You Even Have Little Brazil Stickers!
Portuguese is one of my favorite languages, and teenage Savannah would never have guessed this. I’ve written here before how I had never been interested in Portuguese until I fell madly in love with Fernando Pessoa. It is a dream of mine to read The Book of Disquiet in its native tongue. And it is a new dream of mine to visit Portugal and Brazil and chatter away with someone, anyone, in Portuguese.
Once I went to Santa Fe with my mother to work in a coffee shop. I waited at her place of work for the coffee shop to open. Her boss and great friend, Eric, saw me with my Portuguese journal and my stickers that I was using to decorate it, and he exclaimed, “You even have little Brazil stickers!” I do. I found them at Michael’s. I have a Cristo Redentor sticker, a coffee mug sticker, and a tiny flag.
I am having the time of my life with this language.
Because I am studying it concurrently with Spanish, it is such a beautiful experience to see these twins, how they are similar, how they diverge. I love the way Portuguese experiences nasalization, the way the [r] is not the same [r] as in Spanish. It is almost as though the two are on opposite sides of a big, expansive mirror, looking at each other with the admiration of a lover looking on their beloved. They look so similar, but one wears red and the other yellow.
In the last few weeks, the cats and I have been going over irregular verbs. Perhaps it is strange to admit, but I love conjugating verbs. Verbs are among my favorite word classes (well, let’s just bump them up to favorites). This has been a fairly straightforward process because the conjugation and vocabulary is almost identical to the Spanish verbs I have encountered in the wild. I may or may not have talked about it on these blogs, but I compiled a list of 2400 essential words to know in any target language that holds my attention. There are three hundred verbs on that list, ranging from to love and to reverse engineer. The reason the latter is included is so I can talk more confidently about my research. But there are also abstract nouns, words related to the body or nature or professions. I printed the list and took it to be laminated, and I consult it every time I make a vocabulary list to later transform into a set of flashcards with which to quiz myself.
I am fortunate to have a great many people around me who speak Spanish, but not so many who speak Portuguese. With hope, I will meet some new friends in graduate school — it’s coming up in two weeks! — and I can learn from them. Learning a language is the purest form of fun.
With practicing speaking, I have two resources that I work from. The first is DuoLingo and the second is Rosetta Stone. For the record, Portuguese in Rosetta Stone is, like its French program, very particular. If the software asks you to pronounce a word, nothing less than perfection is accepted, while you can pretty much butcher Persian and it will give you the green light (I know because I’ve tried).
When I face anxiety, which happens a lot, I like to turn to Portuguese in particular. Something is very comforting about this language, the way it feels like the right fit because of Spanish. I feel at ease. My goal is, by October, to be at B1 proficiency, which I think is quite doable.
And then it is on to Fernando Pessoa, author of my very love of words. If the translation into English is this exquisite, how much more joyful and beautiful and powerful it must be in Portuguese! The words are like a fine sonata on a viola, deep and amber. This is what propels me onward, the love of great beauty, which I have come to associate with this language that I never intended to sit with as friends. For the rest of the day today, I am going to be working on Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and Spanish. There is nothing I enjoy more than language, after all.
