It's been some time since I've really had a chance to do much with Portuguese. School has been pretty busy, and I've only really just got settled in. But last night, I cracked my Portuguese book for the first time in weeks and got some interesting grammatical surprises.
The first is that Portuguese moves object pronouns quite a bit. Depending on whether a sentence is positive or negative or a question, and on whether it is uttered by a speaker of Brazilian or European Portuguese, the object pronoun may be either just before the verb (as in French) or after it, with a little hyphen. In the latter case, some verbs lose an ending. This will take some practice.
The other interesting surprise concerns what in English is called the causal infinitive. A brief grammar lesson:
In English, we can show our desire for, or causation of, other people's actions by using the infinitive:
I want you to come straight home after school.
He asked me to pick up some milk on my way home.
In many languages, the infinitive cannot be used this way. The same sentences in French would read:
I want that you should come straight home after school.
He asked that I pick up some milk on my way home.
I was rather surprised, then, to find that Portuguese does have a causal infinitive--but with a difference. In Portuguese, the causal infinitive actually conjugates. Endings are tacked on to the infinitive, depending on the person, number, and gender of the object pronoun before it.
This really does blow my mind. Through years of Greek, Latin, French, and the smattering of Russian I had in college and managed to teach myself before leaving for Moscow, I had always understood that the very definition of an infinitive is that it is the unconjugated, pure form of the verb, the form from which all other forms of the verb are made. But apparently Lusophones (Portuguese speakers) don't think that way.
Or speak that way. Or write that way.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Two For the Price of One
My apologies for not writing for so long about my efforts to learn Portuguese. This is mainly because, over the past three weeks, I've hardly made any. I did go the first day of Portuguese 101 at Penn, but as taking the class was way too expensive and conflicted with a required course in my master's program, I was unable to take it. Having also been mainly occupied with getting my apartment set up and settling in to my other work, I've had to put Portuguese on the back burner. But now that I have my schedule down, I think I can commit to it a bit more.
Tonight, I saw on Netflix a cute little movie called Quinceanera. A quinceanera is a coming-of-age ritual for Latino and Chicano girls when they turn fifteen that, as near as I could tell from the film, involves a lavish party, a stretch limo, a father-daughter dance, and a whole bunch of teenagers dressed up in outfits Anglo culture reserves for bridesmaids and groomsmen. This was actually quite an approrpriate film to watch, given that we're now studying code switching in my Educational Linguistics class. Briefly, code switching is a fancy name for what occurs when two or more people, who both speak the same two languages, switch back and forth between them in the course of conversation.
Quinceanera does quite a bit of code switching of its own. The film constantly switches back and forth between English and Spanish. I was somewhat surprised that a film aimed so squarely at the Latino market had subtitles for the Spanish, but not for the English, portions.
Although I'm studying Portuguese, not English, I was happy to be able to understand bits and pieces of the Spanish, even without the subtitles. By bits and pieces, I mean a few words hear and there, not long conversations. But I was happy to be able to confirm through personal experience what I have heard about the relationship between the two languages--that people who know Portuguese can often understand a lot of Spanish (the reverse, I'm told, is not true; it's apparently much more difficult for Spanish speakers to understand Portuguese).
I may end up getting two languages for the price of one, after all.
Tonight, I saw on Netflix a cute little movie called Quinceanera. A quinceanera is a coming-of-age ritual for Latino and Chicano girls when they turn fifteen that, as near as I could tell from the film, involves a lavish party, a stretch limo, a father-daughter dance, and a whole bunch of teenagers dressed up in outfits Anglo culture reserves for bridesmaids and groomsmen. This was actually quite an approrpriate film to watch, given that we're now studying code switching in my Educational Linguistics class. Briefly, code switching is a fancy name for what occurs when two or more people, who both speak the same two languages, switch back and forth between them in the course of conversation.
Quinceanera does quite a bit of code switching of its own. The film constantly switches back and forth between English and Spanish. I was somewhat surprised that a film aimed so squarely at the Latino market had subtitles for the Spanish, but not for the English, portions.
Although I'm studying Portuguese, not English, I was happy to be able to understand bits and pieces of the Spanish, even without the subtitles. By bits and pieces, I mean a few words hear and there, not long conversations. But I was happy to be able to confirm through personal experience what I have heard about the relationship between the two languages--that people who know Portuguese can often understand a lot of Spanish (the reverse, I'm told, is not true; it's apparently much more difficult for Spanish speakers to understand Portuguese).
I may end up getting two languages for the price of one, after all.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Genitively Deficient
One of the interesting little facts about Britain I learned from my fellow teachers in Moscow is that British people absolutely adore Indian food--or at least, what they perceive as Indian food, since a fair amount of what passes for Indian food in Britain was actually created on the Sceptred Isle by Indian immigrants, and is not actually known in India. A few years back, a British politician actually declared chicken tikka massala Britain's "national dish".
Chicken tikka massala, it turns out, is a rather odd dish, because there is no actual agreement about what the essential ingredients for it are. According to Wikipedia, one survey of 30-40 recipes for the dish could find only one ingredient common to all of them: chicken.
Well, it turns out that the world of lingustics has its own chicken tikka massala.
In reading The Loom of Language, I've gotten to learn some interesting facts about what is known as the genitive case in inflected languages. Long ago in school, I got to learn about the genitive case as it existed in Classical Greek and Latin. Briefly, what I was taught about the genitive case was as follows:
Chicken tikka massala, it turns out, is a rather odd dish, because there is no actual agreement about what the essential ingredients for it are. According to Wikipedia, one survey of 30-40 recipes for the dish could find only one ingredient common to all of them: chicken.
Well, it turns out that the world of lingustics has its own chicken tikka massala.
In reading The Loom of Language, I've gotten to learn some interesting facts about what is known as the genitive case in inflected languages. Long ago in school, I got to learn about the genitive case as it existed in Classical Greek and Latin. Briefly, what I was taught about the genitive case was as follows:
- The genitive case can take the place of what would be a possessive with 's in English. So in the Latin for That is the boy's book, boy's would be in the genitive case.
- The genitive case can express an origin point--i.e., in the Latin for The wheat is from Kansas, from Kansas would be one noun in the genitive case.
- The genitive case is used in situations where English uses the preposition of--i.e., in the Latin for The stack of books is over there, of books would be one noun in the genitive case.
Well, it turns out all of this is, as Jane Austen would say, a truth not universally acknowledged. By the 1940s, linguists had examined all of the languages that had had, or at the time still had, something the grammar books called the genitive case--and they could find not one single use that was common to all of them, across the languages. The genitive case, it turns out, is the linguists' chicken tikka massala; the only thing common to all of the "genitive cases" across the languages of Europe is that grammarians call them genitive (incidentally, this was true of English grammarians at one time; until about the mid-18th century, English grammarians often called the possessive with 's the genitive form of English nouns, even though it has only one feature of the Greco-Latin genitive).
Oddly, this doesn't surprise me, because of something I discovered during my brief foray into Russian. Greek and Latin have another case called the dative case which, I was taught, took the place of the English prepositions to or for. So when I learned the Russian word dla (meaning for), I assumed it would be followed by the dative case. In fact, dla requires not the dative but the genitive case in Russian.
What this likely means is that grammarians in all of these languages took something that actually existed in Latin and basically imagined it into their own langauages' grammars, even when it didn't really exist there.
Latin Lovers
Having arrived at Penn less than a week ago, I haven't had a chance to do much with my Portuguese. Indeed, until today, I hadn't yet fully unpacked my suitcase, and therefore had yet to take out the file cards of Portuguese words I so carefully prepared and alphabetized before leaving home. Nonetheless, I have exchanged a couple of e-mails with my Portuguese penpal and am beginning to get a feel for certain aspects of the language.
In its system of verb tenses, Portuguese bears a strong resemblance to Latin--not surprisingly, since, like other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, and Occitan/Provencal), Portuguese is a direct descendant of Latin. The resemblance was made even clearer to me when I picked up a book at a local used bookstore called The Loom of Language. Published in 1944, The Loom of Language is an attempt to make foreign language study simpler for students by explaining the linguistic connections among the Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, etc.) languages and the Romance languages. A lot of the book strikes me as too highly technical for, and thus not of much use to, a beginning language learner with no prior exposure to any of these languages.
Nonetheless, I've had fun watching the author skewer what I call the "Latin lovers"--exteme adulators of Latin who managed to retard knowledge of linguistics for decades. One of the questions that preoccupied linguists in the early years of the discipline--in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--was how and why the languages of Europe had declined from the supposedly "pure" and "logical" forms of Latin into the less pristine systems of modern European languages.
Latin, like many other languages, is what linguists call an inflected language. What this means is that words change form according to how they are used in a setence. In English, we do this a little bit with pronouns. A simple example:
Michael hits the ball becomes he hits the ball, when we replace Michael with a subject pronoun. If the ball hits Michael, however, we have to say The ball hits him--using an object pronoun instead of a subject pronoun. This change from he to him is called an inflection.
In modern, standard English (or as The Loom of Language likes to call it, Anglo-American), only pronouns have inflections. Most of the time, we express different relationships among words in a sentence through either word order (syntax) or with prepositions. Take, for instance, the following simple sentences:
My mother sent me a package.
I sent my mother a package.
We know who does the sending, what is sent, and who does the receiving, because of the order of the words. My mother sent me a package and I sent my mother a package do not mean the same thing in English, because the sentences have different subjects (mother, I) and different indirect objects (me, mother).
Notice an importance distinction, however; the pronouns in these sentences (I, me) change based on their role in the sentence, but the noun mother does not. In English, we do not put a special ending onto nouns to show their role in the sentence, except when we add 's to make the possessive (That is my mother's package).
Latin (and Russian, and many other languages), does, however. For many centuries, because Latin was the language of culture and scholarship in Europe, an idea arose that its system of noun-endings represented an inherently superior form of language, and that all subsequent languages had somehow declined from the "Golden Age" of Latin. Latin grammar was characterized as systematic and logical, in comparison with other languages.
The Loom of Language points out a number of facts about Latin that make hash of this idea:
In its system of verb tenses, Portuguese bears a strong resemblance to Latin--not surprisingly, since, like other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, and Occitan/Provencal), Portuguese is a direct descendant of Latin. The resemblance was made even clearer to me when I picked up a book at a local used bookstore called The Loom of Language. Published in 1944, The Loom of Language is an attempt to make foreign language study simpler for students by explaining the linguistic connections among the Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, etc.) languages and the Romance languages. A lot of the book strikes me as too highly technical for, and thus not of much use to, a beginning language learner with no prior exposure to any of these languages.
Nonetheless, I've had fun watching the author skewer what I call the "Latin lovers"--exteme adulators of Latin who managed to retard knowledge of linguistics for decades. One of the questions that preoccupied linguists in the early years of the discipline--in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--was how and why the languages of Europe had declined from the supposedly "pure" and "logical" forms of Latin into the less pristine systems of modern European languages.
Latin, like many other languages, is what linguists call an inflected language. What this means is that words change form according to how they are used in a setence. In English, we do this a little bit with pronouns. A simple example:
Michael hits the ball becomes he hits the ball, when we replace Michael with a subject pronoun. If the ball hits Michael, however, we have to say The ball hits him--using an object pronoun instead of a subject pronoun. This change from he to him is called an inflection.
In modern, standard English (or as The Loom of Language likes to call it, Anglo-American), only pronouns have inflections. Most of the time, we express different relationships among words in a sentence through either word order (syntax) or with prepositions. Take, for instance, the following simple sentences:
My mother sent me a package.
I sent my mother a package.
We know who does the sending, what is sent, and who does the receiving, because of the order of the words. My mother sent me a package and I sent my mother a package do not mean the same thing in English, because the sentences have different subjects (mother, I) and different indirect objects (me, mother).
Notice an importance distinction, however; the pronouns in these sentences (I, me) change based on their role in the sentence, but the noun mother does not. In English, we do not put a special ending onto nouns to show their role in the sentence, except when we add 's to make the possessive (That is my mother's package).
Latin (and Russian, and many other languages), does, however. For many centuries, because Latin was the language of culture and scholarship in Europe, an idea arose that its system of noun-endings represented an inherently superior form of language, and that all subsequent languages had somehow declined from the "Golden Age" of Latin. Latin grammar was characterized as systematic and logical, in comparison with other languages.
The Loom of Language points out a number of facts about Latin that make hash of this idea:
- Far from being regular and systematic, Latin's system of word-endings is in fact quite arbitrary; the same ending may be used for differing grammatical relationships, depending on the declension (roughly, a system of changes of noun-endings) the noun is in. If Latin appeared logical to scholars of a previous era, it was only because students learned each declension one at a time, and therefore didn't tend to see the confusion caused by the name ending representing diferent kinds of word relationships in different declensions.
- Like every language, Latin underwent enormous changes over the centuries. As in English, great differences came to exist between the language of refined literature and the language of everyday speech and, as in English, the literary language was markedly more conservative than the spoken language. Over time, the language of everyday speech came to have fewer and fewer inflections and to rely more and more on prepositions to show relationships among words--so much so that, by the Fall of the Roman Empire, noun inflections had almost ceased to exist in spoken Latin.
- Earlier forms of Latin acutally had more inflections than the Classical Latin usually studied in universities. At one time, Latin had a separate locative case (that is, a special noun ending to indicate that another noun was in that thing or place), but by the classical period this had already disappeared. So by the standards of early linguists, Classical Latin was already a "declining" or "degraded" language.
Modern linguistics, fortunately, have lost this early adulation for Latin. It is also clear, from the study of the world's languages, that languages do not always move from a system of high-inflection (like Classical Latin) to low-inflection (like English). So there has been no great "decline" in the world's tongues, but merely change.
Monday, August 24, 2009
The Junior Woodchuck Verb
When I was a kid, I used to race home from school every afternoon to watch a Disney cartoon called Duck Tales. In every episode, Huey, Dewey, and Louie would get into some predicament that would require them to refer to an all-knowing book called the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Looking back on it, I gather the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook was Google before there was Google; it seemed to have an answer for any question posed to it. Need to know how to trap a bear, or build a canoe, or send smoke signals? The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook always had a ready answer.
No language has a Junior Woodchuck Guidebook, of course. But every language seems to have a few verbs I'll call Junior Woodchuck Verbs: verbs that seem to do everything in a language. In English, one of those verbs verb is get. Get definitely gets around in our language. The elementary-level textbook we used in Russia taught five different senses of the word get:
No language has a Junior Woodchuck Guidebook, of course. But every language seems to have a few verbs I'll call Junior Woodchuck Verbs: verbs that seem to do everything in a language. In English, one of those verbs verb is get. Get definitely gets around in our language. The elementary-level textbook we used in Russia taught five different senses of the word get:
- to obtain (Can you get some milk when you go to the supermarket?)
- to arrive at (What time did you get to the party last night?)
- to receive (I got a letter yesterday from Tokyo, and a souvenir.)
- to become (Hallelujah, come on, get happy!)
- from the above, its use in passive verb constructions (I've got some money because I just got paid.)
This is not even counting the use of get in phrasal verbs (get over, get at, get out of, get rid of), all of which extend the meaning of the verb even further. I recently read that Samuel Johnson's dictionary lists 65 different senses of the verb take; I imagine there must best at least this many senses of get.
Today I discovered my first Junior Woodchuck verb in Portuguese, ficar, which can be used in several different ways. There is no single word in English that translates it perfectly, but some of its senses are:
- to stay (Fica aqui enquanto eu vou ao armazem--Stay here while I go to the store)
- to be located (Nosso escritorio fica no Rua Quinta--our office is located on Fifth Street)
- to keep on doing something (Ele fica falando, mas eu nao o entendo--He keeps on talking, but I don't understand him)
- somewhat strangely, considering its other senses, to take (Eu fico esse livro e voce fica aquele--I'll take this book and you take that one).
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Past, Present, Future
Well, it finally happened: my Portuguese book has finally gotten beyond the present simple (I go, he goes, etc.) into other verb tenses.
It turns out that Portuguese, unlike French, does have a tense roughly equal to the English present continuous (I am going, he is going, etc). It's made the same way as in English--by using estar (to be) and adding a participle onto it (although my book incorrectly refers to this as a gerund). Luckily for me, Portuguese uses its present continuous in all the ways English does except one: it does not use it for what EFL teachers sometimes call "diary future" (i.e., Tomorrow, I'm visiting my aunt.)
This is one of my pet peeves with most language books--how long they take to break out of the present simple. In my book, it's taken until lesson 19, out of forty. I did some checking on when I can expect to learn past forms. The answer: not until lesson thirty-one. I've decided to skip ahead a little to this one, because I'm starting to need it in order to correspond with my newfound penpal in Lisbon. There's only so long we can go on writing rather dull, present-tense-only letters about our daily schedules and what we do in our free time.
In fact, my penpal has proven pretty valuable. He corrects all of my e-mails to him, and from his corrections, I've managed to pick up a few additional tidbits about Portuguese:
It turns out that Portuguese, unlike French, does have a tense roughly equal to the English present continuous (I am going, he is going, etc). It's made the same way as in English--by using estar (to be) and adding a participle onto it (although my book incorrectly refers to this as a gerund). Luckily for me, Portuguese uses its present continuous in all the ways English does except one: it does not use it for what EFL teachers sometimes call "diary future" (i.e., Tomorrow, I'm visiting my aunt.)
This is one of my pet peeves with most language books--how long they take to break out of the present simple. In my book, it's taken until lesson 19, out of forty. I did some checking on when I can expect to learn past forms. The answer: not until lesson thirty-one. I've decided to skip ahead a little to this one, because I'm starting to need it in order to correspond with my newfound penpal in Lisbon. There's only so long we can go on writing rather dull, present-tense-only letters about our daily schedules and what we do in our free time.
In fact, my penpal has proven pretty valuable. He corrects all of my e-mails to him, and from his corrections, I've managed to pick up a few additional tidbits about Portuguese:
- Portuguese apparently has two different, common words for old: one for chronological years (idoso) and one not normally applied to people, except to indicate that you've known someone for a long time (velho).
- The second person (you) in Portuguese is stranger than I had thought. There are four different pronouns in Portuguese that could conceivably be translated as you: tu, voce, voces, and vos. Of these, only voce and voces are used in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, and they are singular and plural, respectively. Tu is no longer common in Brazil but is still used in Portugal itself. Vos is now considered archaic and only really shows up in historical fiction. If all that isn't complicated enough, it's also common to use o senhor (Sir) / o senhora (Madam) in lieu of a second-person pronoun--or even the definite article (the equivalent of the) followed by a person's name. This makes me picture an officious waiter asking, "Would Madam care for some desert?" But apparently, Portuguese speakers actually talk this way.
- The gap between European and Brazilian Portuguese is wider than I thought. I had been under the impression that the difference was similar to that between British and American English, but my correspondent said in his second e-mail that it's rare for two sentences to be the same in both versions of Portuguese.
I've also picked up a little bit of the future in Portuguese. So far, I've learned that Portuguese has a formal future, similar to the English future with will, and an informal future, similar to the English future with going to. There may be others.
By the way, if you really want to get your friends flustered at a dinner party, ask them how many ways of expressing the future there are in English. No, it's not the two I've just mentioned. The answer, as only an experienced EFL teacher can tell you, is seven:
- The simple future with will or (much more rarely) shall--what we usually (and wrongly) think of as the future in English. Oddly, EFL textbooks consider this one of the weakest forms
- The future continuous with will be. This is the odd duck of continuous tenses in English, because it can express a one-time event (I can't come to your party, as I'll be visiting my aunt that day) or a series of events (I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places).
- The going to future, which EFL textbooks generally explain as expressing a future plan or intention
- The "diary future" (so-called from the British use of diary for what Americans call a datebook or a planner), with the present continuous; this expresses a plan already made, or as the EFL books call it, an arrangement (I'm seeing my dentist on Friday).
- The "timetable future," using the present simple to express the future--so-called because its most common use in EFL world is for train and airplane schedule (My train doesn't leave until nine o'clock)
- The "headline future" (so-called because of its use in newspaper headlines, at least on the other side of the Atlantic), with a form of to be and an infinitive with to. One of my CELTA trainers jokingly called this the "Queen Mother future", because its only use was in newspaper articles about the Queen Mother's impending surgeries (The Queen Mother is to have her appendix out next week).
- The past tense to express a future. Very rare, but yes Virginia, it does happen. (We'll be there at 9:30, if our train wasn't delayed).
In EFL, the future can actually be a major source of frustration for students. When English-speakers deal with the past, we're pretty rigid about which tense we use, but it often seems to EFL students that we'll use any old thing we happen to have lying around to express the future.
I should be relieved, then, that things do not seem to be this complicated in Portuguese, but I'll have to wait and see.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Much Farber to Go
These past three days, I was away visiting my grandmother in a small town in Missouri and so didn't get a lot of work done on my Portuguese. The only thing I can say I accomplished was to alphabetize and organize my growing set of flash cards (somewhere near 500 at this point) and to start some new ones based on a system recommended in Farber's How to Learn Any Language.
Farber recommends doing something completely different with flash cards than what I've been doing. So far, I've always made one card per word, with the English on one side, the Portuguese on the other, and an example sentence under the Portugese. What I've realized using my own system, however, is that I tend to end up with better recognition than production--that is to say, I can think of the English translation of a Portuguese word when I see it but can't produce the Portuguese word when I look at the English.
Farber's preferred use of flash cards, however, is to put several words on each card and carry them with you, looking at them and trying to remember then whenever you have a few idle moments standing in line at the post office or waiting for the subway to arrive. What this does, according to Farber, is to extend the amount of time you're exposed to the language.
Additionally, Farber recommends culling words from an authentic text in your target language--preferrably, a newspaper or magazine article. He thinks that slugging through a real newspaper article, even as a beginner, is an excellent way to boost vocabulary as well as to begin to get some rudiments of grammar.
The main problem with this approach, from my perspective, is that it doesn't take enough account of irregular verbs. An irregular verb (in case you've forgotten from sixth-grade English) is a verb that doesn't conjugate in the manner of most verbs in the language but according to its own, idiosyncratic pattern. For example, in Portuguese, there are three kinds of regular verbs: verbs ending in -ar, verbs ending in -er, and verbs ending in -ir. Falar, the verb meaning "to speak", is formed (conjugated) as follows:
eu falo I speak
voce fala you speak
ele/ela fala he speaks/she speaks
nos falamos we speak
voces falam you (pl.) speak
eles/elas falam they speak
As you can see, a root (fal-) remains the same in all of these words, while an ending changes. An irregular verb like ser (to be), however, can behave very differently:
eu sou I am
voce e you are
ele/ela e he/she is
nos somos we are
voces sao you are
eles/elas sao they are
As you can see, here the root of the verb goes wild, changing as much as the ending. If a beginning student in Portuguese enconters somos in a text without having first learned this verb, he'll be at a lost. Somos won't be in any dictionary, and he won't be able to figure out what it means.
Nonetheless, I may try a modified version of Farber's approach, using something a bit simpler like the Wikipedia article on Brazil.
Farber recommends doing something completely different with flash cards than what I've been doing. So far, I've always made one card per word, with the English on one side, the Portuguese on the other, and an example sentence under the Portugese. What I've realized using my own system, however, is that I tend to end up with better recognition than production--that is to say, I can think of the English translation of a Portuguese word when I see it but can't produce the Portuguese word when I look at the English.
Farber's preferred use of flash cards, however, is to put several words on each card and carry them with you, looking at them and trying to remember then whenever you have a few idle moments standing in line at the post office or waiting for the subway to arrive. What this does, according to Farber, is to extend the amount of time you're exposed to the language.
Additionally, Farber recommends culling words from an authentic text in your target language--preferrably, a newspaper or magazine article. He thinks that slugging through a real newspaper article, even as a beginner, is an excellent way to boost vocabulary as well as to begin to get some rudiments of grammar.
The main problem with this approach, from my perspective, is that it doesn't take enough account of irregular verbs. An irregular verb (in case you've forgotten from sixth-grade English) is a verb that doesn't conjugate in the manner of most verbs in the language but according to its own, idiosyncratic pattern. For example, in Portuguese, there are three kinds of regular verbs: verbs ending in -ar, verbs ending in -er, and verbs ending in -ir. Falar, the verb meaning "to speak", is formed (conjugated) as follows:
eu falo I speak
voce fala you speak
ele/ela fala he speaks/she speaks
nos falamos we speak
voces falam you (pl.) speak
eles/elas falam they speak
As you can see, a root (fal-) remains the same in all of these words, while an ending changes. An irregular verb like ser (to be), however, can behave very differently:
eu sou I am
voce e you are
ele/ela e he/she is
nos somos we are
voces sao you are
eles/elas sao they are
As you can see, here the root of the verb goes wild, changing as much as the ending. If a beginning student in Portuguese enconters somos in a text without having first learned this verb, he'll be at a lost. Somos won't be in any dictionary, and he won't be able to figure out what it means.
Nonetheless, I may try a modified version of Farber's approach, using something a bit simpler like the Wikipedia article on Brazil.
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