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.