Speaking Portuguese

My old friend Howard Grabois made a comment after my last post – “I notice that you often comment on folk’s ability or lack thereof in English. How’s it going with your Portuguese?”

I’ve been trying to speak Portuguese as much as I can. I used a combination of software, online sites, and audio books to teach myself the language. I also took some conversational classes one-on-one with a tutor who lives in Sétubal, but this was difficult to manage due to the time differences.

I’ve been wanting to learn Portuguese for a long time, because I think it’s a beautiful language. I had what I felt was an advantage going in for two reasons:

• I already spoke moderately good Spanish, and the languages are similar (although by no means the same!)
• I naturally have a good ear for accents

Portuguese and Spanish are Latin-based languages that grew up right next to each other, although differences in environment and separation by political and geographic features have led them to evolve into distinct tongues. Luckily, the grammar is almost identical, so the whole conjugating verbs and assigning gender thing is something I’m familiar with.

The vocabulary also has a huge pool of words which are recognizably the same, or at least similar – especially as written. I’d guesstimate that about 70% of the dictionary are noticeably the same words. “Como está?” means exactly the same thing in both languages.

It’s the pronunciation that sets the languages apart … in Portuguese, this would be “Koom shtah?” (more or less).

There are some tricks to learning Romance languages that English-speakers can take advantage of that will immediately give you a vocabulary of thousands of words.

Words that end in “…tion” (revolution, vacation, invitation) are almost always the same with the exception of the ending. In Portuguese, you replace it with “…ção,” which as soon as you learn how to pronounce (“sow” and then sort of swallow an “MN” at the end) gives you a big batch of words.

A lot of those words also have regular verb forms which you can get by cutting off the “ção” and adding “-ar,” although this doesn’t always work – “to invite” isn’t “invitar,” it’s convitar or solicitar.

Reading Portuguese is easier than speaking it, especially if you can read Spanish. You just need to know certain orthographical conventions – in Portuguese, “lh” is the same as “ll” in villa, “nh” is “ñ” in cañon, and a few more.

In Spanish, you pronounce every letter of words – they’re pronounced the way they’re spelled. Spoken Portuguese is like French in that there are a lot of letters that go missing … “E claro que” (“For sure!”) comes out as “’klar kay.”

I officially have a vocabulary of about 700 words, and I can do basic verb conjugations for present, future, and two different past tenses. So, why do I keep asking if people speak English?

Reason number one – people here talk really, really fast. One of my most used phrases is, “Desculpe, mas pode o senhor falar mais devegar?” (I’m sorry, but can you [the mister, the polite way to say “you” to a man you don’t know] speak more slowly?)

Reason number two – I can make myself understood in simple exchanges, and I’m really good at paraphrasing to get my point across, but my vocabulary does not include technical or business terms, and there are a lot of colloquialisms you don’t get out of any book. When the woman at the electric company started talking about the discount program that would be available if I signed up for some additional service, I got lost pretty quick.

Now, with practice and time, I think I’ll be OK – but I was absolutely not as well-prepared as I hoped to be. I’m safe in emergencies, or at restaurants or the grocery, but I’ll know I’ve made it when I can tell the leprechaun joke.

Kristie is still at a basic pleasantries level, but she’s going to start lessons when the language school reopens this month, plus we’ll probably get her a private tutor as well. I’m also planning on restarting conversational lessons, which will be a lot easier now that I’m on the same time zone as all the European Portuguese tutors.

And yes – there is a difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese, but I don’t think it’s any bigger than the difference between US and UK English. Some of the words are different, and the accent is distinct, but I can understand one as well as the other.

In case you’re interested – there’s a video of someone reading Fernando Pessoa’s “Mar Português” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFD9ztnMnH0 with the words shown, so you can compare written to spoken. I will tell you, this woman is reading very slowly and clearly!