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.