Living in Brazil

Last week I finally finished lesson 30 of Pimsleur’s unit 3, which is the 90th and final half hour lesson of the series.  I’ve listened to most lessons 2-4 times in the past, and still have the final five to listen to a second or third time, and am reviewing some from the second and third unit now.

I thought it might be useful to let people know where this gets you.

First, some disclaimers.  I’ve also done most of unit 1 of Rosetta Stone (about a year ago) and I have a private Portugese teacher I see a few hours a week when I am in Brazil.  And I’ve been living in Brazil 6-7 of the last 9 months, which includes talking to people in Portuguese, watching TV and movies with Portuguese subtitles, and occasionally trying to watch Brazilian TV and movies themselves.  I’ve also been working on reading some articles and stories in Portuguese.

So, in most ways I’m a lot more advanced than I would be if I were simply doing my Pimsleur lessons back in the U.S. and only them in an attempt to teach myself Portuguese.

Now, what Pimsleur was perfect for was its portability.  I could put the lessons on my ipod and listen to them out walking or on the bus, and I have about an hour on the bus any day I go to work on campus.  I do more mumbling to myself than speaking while doing the lessons.  I like Rosetta Stone but don’t like being tied to a computer to do it (although I hear that newer versions have a portable portion now), and while I liked being able to subscribe, sometimes internet connections are not so cheap or reliable.

So, where am I with the Portuguese?

Not fluent, that’s for sure, but much improved.  My vocabulary is very limited although I do know a lot of forms, tenses, etc. and can say all sorts of things correctly.  I think it would be very difficult if not impossible to learn Portuguese without being able to listen to it one way or another as the pronunciation is tricky.  I tend to have a lot of trouble with words that are very similar to the English words because the pronunciation is often so different.  I was once beffudled by a couple of girls talking about this famous movie they couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen.  It was called, phoenetically, CHEE-TAN-EE-KAY.

That’s “Titanic” to you and me.

Now, I have to say that the Pimsleur system, asking in English (sometimes Portuguese) for me to say things in Portuguese and following conversations, with good review of old words and slow introduction of new words, works.  I’ve mastered most of the Pimsleur vocabulary, but it is far from complete, and some aspects of how things work are a little mysterious still.  Additional referencs may prove useful.

Also, parts of it are kind of old fashioned, or are particularly suited to business travelers rather than someone living in Brazil every day.  I asked my Portuguese teacher about a few things and she confirmed to me that no, no one tends to be as formal as some expressions I had learned from Pimsleur.

I definitely needed to review many lessons more than once, and when I took a few weeks off I felt the need to review more restarting.

Being busy though and having something useful to do on bus rides, where I’ve been warned not to pull out an expensive laptop computer in plain sight, makes Pimsleur a winner for me.   I mean, over the past 8 months I’ve spent the equivalent of 3-4 full time work weeks on just the Pimsleur, and I finished them, which pleases me.  I wish there was a unit 4 for me to listen to now — I still have a couple of months more of bus rides here, and the review will get old pretty soon.

I can usually hold up my end of a one-on-one conversation pretty well, although sometimes the lack of a wide vocabulary for some topics is a problem.  A bigger problem is just listening and following someone else who uses a much larger vocabulary than I have, along with slang and verb forms I don’t know or don’t know well.  When I watch TV in Portuguese, I can pick out a lot of individual words, but unless the conversation is simple I can’t keep up with it for very long and put it all together.

I should also say that real-life Brazilians don’t speak as clearly as the voices on Pimsleur.  Furthermore, there is a wide range of accents and ways of pronouncing things here, and that full range is not present in Pimsleur (although they do have at least 4 different native speakers on the lessons).

To be honest, I thought I would know more and be more fluent after finishing Pimsleur.  I’m not unhappy with my progress, but still feel like I can’t tell people “I speak Portugese” without qualification.  I can watch and understand a Brazilian movie in Portuguese, but only with the Portuguese subtitles turned on to let me read along.

I have to put in more time, especially listening.  Probably reading too, which will help more with the vocabulary as I can look up things in a dictionary.

I am sure that if I took three months, doing a lesson a day, and then visited Brazil for the first time I’d be able to be understood about simple things, but I would probably find it nearly impossible to understand what anyone was saying around me most of the time.

I was watching TV the other night, Globo, a Brazilian channel, trying to get better about understanding spoken Portuguese and the movie Spanglish came on.  If you don’t know this movie, it’s about an illegal from Mexico trying to make it in southern California with her daughter and her involvement on multiple levels with the rich American family she works for.  It’s a good, complex movie with all sorts of levels, about love and family and identity, and the acting is good, too.

One of the key points about the movie is that the woman doesn’t speak English, only Spanish, at the beginning.  A lot of the movie is about communication between parents and children, men and women, and different cultures.  And problems with communication and learning how to speak to each other.

This movie was dubbed into Portuguese, and the Spanish parts were left untranslated as in the original English version (your experience watching this movie probably varies a lot depending on what langauges you speak).  Anyway, as you probably know Portuguese and Spanish are not so different.  Some things, totally different, some things similar with small differences, and quite a few things identical save perhaps for accent or pronunciation.

There’s a key scene where the mother is furious with the male head of the household and is ranting at him, with her daughter translating for her from Spanish into…Portuguese.  I was struck watching this how ridiculous this movie was dubbed into Portuguese when the  daughter simply repeated almost exactly, word for word, what her mother had said so that the man could understand.  I mean, WTF?  Lots of disbelief you have to suspend here.

Another problem I’ve noticed watching TV, more with subtitled comedies from the United States which I can understand better, is how often they don’t even try to translate a joke.  Some of this is cultural differences, or wordplay that works in English but not Portuguese, but I just got to wonder if the Brazilians understand why some shows are funny at all.

All in all, it is interesting how dominant American TV and movies are in Brazil, and around the world more generally, and how this probably leads to all sorts of things weirder than just missing a few jokes.  I mean, the world has this view into American life, distorted as it is by Hollywood, that Americans do not have of the rest of the world.  Even if America wasn’t dominant economically and militarily, the Hollywood machine would probably still make us look dominant, make people think about America, make people want to move there, and make some people have strong feelings about it (good and bad).

I have a furnished apartment here in Porto Alegre, but it didn’t come with any office chairs to go with the nice desks, and the sofa sleeper it did come with just plain sucks.

So, I went shopping.  There’s one of the big avenues here, Ipiringa, that has about 20-30 furniture stores (”Moveis”) all in a row along both sides.  I took my Brazilian girlfriend for language backup and started in one store and vowed to keep going until I found what I wanted.

I need to work on the Portuguese and tried to engage all the salespeople who were generally attentive and helpful.  Unfortunately I was getting a lot of “I don’t understand” in response to some of my questions.  I have an accent and sometimes I can’t string together my limited vocabularly very fast into the phrases I want, but I usually manage to communicate better.

The problem came when I asked about chairs for an office.  The world chair in Portuguses is “cadeira.”  I have problems with that “r” that is a hard “r” rather than the one pronounced like an “h.”  I can’t roll an r to save my life, at least without drinking, and I usually just fake it.  Well, I was faking it badly that day, and it was coming out sounding like “cadeia.”

“Cadeia” means “prison.”

I was there with my girlfriend asking if they had any prisons for my office.

I guess this is natural in the language acquisition process and will probably happen again with other words in more embarrassing situations.

Anyway, after a dozen stores I ended up with a fold-out “sofa-cama” (sofa bed) for $R650 (delivered) from Lewis Moveis, and a nice office chair for $R330 (an extra fee on top of that for delivery) from La Torre Moveis.  There were small sofa beds for as much as $R1000 more, but I didn’t like them much more than the one I got.  I have a small living room, and the sofa fits it well and matches the colors.  I’m happy with it.

Now I just need to figure out where I can buy a prison, like the one they had in the “Alcatraz Suite” at the motel we stayed at over New Year’s Eve…

I was talking with my friend Rob in Rio this past weekend.  He had some advice for a quick way to improve my Portuguese, explaining that I was using a lot of vowel sounds that we have in English that are not part of Portuguese.  Here is his guide:

Well in Portuguese (and also in Spanish), each vowel only has one sound. So therefore, rather than 10 vowel sounds in English, Portuguese and Spanish only have 5. The trick if you are an English speaker is to throw out the other vowel sounds because they do not exist in Portuguese.

I’ve posted before about some commercial products like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone, but wanted to point out that there are some free and extensive online resources.

An American friend recommended www.learn-portuguese-now.com, which has a lot of free lessons and other items concerning Brazilian culture.

There is a set of Foreign Service Institute language courses, including pdf texts and mp3 audio files, with Portuguese as an offering.  I think it’s old, but it isn’t like languages change that fast.

I haven’t used either too much, continuing with my private one-on-one teacher here in Porto Alegre at R$50 per hour, three hours a week, plus my own studies using Pimsleur audio lessons, which I can listen to on the commute on the bus every day.

I am an American Astronomy professor from Wyoming who has moved to Porto Alegre, Brazil to do research with collaborators.  I am also a published science fiction novelist.  I blog at www.mikebrotherton.com about science and science fiction.  Here I will blog about being an American learning to live in Brazil and other issues involving long-term international travel.

I’ve traveled to Brazil a number of times before, but never for the long-term.  I’ll be posting about visas, atms, shopping malls, movie theaters, cell phones, skype, slingboxes, apartments, flats, buses, taxis, fashion, weather, and more.  I’ll try to stay practical and give first-hand information whenever possible.

I already have some other posts on my other blog pertinent to this topic:

Learning a Language with Rosetta Stone.  Here I discuss using this popular software to learn Portuguese and compare it to Pimsleur lessons.  I’ll have more posts about learning Portuguese in different ways in the near future.

Crime in Brazil.  A couple of incidents from a trip in May.  I’ll discuss this one in the near future, too, with tips on how to avoid it.  Mostly common sense, but some specific examples of crimes here, too, from talking with my friends here.

Please be encouraged to comment and ask questions if I haven’t been clear enough.  I’m hoping this will be a handy resource for people.  I benefited a lot from talking with other Americans who have lived here and abroad in other places.

Please enjoy, and welcome to Brazil!