political debates in Portuguese.
Obviously I wouldn’t dare accelerating that much, had I not improved fast enough. Since my progression is advancing smoothly, I must be as audacious as possible and never hesitate to shift to the next gear.
European Portuguese phonology
Apparently, there’s a very strong vowel reduction process in European Portuguese. That leads to the fusion of syllables that are glued together through the phonological phenomenon of voicing assimilation.
Also, from what I can hear, palatalization is weaker than in Brazilian Portuguese, which makes it sound a lot harsher.
Affricates are very present, due to the vowel reduction that creates more complex consonant groups.
There could be a process of final devoicing that cuts all ending vowel sounds and devoices all voiced consonants that have a devoiced counterpart. (To better understand this, check this other post)
examples
t(e)rritorio – /tʁitorju/
tod(o)s – /tot͡ʃ/
estados unid(o)s – /estadsunit͡ʃ/
candidat(o)s – /kɐndidat͡ʃ/
o mesmo temp(o) – /umizmutemp/
P(or)tugal – /ptugaɫ/
I did the phonetic transcription according to this study of European Portuguese by Cruz-Ferreira (1995). I am not yet sure of how I should transcribe the ending vowel written as <o> and pronounced more like a /u/ sound though.
Reading
Paulo Coelho. How could he possibly become so famous? No effort in the construction of his characters, no effort in the plot, no effort in anything, everything in his book is shallow. And I can perceive it without even being fully proficient in Portuguese.
The time is ripe to move to a real writer’s work, Fernando Pessoa.
On this site, you can find plenty of information about him and his books and even one of his poems read out loud. You can even download some of his books pdf for free!
Today I started reading “O banqueiro anarquista” which is more of a dialogue rather than a novel, but still more interesting to read than “O alquimista” which was starting to become a torture to me.
The more you understand a language, your native language included, the more you become demanding.
I got to half of it, I should finish it in two days maximum, spending some time to memorize new and useful vocabulary.
Grammar rules
I am still listening to that playlist of the channel Speaking Brazilian Portuguese that I shared on my previous post.
I could skip a few videos in order to give priority to those rules for which I feel a more immediate need. It’s not over yet, but those videos really are helpful and they gave me more confidence about the verb conjugations.
That should be all for the moment, though my exercises for the day aren’t over yet!
I will keep you up to date as soon as I can. Until then, so long!