When things get complicated
The hardest part of learning a new language is that, no matter how smart you are, you’ll always end up on low-quality resources. High-quality content requires a mastery of the language that we don’t have yet.
We have to learn to accept this low-quality content as something that opens us up to a new world even if we are not necessarily fond of it. When we learn a new language, we are going back to the times where we couldn’t choose what we would be fed, nor could we understand what people around us would talk about. We were just kids in a storm in the middle of the ocean and we could only trust the people who were around us and who were giving us their view of the world and the language they use to describe it.
… So yes, I ended up watching a Big Brother Brazil interview. Well, I didn’t watch it, just listened to it while on my way to my favourite café. I searched bate papo – my newly learnt word – and the youtube suggestions were all about this Big Brother.
I feel so bad about sharing this, but I have to be fair with you, no secrets. At any rate, I don’t judge you if you actually like this kind of content, I mean it is about good-looking young people being humans and doing things in front of a camera.
Anyway, let’s stop with excuses. What I noticed was that I had a lot more trouble understanding this video. I could only seize a few words. I now realise what Portuguese sounds like on a normal flow in a speech that is not meant for people who should pay attention to the words of the speaker. Do they speak fast? If you think that native speakers think fast instead of thinking that your level is not good enough, probably you should work on your ego, or at least read this post about the most common myths about languages (soon to come)
So my boasting from yesterday has been redimensioned all of a sudden and my immense ego destroyed. And I actually appreciate it, because I was afraid the challenge wouldn’t be hard and motivating enough. I might actually consider doing a full immersion in this channel.
But since my ego needed some balm, I gave it the chance of listening to another video for Portuguese learners, once again in Brazilian Portuguese – apparently it is more common to find Brazilian Portuguese resources than Portuguese resources, at least with the few words I know.
So I bumped into this. The title is already really helpful to learn new words. For an Italian native speaker it is easy to translate it: are you able to understand this conversation?
And here we see that a synonim – and maybe even a more official way of saying <bate papo> is <conversa>. But what about the conjugation of the verb to be in the second person singular? I thought it should have been <és>. Am I wrong? Or is it this way that the courtesy form is composed? So many questions, but we have to resist the temptation of looking for the answers too soon. We get that <able> is <capaz>, nothing weird, it’s pretty much like Spanish and we see that adjectives that in Italian end in -ace, that come from Latin’s -acis, in Portuguese they end in -az, where the <z> is devoiced and sounds <s>. This <capaz> is followed by <de>: we finally have a preposition that helps us build sentences to say what we are able to do, a very precious weapon for our quest. Then we get to <entender>, the word for <understand> which totally sounds – and looks – like Spanish. Nothing to hard there. And <essa> is the demonstrative adjective.
Obviously, if this is the title, the conversation is meant to be understood, so that they make their audience feel more confident learning and confidence builds trust. Its their market strategy, but we… actually need confidence on this fourth day, so let’s trust them and go ahead with this challenge.
Our goal now is to listen to the video and take notes of all the words we manage to recognise. Don’t worry if you are not a Neolatin language speaker and you can’t recognise enough words. In this case you can just keep doing the exercise of listening without paying attention to the words, and paying more attention to the sounds of the language. That is because doing an exercise that is too difficult for you – as well as an exercise that is too easy for you – would be demotivating. So always be aware of your level and the pace at which you advance.
This is my exercise. I didn’t care about the ortograph yet, I just tried to be as faithful as possible with the few notions I have. Don’t hesitate to post your own exercise in the comments. Though it might seem demotivating if you feel that the words you recognised are too few, you will feel more encouraged on the long run, when you will see that, by doing this exercise regularly and sticking to it every day, you will eventually be able to recognise more and more words.
The google sheets for vocabulary
Now that we have these new words, we should enter them in our Google sheets.
We already have 61 words in 4 days. Sounds like a good ratio! I checked these words with an online translator to make sure there are no spelling mistakes.
The suffix -ade /ad͡ʒɨ/
That’s something that comes from Latin, where some abstract concepts where described by words ending in -tas. This suffix has arrived into the Italian language having lost the /s/, but that /s/ that fell on the road left a trace: its spirit lives on in the /a/ giving it more power and the ending becomes the syllable that carries the accent of the word. How does this work? Let me show you:
veritas -> verità
dignitas -> dignità
vanitas -> vanità
As we can see, this words all carry an accent on the <a>. In French, you simply need to replace the <à> with <é>, in English with <y>, but unaccentuated and is pronounced /ɪ/, in Spanish <ad>, pronounced with the devoiced /θ/. If my calculations are correct, this suffix becomes -ade, pronounced /ad͡ʒɨ/ in Portuguese. Here we see it in words like <qualidade> and <verdade>. But there is a word I have heard, and that actually stuck in my mind, it is <saudade>, because I find the phrase “Samba do saudade” exceedingly satisfying to pronounce. But this word doesn’t apply to my calculations correctly, because it might be a word like <natureza> that Portuguese built by changing the ending to make it sound more… dancing? After a brief research, I found out it has no Latin roots, it is a word that describes a feeling of deep nostalgy.
-çao and -çoes
We have now discovered, thanks to the word <notificaçoes>, how the plural of a word ending with -çao is formed.
-or and -ora
by searching the word <professor> on google translate I have been given the feminine form, which is <professora>, which means that words ending in -or, form their feminine counterpart by simply adding a -a. This really sounds weird for an Italian, that is why my people chose to add something more to the ending -a and we also add a double <s> before the <a>, so instead of <professora> we would say in Italian <professoressa>.
For the other words, as an Italian native speaker with knowledge of Spanish and Latin, they all seem straightforward. That is why I haven’t put any translation. But feel free to put the translation on the column on the right and to change the text colour of the translation to white as soon as you feel that you’ve learnt it.
Free writing improved
Now that we did our daily listening practice and our vocabulary gathering task, we can now take the exercise we did yesterday and correct it with the help of an online dictionary. Beware to not use an automatic translation to translate a full text because if we wanted to waste our time, we could waste it in a less sophisticated manner. We are here to learn how to speak Portuguese, nobody actually cares about us writing a correct text of a presentation of ourselves in Portuguese, so please don’t use a translator in this way. Unless you really like to waste your time in a sophisticated manner, in which case, no kink-shaming.
First of all, while writing the text I needed to say that I am an English teacher and that I live in Paris. The main problem with that is that I had no idea of which prepositions to use: how do I say <of> in “professor do ingles”? How do I say <in> in the sentence “I live in Paris”? and how do I really say <live>?
Then I also listed the languages I know, so I have to check the spelling of those nationality adjectives.
Finally my hobbies: those were verbs I hadn’t encountered, so I made them up, hoping it would work.
Let’s check all this and then write down the new and improved version of the previous pitiful text.
Bom dia pessoal! Eu sou Sasha, moro em Paris y sou professor de inglês. Eu sou um linguista. Posso falar italiano, inglês, francês, russo, alemão, japonês y espanhol. Quero falar português também, porque vou ir para os Açores. Eu gosto de viajar, ler y escrever.
Whew, so many things to correct. And I even have to correct the também on my google sheets vocabulary!
Apparently <morar> is more appropriate to speak of the place where we live. As for the nationality adjectives, I was surprised about the way to say <German>, but it wasn’t so surprising after all; what is to notice is that most of them need to have a hat on the final <e>. The verb <like> works, apparently, like in English and not like in Spanish <me gusta> or the Italian <mi piace>, where the subject of the sentence is the thing we like and not the person who likes it; but here we have a small difference, there is the preposition <de> just like in “é capaz de entender”. Curious.
As for the “para os Açores” we will still have to investigate more, but when it comes to islands and locations that don’t make up for a full independent country – yep, this can sometimes be a very tricky part of learning a language… – it is usually common to use a different preposition and in this case it even uses the <os> which, I guess, is the definite plural article. And now this article brings back two recollections of music bands with a Portuguese name: “Os bravos” which means “the brave” and “Os tincoas” of which I can’t get a precise translation for the moment.
This is already quite good for day 4. But it’s Sunday, it’s 1pm and my brain is vibrating with a desire for more knowledge. This is what happens when you take it easy and don’t rush anything: you make your brain feel at ease with a challenge and it will eventually seize it and become even more passionate about it than you are. This is what motivation looks like.