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Se fala Portunhol

I've still got a lot of blogging to catch up on from my Brazil trip and perhaps the topic I've neglected worst is my effort to get a running start in Portuguese.

My hosts tell me that my Portuguese noticeably improved in the week I was there, which must be a testimony to how bad it was to start with. I've had the "Como vai? Tudo bem? Tudo bem!" pleasantries down for months, but I'm still hard pressed to put more than three words together correctly. I have the blessing and curse of entering the game speaking Spanish, which means I'm lulled into thinking I know what's going on but when I open my mouth what comes out tends to be Portunhol.

Not wanting to lug around a pile of textbooks, I flew to Rio armed only with a phrasebook from Lonely Planet and a thin reference grammar from Dover. Lonely Planet Brazilian Portuguese turned out to be mostly of entertainment value. Although it is a marvel of organization, it's jam-packed with errors, right down to misspelling the name of the language on the first page of the introduction (sorry, guys, it's português, not portugûes!). To its credit its opening "Tools" section does a better job of presenting grammatical information to linguistic naifs than anything I've ever seen -- the future tense is covered in a section titled "planning ahead", followed alphabetically by the label "plural: see more than one". But as reference books go it is good beach reading: the chapter on "Romance" alone is worth the cover price. Its handy sections cover the full life-cycle of a tourist fling, from "pick-up lines" and "getting closer" through "sex" and "love" to "problems" and "leaving". The section on sex includes the eminently sensible phrases "It helps to have a sense of humour" and "Don't worry, I'll do it myself". (However, they seem to have omitted the essential phrase, "Have you seen my missing kidney?") My only question (other than why they didn't hire a Brazilian proofreader) is this: although it looks like Lonely Planet cranks these things out from a well-designed template, do you suppose the Arabic edition is this complete?

Essential Portuguese Grammar by Alexander da R. Prista, on the other hand, was exactly what I needed to read on the plane down. The gushing reviews on Amazon are accurate: it's a clear, concise, just-the-facts-ma'am traditional grammar for people who already know their participles from their preterite and preferably have a good grasp of one or more Romance languages. It shouldn't be mistaken for a complete course -- it has only half a page on phonology, it points out few distinctions between European and Brazilian Portuguese, and it's so compact in its presentation that you can read in a minute what may take hours of drill to really absorb. Still, none of the textbooks on my shelf cover as many nooks and crannies of the verb tenses before page 350, if at all.

Lonely Planet BrazilianPortuguese Essential Portuguese Grammar

But back to my personal struggle with Portuguese. As I've said, my every sentence threatens to be word salad tossing together Portuguese with Spanish, some Italian and occasionally a little Gujarati. The worst is not when I use Spanish or badly guessed Portuguese vocabulary; I don't feel bad if I sometimes turn Spanish hambre into fame [sic] instead of fome. No, the worst is that I don't seem to be able to shed Spanish's informal second-person even though Portuguese uses você for informal purposes (which corresponds to Spanish's formal Usted in verb conjugations). Similarly, I can't seem to get it through my skull that a gente with a third-person singular conjugation is the preferred way to say "we" (a gente does not mean generic "people" as la gente does in Spanish) or that formal "you" is accomplished by a third-person o Senhor/a Senhora. Ai caramba! (In fact, so much is piled into the third-person verb forms that I'd say Portuguese is on its way to becoming like Esperanto, without inflections by person; all it needs is a third-person circumlocution for saying "I" to flatten the verb tables to a single line.)

Now that I've scared away everyone but my fellow students of Portuguese, it's time to dump a bunch of Portuguese language bookmarks I've been saving up.

Divirta-se!
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