notes
Monday, 10 February 2003Learning Portuguese
Tonight I attended my first Portuguese lesson at a local evening college. The lessons are two hours with a five minute break.
The aim of this little site is to track my lessons and hopefully, progress learning this new language. I hope to use the site to develop a clear trail to be able to re-trace my meanderings around and through the language and its culture.
Our teacher is very animated. We jumped into the language, if not at the deep end, at least where we had to tread water a little. After introductory questions like
Como é seu nome? and answers like:
Meu nome é Stephen.
one of the next things we learnt to ask was:
Por que você quer aprender português?
And perhaps not so surprisingly the main reason was a 'namorada' or a 'namorado'. At least 20 of the 25 students were there so they could learn to communicate with a lover!
What we also quickly discovered was that we were learning Brazilian Portuguese! This came as a shock to the majority who were keen to whisper sweet nothings with a continental flavour rather than to a samba rhythm. So we're effectively learning two languages for the price of one! We're getting the low-down on the differences albeit from the Brazilian perspective. We get to say many of our new words twice if the pronunciation is different, and if there's a 't' in the word, you can be sure it will be!
Amazingly this is not an annoyance to anyone, mainly because of the bubbly enthusiasm of our teacher, Sandra.
