The second day is a particular day. You haven’t built any routine yet, but you just felt the start of something new. And you might like this something new, or you might regret it. So how do you feel today? Have you still got the motivation from yesterday?
When I woke up this morning, my brain was sending me a few Portuguese words creating a morning melody that motivated me to wake up early to begin my daily learning. Such enthusiasm can be interpreted as my brain telling me he enjoys the challenge and wants more. So, without waiting any further, I let the light come into my room through the window and let the infinite submerge me.
But how can we start learning before even being woken up?
For the beginning of the journey, when our level is still not good enough, there is an exercise I like to do and I hope you’ll understand its usefulness.
Before we even try to learn the vocabulary, we should start by becoming acquainted with the melody of the language, so here’s why today, while doing my morning routine, I connected my phone to the bluetooth speaker and put on a video of a guy speaking Portuguese. I used the only Portuguese words I could think of that would lead me to a not too interesting video: “Presentaçao Portugal” and I bumped into a guy making a stand up presentation in a forum. I hadn’t even read the title, I saw it lasted 34 minutes and I thought it was the perfect duration and since it was a monologue, the speech flow would sound natural enough but also clear, the opposite of dialogues, where speakers tend to speak more naturally but in a less articulated way. The goal was not to understand but to focus on the language’s melody and rythm, because a language you can’t understand, is like a song without lyrics and it is important to learn how to listen to this kind of music, just like you have to train your ear in order to start appreciating symphonies or the raw sounds of black metal.
I was surprised about how many words I could recognise though. This exercise not only let me familiarise with the language, it also made me discover a few phonological transformation patterns that made me unlock a lot of new vocabulary, here’s what I discovered:
The word organisaçao
Everything that in Latin had the suffix -tio (pronounced /tsjo/), transformed into the suffix -tion in English and French and into the suffix -zione in Italian and -ción in Spanish. For Portuguese this suffix transformed into -çao, where the diphtong (the <ao> part, composed of two vowels pronounced together) is nasalised – which simply means that when you pronounce those two letters, the airflow should come mostly out of your nose and not just from your mouth. This means that I can easily guess the Portuguese version of every word I know from any of the aforementioned languages that bears that suffix. There could be exceptions, but this works for languages like Russian too where it becomes -циа /t͡sjɐ/.
The word economia
This basically is the same as Italian and Spanish. In French it becomes -ie (pronounced /i/), in English it becomes -y (pronounced /ɪ/) and in Russian -ия /ijɐ/. This unlocks many technical words like maybe philosophia, ecologia and historia (though this doesn’t work for French, since it became histoire; there are exceptions, but this technique is so useful that even if it might not work at times, it’s still worth learning this way and correcting the few exceptions you will find.
The word muito
This is like <molto> in Italian, where not only the /o/ shifted to /u/, but also the /l/ sound, pronounced before /t/, which is a plosive consonant, transforms into a short /i/. This will help us recognise other new words.
The /s/ and /t/
I could notice that, when pronounced at the end of the word, the sound /s/ is pronounced /ʃ/; this also occurs when the /s/ is pronounced right before a /t/, which means that probably dental plosive tend to transform the consonants preceding them, just like we saw with the example of <muito>. In the end of a word, the sound /t/ is pronounced with the tongue pressed against the palate which makes a softer sound /t͡ʃ/. Knowing this, we will be able to improve our pronunciation and make ourselves more understandable right from the start.
The numbers
Damn, they really sounded familiar. I could understand all numbers easily. After the challenge of Japanese, where my brain had to do the math every single time it would hear a number with more than one figure without getting lost, this is like childplay. Pronouncing them fluently might take a bit longer, but still, that’s nothing to worry about.
Issa e uma…
This phrase helps us understand that the demonstrative pronoun is <issa> when it’s feminine, isso when it’s masculine, I guess. We can already see the third person singular of the verb to be as well and the indefinite article <uma> in the feminine form. I also spotted the sentence “trabalhar poco e uma cosa positiva” which not only shows that the word for work has the same root as the French <travailler>, but also how similar the sentence structure it is to the other Latin languages. The word <cosa> (thing) is also a very useful word, because it is so vague that you can pour it in any conversation as soon as you don’t have anything more specific to offer. It’s like a lifesaver. I also know how to form sentences with the verb to be to say that one thing is another thing, and the word order is simple: x + verb to be + indefinite article + thing + adjective. Moreover, <positiva> is the same as Italian and Spanish and almost the same as French and English – the latter languages tend to cut the reduce the ending vowel sound, whereas the former prefer to keep it.
E minha culpa
Here we find the verb to be again, followed by what I can guess to be the possessive pronoun and then the noun <culpa> which, once again shows that what is /o/ in Italian, it might be /u/ in Portuguese, since the Italian counterpart for it is <colpa>. I can also guess that the possessive pronoun is in its feminine form and it might take a -o ending to form the masculine form. We’ll verify this too in due time.
Na minha vida profissional
Here we can learn how to mention the place where something happens, with the preposition <na>, which shares the nasal sound that we can find in the locative complement of many other languages. What we can notice is that adjectives ending in -al also work the same way as the other latin languages, but for some reason it seems that the ending could be the same for the masculine form.
Bear in mind that I still haven’t started reading any rules. That’s because it is always better to find the answer yourself, rather than having someone give them to you in a ready-to-use fashion, for the simple reason that what you learn with the effort, will eventually require less effort remembering it, because you will have created solid links between the different notions you are gathering and the day you will compare your discoveries with the official grammar rules, you will be able to easily correct them, because you will know what the grey spots in your knowledge are. It’s an investment. Also, there is nothing funnier – at least for a linguist – than to try and discover the solution to the enigma of an unknown language and I want to enjoy this journey as much as I can.
It’s now the evening and before I declare this learning day over, I will take some time to look at the conjugation of the verb to be and to have in the present tense. This should enable me to start forming sentences and I will be able to create my first sentences in my head while in bed before sleeping. It’s going to be the first grammar point I will check and I might have to make a few corrections.
The most important verbs: to be and to have
In order to check this rule, we can use the site reverso, that lets us easily check the conjugation of all verbs in many languages.
ser
eu sou
tu/você és
ele/ela é
nós somos
vós/vocês sois
eles/elas sao
ter
eu tenho
tu/você tens
ele/ela tem
nós temos
vós/vocês tendes
eles/elas têm
Ok, it is quite weird as to how the pronouns are shown, as the sites I have consulted don’t seem to agree on the pronouns. I’ll have to investigate this more tomorrow.
We have enough knowledge for today. Don’t worry if the practice is lacking, here it’s important to not overdo, or else your brain might not like it. The goal is to integrate the concepts and sounds slowly but surely. Consolidation is key and in order to consolidate what you learn, it’s important that you don’t flood yourself with information, but rather save the little you have by recollecting it in your memory and building sentences in your head or on paper by using all the words you can, even those words that you “unlocked” by discovering how different suffixes are transposed into Portuguese.
That’s all for day 2. Keep it up and see you tomorrow!