Trouble learning Portuguese?

I have a solution

There is no reason for this other than it still amuses me many years later.

Listen, I know I’m a stuck record. If you’ve ever read much of what I’ve written about us bloody foreigners in Portugal, you’ll know that I wish that everybody just learned the language. EVERYBODY. I know that lots of people think it’s difficult, but it really isn’t THAT hard. I even see Portuguese people on the net saying “oh, Portuguese is really hard!” Stop doing that! If you tell people that, they’ll believe you and not try. It’s like maths at my school. It was the thing at my school to say “oh, I hate maths, it’s so haaaaard!” making other kids think it was hard. For some, maybe it was, but at my crappy school, it was cool to appear to be thick. Made me crazy. I hated that place.

I want everybody in Portugal to learn Portuguese because a. it’s a beautiful language and b. life is 900 times easier and more fun if you can communicate fully with your friends and the tax office, so I thought I’d tell you about “my journey” in Portuguese. Please don’t tell anyone I just said “my journey”.

I arrived in Portugal to live having absorbed the Hugo Portuguese in Three Months in the space of two weeks, while heavily pregnant at 29. I was sure it would set me up and I could hit the ground running.

I could not. I arrived and didn’t understand a word of what anybody was saying. Theoretically, I knew the grammar and some basic usable, vocabulary. That Hugo book is a very good primer. If you like systems and codes like I do, it’s a very good base to start from, but the Portuguese don’t speak nice and slowly like they did on the tapes that came with the book.

“bom dia. gostaria de falar. com. o gerente. se. faz. favor.”

“com. certeza minha senhora.”

The Portuguese speak really fast. The Portuguese take vowels and smoosh them between consonants, and take other vowels for long walks around a diphthong, which may have its own syllables. The position of a vowel or an accent changes the sound of it. An A can be an uh, an aaah, an a! or an AAAH, but never an AY. The sound of an E when not an AY is often the sound of silence, and the sound of an O at the end of a word is usually the almost noiseless puckering of lips. Stick a tilde (~) on an A or an O and you have to have been born hearing them or have an anomaly (*waves*) to be able to hear or reproduce them. I know SO many people who have been here SO long and cannot reproduce an à (a-silent-ng), ÃO (ow-silent-ng) or an ÕE (oyw-silent-ng), which isn’t helpful as about 86% of words use one of these (ok, that’s an inflação of the real number). The sound of a hard R (that being the first R of a word, or an RR) change a bit from region to region, from a French-like RRRRRRR in some places, to a Scottish sounding CCCHHHHH (as in loch) in most other places, so you just have to pick one you CAN do and let people mock you your whole life for not getting it right.

In my first few months here, I was at home with my tiny baby (who’s going to be TWENTY SIX THIS YEAR) and sometimes I would look after my then 6 year old niece after school while her parents worked. She could understand some of what I said in English, because, sensibly, most Portuguese TV doesn’t dub foreign languages, only TV for tiny kids, so the sound of English was often in her earshot. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. “Kiyorasshsowng?” she asked me one day, and I looked at her blankly. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Catarina!!!” I said, frustrated. She laughed her head off, delighted to be confounding an adult. She then just repeated it over and over again. I was lost. Finally, she decided to help her new aunt out. “Kee - orash - sowng?” I still didn’t get it. She pointed at a clock, and raised her hands in a theatrical question. OH!!!! Que. What. Horas. hours. São. Are they? What time is it?

If only she had just said Que. Horas. São. I would have got it. Eventually. But she spoke like a normal person and not a language learning cassette.

The Que, normally Kuh, eliding with a vowel (the O of horas, because the H doesn’t have much of a place in this society) becomes Kee, so in this case, Kee-yora. The S at the end of horas is a SH but elides with the S of the São to make one SHS sound. All this time later, I remember that whole afternoon, because a six year old helped me with a key to unlock Portuguese; that I needed to listen to and learn whole phrases before I could start to recognise all the contractions and elisions that make up spoken Portuguese. Thanks Catarina!

My then mother-in-law, as superstitious as any good catholic woman of her generation, was incapable of talking about ANYTHING in the future without appending “sedeyooshkeesair” to it. “see you later, ssedeyooshkeesair!” I understood the context, as I could decipher the word “Deus” in there, and understood that she was saying something like “God willing”, said in case God was outraged at her presumption that any one of us might be alive to be seen later. Only when I saw “se Deus quiser” written down in a subtitle one day did I understand that she did in fact mean “God willing”, or rather “If God will will”. That whole business unlocked the personal infinitive for me, the quiser part.

The only English grammar I was ever taught at school were the very basics in primary school: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and at secondary school: punctuation, etc., etc. The semi-colon can do one, though. Life’s too short. I only knew about subjunctives because of French and German, and never connected them to subjunctives in English (because as clever as I think I am, I sometimes miss HUGE THINGS in front of me). I knew we were supposed to say “If I were to…” but I didn’t know that was a subjunctive, I thought I was just being nicely spoken, like using “you and I” and “you and me” in the right places. Have you noticed how many TV scripts have people saying things like “things haven’t always been great between you and I”? It makes my teeth itch. Anyway, most subjunctives in English are the same as the indicative, so you can forgive a kid for not getting it until she learns Portuguese fifteen years after she left school.

Piece by piece, stilted conversation by stilted conversation, I got more words down, more grammar recorded in my head, and tried hard to remember all the non obvious gendered words like “internet”, which is feminine. I know this deep in my soul because of my children’s shrieking at me every time I got it wrong “MUMMY, IT’S A INTERNET, NOT O INTERNET, GOD!!”. I can only assume because it’s a rede, a net, and that’s feminine. In fact, I don’t care if that’s the reason or not. It’s MY reason, and making up my own reasons for things helps me remember them.

Sometimes, people would laugh at me. I had to suck it up. Sometimes, especially in the village, I could say 99% of something absolutely correctly, until I said one word wrong and then people would shut down and decide that I was talking gibberish and not understand me.

We spoke only English at home, so the girls would have plenty of English, while everything else in their lives was Portuguese. Their family, their friends and their school. I had to deal with kindergarten and school and shopping and bureaucracy and car stuff… and in-laws, in Portuguese, without any help, and I mangled every bit of it… but it only took a couple of years to get NOT TERRIBLE at Portuguese. It took a bit longer to be able to sit at a typical dinner table and be able to decipher six conversations at once. It took even longer to fix little bits of idiomatic small talk punctuations, that differ from group to group, little expressions that don’t make sense, but that keep conversation flowing.

I was rigid in being polite and not calling anyone TU unless I was sure we were friends, until I just couldn’t be arsed any more. I just reckoned, fuck it. Of course, this was only for people more or less in my circle, social and work. If someone older came along who wasn’t a friend, family or work colleague, I’d be proud of myself for calling them a senhora, o senhor, but never VOCÊ, as I was told never ever to use that, especially to my mother in law. In some circles, it’s perfectly acceptable, in some it’s downright common, or presumptuous. However, posh old ladies and wannabe posh old ladies can be heard calling babies VOCÊ which I find utterly horrible, but hey, that’s me. Some couples call each other você (as in Portuguese, not Brazilian, couples) which just makes me wonder what their sexy time talk is like.

After a few years, I made a point of only speaking Portuguese to my Portuguese friends, even though most of them speak English and eventually I found that I could call myself what I like to call pretty bloody fluent.

So, looking back, I guess I gamified learning a bit. I broke it down into chunks, one issue at a time. Add to that the many situations that I couldn’t avoid, the schools, the mechanic, the mother in law, where nothing but Portuguese would do.

Portuguese grammar is not very different from English grammar or French grammar, and while the rules are the rules are the rules, you can mix it up a bit with word order, something you can’t do in English. The same for pronunciation. 98% of the time, you can be sure how to pronounce a word having seen it written down. You can’t say that about English.

My advice, if you want it, is find your own way, make it make sense to you, break it into pieces, make it a game, invent reasons, or be curious about the real reasons for words and their etymology, but above all, and I know this might be a bit difficult, find yourself a Portuguese mother in law that lives less than 300 metres away.