The time is ripe: my proficiency in Portuguese is now enough that I can think in Portuguese almost without interruptions and for longer periods of time; furtermore, I can write longer paragraphs without using the help of the internet. Sure enough I still make mistakes – more than I can recognise – but I have the confidence to stick to it without fear.
Know your limits
My limits now are:
- vocabulary: though most of it is shared among all the Romance languages, there’s plenty of false friends and despite them being easy to recognise, it’s hard to guess them when I need to use them.
- Conjugation: being able to fluently conjugate verbs is something that needs solid theory and practical training, luckily the grammar is litterally the same as any other Romance language and it actually looks pretty easy: only 2 regular verbs groups and 4 different endings for the present simple. What might look hard is the auxiliary verbs for composite tenses.
- Genders and possessive adjectives: Though it works very similarly to Italian, I still need to master the endings and the pronouns. Besides, if I understood it correctly, something went wrong when pronouns and possessive adjectives got to Portugal. For example, it shocks me that <your> becomes <su>/<sua>, that comes from the root for <his>/<her>. How is it even possible? Maybe I just encountered a polite form?
Hunting for solutions
Now that I am acquainted with the language, I can start learning grammar rules with a Portuguese explanation. I was lucky to find this channel so soon, because it contains a full playlist of grammar rules explained in Portuguese. Could I ask for anything better?
Transcription exercise
During the last two days I did some copying exercises. Basically I copied entire paragraphs and sometimes even pages of the book I am reading. This improves recollection because it lets us stimulate the hand’s muscle memory and we become acquainted to correct sentence structures.
Nevertheless, the challenge I set to myself requires a lot more effort than that, so I decided to transcribe some parts of a documentary in order to train listening comprehension, syntax mastery, vocabulary and written expression simultaneously.
Obviously I paused the video to give myself time to write down the sentences, and I gave myself permission to rewind whenever needed. After all, it was no test and what I wanted was simply to make additional effort of recording in my mind what I hear.
I thought it was going to be a lot harder, but considering that it was a first time, the exercise was a success: I am happy with my progress.
Here’s the result!
Deduction exercise
One thing that people really love doing when reading a text in a foreign language is to get stuck on a word and saying “oh my god, I don’t know this word, what am I going to do? It’s over for me”.
In reality, we don’t really care about single words, but group of words and sentences. And, even more importantly, context!
If you focus yourself too much on a single word, you might forget about the overall meaning of what you read. But the overall meaning of a text is more helpful than a dictionary!
That’s because when you use a dictionary to find a translation, you’ll get the solution but you won’t train your deduction ability. On the other hand, when you use the context to discover the meaning of a word, not only will you find the solution, but you will also improve your deduction skills becoming more and more autonomous.
Here are some examples of how I managed to deduce the meaning of some words in the book “O alquimista”:
“[…] mercadores entravam e saíam, pessoas conversavam pelos cantos, uma pequena orquestra tocava melodias suaves, e havia uma farta mesa com os mais deliciosos pratos daquela região do mundo.”
mercadores
root merc -> merchant – mercado (market) + or (profession)
cantos
Reminds me of the italian word <accanto> which means <next to>, which must have come from Latin ad + cantum, which can only mean that cantum could be <side>. Whether I am right or wrong on this one doesn’t really matter, because the sentence makes sense even without this information: “merchants come and go, people chat […]”
farta
I still can’t say the correct translation of it, but I know that between an article (uma) and a noun (mesa) there can only be an adjective. The noun <mesa> is surely the same as Spanish for <table>. Here we’re talking about the house of a wise man, where a lot of people, mostly rich, come and go. Based on that, what could this adjective mean? My guess is that it’s a positive adjective that describes a table rich in dishes. And the following words actually support my theory: “com os mais deliciosos pratos […]”
Results
By the end of the day, after all the hard work, I copied by hand two pages of the book and I start to finally see some very concrete results.
This is the exercise. The words that I circled are the words that I don’t know. Only 5 words out of around 400. This is a very good result. It shows how fast my proficiency is progressing.
This is all for today ! If you are still following me, write a comment to say if some of these exercises work for you as well or what you do different.
I will keep you up to date as soon as possible !
Bye !
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