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.