Today I also started my day by listening to a video on my way to my favourite café where I like to get my inspiration. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy the silent music of a fresh summer morning with my headset on, but when you want to learn a language, you have to make sacrifices sometimes.
This time, the video was shorter, it was a dialogue and it is from a channel meant to help people learn Brazilian Portuguese. That’s the best I could find in the rush. Though it had both Portuguese and English subtitles, I haven’t read them. When we do this exercise, which is about focusing on the sounds of language, we shouldn’t try to understand, but simply grasp the sounds.
It comes a point where our level becomes too advanced to be able to do this exercise correctly, for the simple fact that we start understanding too many words. For languages that differ a lot from our native language, reaching this level takes a long time. But for Portuguese, it went way faster than I had expected: the video I had played yesterday, I played it once more and could notice I started understanding the overall meaning of the speech and understand a lot of sentences. This morning’s video gave me no trouble understanding the overall meaning and I could actually follow the whole dialogue without any problem. Though the video was an easy one, I think it’s a good result for such a small amount of work. Since day 2 gave me so much, I am eager to see what day 3 is giving me.
When we do the exercise of listening without paying attention, we should always conclude it with a recollection exercise, trying to see how many things we managed to seize from the video and save them in our brain so that they can come in handy when we’ll be needing them in a real life conversation, but we can’t just say “I remember this”/”I noticed that”, we should also write it down, so that the effort becomes official in the eyes of our brain.
Here’s what I can recollect from the video:
Natureza
What the… Why would they put the -eza ending? Does it really mean <nature> or does it mean something else? Nature, natura, but in Portugal they say <natureza>? And what would the adjective be like? naturezal or – going back to the main path – natural?
Todo mundo
Quite straightforward. The difficult part for me will be not to mix the pronunciation with Spanish, where <d> is pronounced /ð/ (which sounds like the <th> sound in <the>). In Portuguese, <d> is pronounced /d/, just like in Italian. The same goes for <b>, which is pronounced like the Italian <b> and not like the Spanish <b>.
Querer
Just like in Spanish, Portuguese also use this word to say want and it works the same way.
Porque
Very simple, it means <because>, just like in Spanish. And maybe, it also means <why>. It wouldn’t surprise me, not all languages make a distinction between <why> and <because>.
Viajar
Written just like Spanish, pronounced a little more like Italian, except for the fact that the <j> is pronounced /ʒ/, like the <g> in <genre>, it means <to travel>.
Bate-papo
This funny word is in the title of the video and apparently it means <conversation>. It reminds me of an Italian word <battibecco> which means <argument>.
Now, my memory is still weak, so I can’t recall much more than that. What we can do now is to watch the video (and not just listening to it), this time paying attention to the subtitles and try to learn as many words as possible. If possible, try to repeat the sentences, mimicing what the speakers do, not just with their voices, but also with their mouth muscles.
The advantage of this video is that it shows many country names, which are words that tend to be similar in every language – at least most of the time – and this gives us a chance to discover other transformation patterns.
One thing I realise, is that it’s not <cosa> but <coisa>, there’s a diphtongue appearing there, right before the <s>.
Collecting the words
Now that we have managed to gather some knowledge, we can “officialise” it by writing it down in a google sheets file. But in order to do this, no dictionary and no translator allowed. We should only write down what we can recollect with our own strength. If you are more of an excel type, feel free to use that, and if you have any other preference, just stick to that. If I choose Google sheets it’s because it lets me modify it whenever I need to, even from my phone, so that I can write it down even when I am commuting to work. If you want to know more about this technique, check this other post (coming soon)
Free writing
We are now going to do an exercise: we are going to write our first paragraph in Portuguese. Don’t be scared, nobody is going to judge us (except for our future selves). Once again, no dictionary and no translator allowed, we are only allowed to use what already lies in our brain. If we feel there are words we might need, write them down and we will be allowed to look them up.
I’ll put here my first attempt for you to witness how bad even a linguist can be before he becomes fluent. If a Portuguese speaker is reading this, he can laugh at my mistakes, because I won’t erase them. They might enjoy a moment of laughter, but I think it is a fairly cheap price to pay in order to become fluent in a new language.
Bom dia pessoal! Eu sou Sasha, um linguista. Posso falar italiano, ingles, frances, ruso, alemanho, japones y espanhol. Quero falar portugues tam ben, porque vou ir para os Açores. Me gosta viajar, lir y escribir.
As you can see, most of the words were improvised from Spanish and I will have to check them later, but it is of utmost importance to not look for the answer immediately because that would spoil my brain. It has to know that it won’t have an answer fast enough, so that it will make an effort to remember words in the future. This is called making a short-term sacrifice in order to gain a long-term reward. Also, being able to accept that we are not perfect and that we can make mistake is a very important skill, without which we can’t learn anything unless we receive compliments, and not all beginners receive compliments.
Tomorrow we will correct the free writing exercise by looking up all the words we need.
See you tomorrow!