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.
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