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:

1. to obtain (Can you get some milk when you go to the supermarket?)
2. to arrive at (What time did you get to the party last night?)
3. to receive (I got a letter yesterday from Tokyo, and a souvenir.)
4. to become (Hallelujah, come on, get happy!)
5. 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:

1. to stay (Fica aqui enquanto eu vou ao armazem--Stay here while I go to the store)
2. to be located (Nosso escritorio fica no Rua Quinta--our office is located on Fifth Street)
3. to keep on doing something (Ele fica falando, mas eu nao o entendo--He keeps on talking, but I don't understand him)
4. 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).

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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:

1. 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
2. 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).
3. The going to future, which EFL textbooks generally explain as expressing a future plan or intention
4. 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).
5. 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)
6. 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).
7. 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.

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.

Perceptible Portuguese

There seem to be no end of good uses for Facebook: reaching out to old friends, playing Scrabble with people 6,000 miles away, finding out about your best friend's beef with his boss. And, apparently, learning new languages.

Last night, I managed to find an application that allows you to find language exchange partners with whom you can exchange Facebook messages, e-mails, even text chats. I found the listings of people looking to practice Portuguese and wrote to a couple of them.

Very quickly, I got a reply from a man I'll call Eduardo. He said he knew English very well and didn't feel he needed the practice, but he was glad to help me with my Portuguese.

So far, we've exchanged a couple of messages back and forth, and he's corrected what I send him. We haven't discussed anything particularly fascinating, but it's good to know I can actually communicate a bit in Portuguese, albeit imperfectly.

Eduardo wrote that my Portuguese is perceptivel--that is, perceptible. I can't quite make sense of this idiomatic usage, but I gather it means at least intelligible and possibly better.

The Mother of Stupid Claims

Well, one good thing I can say for Barry Farber (author of How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably, and on Your Own) is that he shares my skepticism--no, skepticism is too weak a word; my loathing--for one of the stupidest claims made by language schools and langauge instruction methods.

When a new diet appears on the market, the shills always seem to come out and tell you you'll shed 50 pounds in five days, or some similarly outrageous claim. Well, no diet known to humankind procudes that result. But the diet-peddlars go right on making it, not even stopping to think that losing so much weight so quickly isn't even likely to be healthy.

In the world of language learning, the equivalent claim is that Our Stupendous New Method will help you learn a new language just like learning your mother tongue! No language-learning system known to man lives up to this claim--even the ones that are the most audio-oriented--and similarly the notion that this is a good way to learn a language goes completely unexamined.

Why is learning another langauge just like your mother tongue a bad method of language learning? For starters, it takes a decade or more to achieve fluency in your native language. In fact, it takes two years for a child to know even 200 words in his or her mother tongue. Granted, a lot goes on cognitatively in those two years, but I think you grasp my point.

More to the point, adults trying to learn a second language are not children. They don't come into language learning with only a child's knowledge of the world. There's no good reason not to use a grown-up's existing knowledge to aid in second language acquisition. And while old-fashioned, grammar-centered approaches clearly don't work, there's no reason not to use an adult's knowledge of his own language's grammar, either.

How to Learn Any Language

Today, I went to the library to return some videotapes I borrowed for the weekend. My mother had dropped me off because she had an errand she needed to take care of, so I found I had some time to nose around in the stacks after I left the books at the return desk. I wound my way to the foreign language and linguistics section. There, practically staring me in the face, was a book called How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably, and On Your Own.

Now, despite my current efforts, I'm a bit skeptical about the on your own part. I know that, sooner or later, I'll need to find a class or at least a Portuguese-speaking friend or penpal, so that I can really practice the language. But having had some experience as an EFL teacher and preparing to go into a master's program in intercultural communication, I figured it was worth at least a gander.

I haven't read the whole book yet, but the author's story is intriguing. As a child, he had a fascination with everyone and everything foreign, so that by the time he had the opportunity to start learning a foreign langauge (Latin) in high school, he was thoroughly psyched up for it. His first three days in Latin class, he was the class star, easily remembering the words his teacher taught him for farmer and merchant and so on. Then on day four, he was out sick. When he came back, the class had moved on to declensions and, deciding that grammar was dull, he proceeded to all but flunk Latin.

Out of some need to prove he wasn't just bad at languages, the author found a book on Chinese and started studying it on his own. He then had a tremendous stroke of luck when, in the midst of World War II, his family went on vacation and he met some actual Chinese soldiers with whom he could practice the language.

Eventually, he claims, he went on to master not only Mandarin Chinese but also French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Norwegian, Danish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Indonesian.

From what I can gather of the approach he's developed over the years, the author seems to have alighted on something close to the communicative method I know and love from my teaching days. The problem with traditional language teaching, the author concludes, is its almost relentless focus on grammar. Students aren't encouraged to do anything with the language until they've mastered all of the grammar, and so they miss out on the fun of actually using their new languages to read, speak, and communicate. This tends to kill motivation and lead to complaints that, despite having taken years of Spanish in high school and college, they can't order a simple bowl of soup in Seville.

Well, I think he has it about half right. Language learning does require practice with real communication even more than learning conjugations by heart. The trouble is that, at the beginning, you don't really have a lot you can communicate with or about. Also, a lot of students are self-conscious about talking with (and being judged by) native speakers at first and really need to practice with other students.

I'll be reporting on how practical the author's suggestions are.

A Idioma, Frankly

Well, it turns out the name of this blog is wrong, all wrong.

I had assumed the word for language in Portuguese would be lingua because this is the Latin word for language, and because the word in French is la langue.

Well, hasty assumptions are your enemy in language learning. The word for language in Portuguese turns out to be idioma (closely related to the English word idiom). So this blog should properly be a idioma, frankly.

At Sixes and Sevens With Seconds

It may have taken eighteen whole lessons, but my Living Language Portuguese book finally got onto the days of the week, months of the year, and prepositions of time.

When I was learning Russian, I recall thinking how logical the words for days of the week are in Russian. In order starting from Monday, the days of week are, translated literally:

Head of the Week (Monday), Second Day (Tuesday), Midweek (Wednesday), Fourth Day (Thursday), Fifth Day (Friday), Sabbath (Saturday--yep, even Russians acknowledge that Saturday is the Sabbath), and Resurrection Day (from Jesus' resurrection on Sunday).

In Portuguese, however, they're even more logical. In Portuguese thinking, as in English, the week begins on Sunday, which is called Domingo (the Lord's Day), followed by:

First-Day, Second-Day, Third-Day, Fourth-Day, Fifth-Day, and Sabbath.

The words for Monday through Friday actually contain the word feria (day) at the end of them--but in casual conversation, feria is often dropped. So a conversation involving days of the week may look something like this:

A: Quando voce vai a sua aula de ingles? [When do you go to your English class?]

B: Eu vou a minha aula de ingles nos segundos e quatros [I go to my English class on Tuesdays and Thursdays--literally, I go to my English class on Seconds and Fourths.]

I imagine this must be incredibly confusing to anyone not born into this language.

But Can She Type?

One of the experiences of learning a new langauge is that, in addition to verb conjugations and the proper uses of prepositions, you also get a glimpse into a whole other way of creating conceptions of the universe.

I got one of these with Portuguese this evening when I opened up my next lesson and found out it was all about vocabulary related to the telephone. There, among such mundane words as o celular (the cell phone) and linha (the phone line), I got to find out what Brazilians call an answering machine.

In Brazil, apparently, an answering machine is uma secretaria eletronica--an electronic secretary. Interestingly, although secretary is a gendered word in Portuguese, the device is always in the feminine, perhaps suggesting that Brazilian secretaries are as likely to be female as American secretaries.

Sounding It Out

Its seems I couldn't have lighted on a more appropriate time to be learning medical words in Portugese, because I spent the whole day today lying on our living room couch com tosse (with a cough) e com refriado (with a cold). By o jantar (dinnertime), I started to feel better, and after eating I decided to go out for a bit. I headed up to our local Borders bookstore and eventually wound my way to the foreign language reference section.

Just for kicks, I picked up a different Portuguese textbook, the one in the For Dummies series. I'm generally skeptical of using For Dummies books to learn languages because, when I checked out Russian for Dummies many moons ago, I noticed the book never bothered to teach the Russian alphabet--the whole book was in phonetic transcription!

Well, I got a different kind of surprise looking through Portuguese for Dummies. In this one, the words are given with a phonetic transcription, and I quickly realized I was pronouncing nearly everything wrong. I guess I'm going to have to spend more time with my CDs working on pronunciation practice; I've tended to skip them for the time being, as I'm more focused on getting to the point where I have a modicum of vocabulary.

Here are some of the crazy things I can tell you about Portuguese pronunciation:

1) Os brasilieros e o portugues (the Brazilians and the Portuguese) seem to be every bit as allergic to the letter r as British people. In some situation it's pronounced as an h, in others as a d.

2) The combination -ante is pronounced "an-chee" and comes at the end of quite a lot of important words: estudante (student), estante (bookcase).

3) De is often pronounced "jeh". Some verbs in Portuguese require de (of) after them, so this sound gets used a lot.

Getting Testy

It turns out I spoke too soon when I said you have hunger or thirst in Portuguese. This is what you do in French, and when I saw similar constructions in my Portuguese book, I assumed it would be plus la meme chose (more of the same thing). But it turns out things are a little more complicated on the Iberian peninsula.

In Portuguese, you have two choices about how to express hunger, thirst, and medical pain. If you're talking about what generally happens, you use ter (to have). If you're talking about what you're feeling at this particular moment, you use estar (to be).

I've started putting sample sentences on my flashcards to make the vocab stick more easily in my brain, and it seems to be working. I guess this proves the value of communicative approaches to language learning. The communicative approach is the fruit of a long series of development in language learning over the past century. It puts practice in using language in real situations at the center of the classroom experience, rather than teaching of grammatical minutae. It's good to know I can sort of communicate in Portuguese, at least with the limited vocabulary I now possess.

A friend of mine, who teaches English in Korea and is working her way through Korean, told me to check out what resources exist on the Internet. Today, I took a look and found a pretty extensive site designed by a woman trying to peddle her own textbooks. The site includes grammar sections, explanations of frequently confused words, and even some tests. Just for kicks, I took the first three out of five tests.

Amazingly, I was able to guess what a lot of stuff on the second and third tests meant, even without having actually studied the grammar.

Right now, Portuguese could either prove much more confusing or much easier than I expected.

Turkey Bird

I'm just starting to get onto food words in Portuguese. A few throw me for a real loop (a manteiga--butter; as uvas--grapes), a few are recognizable from signs in Spanish I recall seeing in New York (a laranja--orange). And then there is the one somehow manages to cause amusement in every language.

I'm talking about the bird we eat every Thanksgiving.

Now, in English this bird is turkey. In French, it's la dinde (literally, the bird from India); in Russian, it's indyook (probably a loan word borrowed during the period when the Russian nobility spoke French better than it spoke Russian); and in Portuguese, it's o peru--the Peruvian bird.

Now, I'm really beginning to wonder how the peoples of Europe became so confused about where this bird is actually from--especially since it's from none of these countries but is native to North America.

To Be or Not To Be

Or at least, not to be permanently. That is the question you must ask yourself anytime you deal with the equivalents of to be in Portuguese.

Portuguese has two different verbs that mean to be, and you have to use them in different situations. The first of these is ser, which is used for more "permanent" forms of being (i.e., Brazil is a large country). The other word for to be is estar, which expresses a more temporary form of being, and is used for such things as saying that you are hot or cold, or for location.

Oddly, though, Portuguese uses ser, not estar for time. I can't fathom why, since the time will certainly change.

To Have and To Hold

My Portuguese book gave me a majorly important verb conjugation today: tenar. It means to have. The equivalent in French means to hold; I imagine this will cause me some confusion for a while until I get used to it. I also suspect it will show up in verb conjugations, just as to have does in English and avoir does in French.
The verb conjugates as follows:

Eu tenho I have
voce tem You have
ele tem He has / It has
ela tem She has / It has
Nos temos We have
Voces tem You all have
Eles tem They (masculine or mixed) have
Elas tem They (feminine only) have

Just s with avoir in French, tenar in Portugues is used for some things for which English uses to be, namely:

1. Age. That's right. In Portuguese, as in French, your age is something you have, not something you are. I wonder if speakers of these languages regard advancing years as an accomplishment, rather than a deformity. The number of beautiful young things popping out of the pages of French fashion magazines does not suggest this is likely, however.
2. Fear. These also have me waxing philosophical. I wonder if these cultures understand fear as something you have and thus choose to hold onto. Do Brazilians have a lower instance of anxiety disorders?
3. Hunger and thirst. I wonder if Brazilians and French people have a saner attitude toward food than we Americans. Maybe this is the secret that explains how the French can eat so much cheese and drink so much wine without getting fat.
4. Rightness. In Portuguese, when you're having an argument with someone, you don't say, "I'm right"; you say, "I have reason." As yet, I haven't learned how to say "I'm wrong."

My book is getting into a new unit dealing with disease and medicine. This has me wondering if I'm now going to learn what the Portuguese attitude toward body parts. French somehow manages to disembody your body; a Frenchman cannot say, "I opened my eyes" but must rather say, "I opened myself at the eyes", because in French body parts cannot be used with possessive adjectives. I'm curious as to whether Portuguese shares this peculiarity.

Word Count Today: 239 known, 26 unknown.

The French Connection

When I taught English in Russia, one of the tasks I often had to perform was that of conducting language tests for new students. New students at my school were given a written and an oral test, the latter of which was my responsibility to administer. One of the challenges of adminstering these tests was getting students to understand that the test was not to judge them but simply to find the right class for them.

As you might expect, prospective students were all over the map in their ability to speak English. A few had never studied the language before and had been sent to me for testing by mistake (our school had a policy of not wasting absolute beginners' time with a test that would only show that they were, after all, absolute beginners). Others had such mastery of English that I wondered why they felt they needed an English class at all. Most, however, fell somewhere in between--usually having had some English in school but either having forgotten it, not used it, for now having a need to improve or prove their level (usually for employment purposes).

Our school would always ask students what background they had in foreign languages--not just English, but any foreign language. Quite a few had studied either French or German before they came to us. One or two had Spanish.

So, at this outset, as I become a new student of Portuguese, I am giving my language-learning background, which--though I do say so myself--is diverse if not terribly extensive. It has also included a variety of techniques, from the traditional grammar-translation method (more on this later) to more recent communicative approaches to self-study.

I first studied a foreign language on any regular basis, and in any serious way, in eighth grade. In eighth grade, I started attending a small boarding school in St. Louis, Missouri. By small, I mean very small: we had all of seventy students in six grades (seventh through twelfth). My graduating class was considered large: it had fourteen people in it. The school had a fairly traditional language-arts curriculum that required all students to take Latin, Greek, and a modern foreign language--the last being a choice of French or Italian.

At school, I took a year of Latin. This is all I was able to take; Latin was offered to seventh- and eighth-grade students only. A new student entering in the eighth grade, such as I, took a year of Latin before starting in on Greek. I remember liking Latin a great deal, doing reasonably well in it, and regretting that I was forced to switch to Greek--a language I remember having a great deal of trepidation about because--gasp--it had that funny alphabet.

That funny alphabet, it turned out, was the least of my worries. Within a month of starting Greek, I remember swearing to anyone who would listen that I hated the language and would never do anything useful with it. Somehow, though, I managed to make reasonably good grades in Greek, enough so that I was able to skip second-year Greek and move straight into third-year.

Latin and Greek are what scholars term dead languages--meaning, languages no longer spoken by living people as their native tongue. The main reasons for people to learn them are either to develop a better understanding of their own languages (this is true for speakers of many European languages, which are chock full of Greek and Latin borrowings) or to delve into Latin and Greek literature. Naturally, my school's Greek curriculum was focused on literature. I recall translating the entire first book of the Iliad, as well as one of Plato's dialogues and possibly bits of the New Testament. What we call ancient Greek actually consists of multiple dialects, none of which ever achieved enough cachet to become the standard version of the language. So a student of Greek ends up having to contend with two or three dialects, at least.

As I was struggling through third-year Greek, I was breezing my way through first-year French. A consensus existed in my French class that any student who was spending more than 20 minutes a night on French was throwing time away; it was that easy. Second-year French took more than 20 minutes a night, but I enjoyed it thoroughly and did extremely well in it--so well, in fact, that my teacher had me enter a French essay contest that I won handily, twice. The second time I won it, I hadn't studied the language in a year.

I was sufficiently confident of my French that I proceeded to do nothing with it all through university. Well, almost nothing. I did end up fulfilling my college language requirement in it, though not until I had already tried my luck at Russian. Readers of my other blog know the story of my college Russian studies--which I attempted to take from a native speaker not of English, not of Russian, but of Italian. Despite grandiose dreams of one day reading Dostoevsky in the original, I gave up on Russian after one semester, a bad case of the flu the day of my final exam, and a C-plus.

I did, however, take a year of college Hebrew, for religious treasons. This was a disappointment to me in two respects: first, it was Modern Hebrew (the variant spoken in modern Israel), n0t the language of the Bible; and second, my one attempt to use it on a trip to Israel resulted in someone firing back that the bathrooms were on my right--in English.

My only language-learning experiences post-college has been my work on Russian last year, in preparation for going to Russia. I bought a Teach Yourself Russian course and worked on it, haphazardly and irregularly, until I got to Russia. I prepared flashcards, color-coded them--and then completely ignored them when I was in the only situation in life I am ever likely to have a chance to learn this beautiful yet incredibly difficult language. My main reason for neglecting my studies was that, almost all the time I was with Russian people, I was teaching them English, or they were eager to practice their English. So my Russian never really found a purpose.

French, however, has turned out (not surprisingly) to be an excellent springboard into Portuguese. A few weeks ago, I was staying at a hostel in Boston when I happened to strike up a conversation with a Frenchman who was visitng the United States. Though embarassed at how rusty my French has gotten, I was able to carry on conversation with him, only occasionally having to ask sheepishly for a word here or there. Starting off with Portuguese, I find myself constantly saying, "Oh year--just like French."

Portuguese and French look so much alike because they come from the common source of Latin. Latin's daughter languages--known to linguists as the Romance languages--include not only commonly-taught Spanish, French, Italian and less-often-taught Portuguese, but also real rare birds like Occitan (also known as Provencal, as it's spoken in the Provence region of France), Romanian, and Romansch (one of Switzerland's four official languages). There has also been quite a bit of borrowing among these languages, so a fair amount of similarity is not surprising to find.

Of the Romance languages, scholars believe that Portuguese actually preserves more of Latin's verb conjugation system than any other language.

So learning Portuguese is, in a way, helping me re-learn French. More on that later.

La Lingua, Frankly

I have never been any nearer to Brazil or Portugal than my grandmother's condominium in Pompano Beach, Florida. I have never met anyone from Brazil or Portugal. Until recently, I knew very little about either country and had no particular reason to want to learn it. So why do I now suddenly find myself with a stack of Portuguese vocabulary flashcards, a Living Language "teach yourself" Brazilian Portuguese book, and a notebook in which to record important grammar points?

By way of answering these questions, allow me to introduce myself. My old friends doubtless know me as the creator of http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com, in which I wrote of my adventures and misadventures teaching English as a Foreign Language first in Taiwan, then in Russia. In September, I am heading off to the University of Pennsylvania, to pursue a master's program in Intercultural Communication. My original aim in seeking this degree was to prepare myself for a career as a foreign students' advisor, but the degree is versatile, and I may end up using it to go on and do research in applied linguistics.

My project of learning Portuguese grows out of two main sources. The first source is some conversations I had with fellow teachers in Russia about difficulties trying to learn Russian. Despite having a strong interest in learning Russian when I came to Russia, I never really did so, for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones being the poor quality of the teaching materials available to me. As a teacher of English as a foreign language these days, you get to use some of the best foreign langauge teaching materials available anywhere. The books from which we taught were highly visual, focused on practical commuication, and chock full of activities that, more than once, got my students to say, "Great Lesson!"--in great English.

When I turned to Russian, however, I found that the materials available could only with great charity be described as deadly. Part of this stemmed, I knew, from the difference between Russian and Western educational techniques. But a greater part of it is that (at least, it seems to me) the wealth of information researchers have collected about how to teach English as a Foreign Language have yet to be adequately applied to the teaching of other foreign languages. I will go into more depth about this in a later post. But to make a long story short, some friends and I had the idea of creating textbooks and materials for other languages similar to the books we used in our English classes.

My first reason for taking up a new foreign language, then, is to get a very good sense of what can be achieved, with diligence and effort, using one of the leading "do-it-yourself" language systems available. I wanted to start a new language totally from scratch to find out better what these materials are like from the student's perspective. This will give me a better sense of whether this textbook project is viable.

My second reason for learning Portuguese is an idea I've had recently about pursing a history PhD at some point in my life. Over the past few years, I've developed an intellectual interest in the history of slavery in the Americas. One thing I learned about this history is that, horrifying as the United States' experience with slavery was, an even more horrifying story of human bondage played itself out in Brazil. Historians estimate that, of the twelve million or so Africans brought as slaves to the Americans, around four millon ended up in Brazil. If I am ever to study this history in more depth, I will likely have to become fluent in Portuguese.