Cколько зим, сколько лет

Loosely translated, that's a Russian expression that means it's been a while, as in it's been a long time since my last post. 

Why would I use a Russian saying on a blog about Brazilian Portuguese? Well, I've been spending part of the time that I have *not* been devoting to this blog attempting to re-acquire a certain skill level in Russian, a language which I studied for several years in college. Here's how it happened:

After I finished all three levels of the Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese program, I continued with my study of Portuguese, using some of the other learning materials that I've written about in my posts about the language. It soon struck me that my skills in Brazilian Portuguese, however limited they may be (and they *are* limited), were nonetheless superior to my skills in languages that I had actually studied in university courses, with a teacher, for grades and credit.  

I'm not blaming anyone for this, but from what I have heard from other Americans who have studied foreign languages in school or at the university level, this is not an uncommon situation. The perception (accurate, as it turns out) that Americans suffer from a foreign language deficit has always interested me, and I have written a post about it here. 

But I digress. The good news is that once I realized that I had acquired a higher level of conversational ability in Brazilian Portuguese, studying on my own, I decided to see how difficult it would be to re-ignite my abilities in languages I had studied formally.  

I started with Spanish, for several reasons, the first being its many similarities to Portuguese.  Of course, those surface similarities had caused me a great deal of difficulty when I started learning Portuguese, mainly due to the challenging differences in pronunciation. But once I had made it past a certain point, my knowledge of Spanish was quite helpful.  

I had to unlearn some things as I worked my way through Spanish audio lessons. All those Portuguese nasals that I had worked so hard to conquer had to be left aside as I repeated phrases and sentences in Spanish. I also realized that the intonation for questions is quite different in the two languages. In Portuguese, the voice tends to rise on the next-to-last word or syllable in the sentence. For example, in the question "Você entende?" (Do you understand?), the voice rises on the syllable "-en-" right before the "-de" at the end. In Spanish, the question would be "¿Entiende?" (or the familiar form "¿Entiendes?") and the voice rises on the final syllable, as in English.  

But I was very pleasantly surprised with how quickly Spanish was coming back to me. I had figured that much of what I had learned in the past was irretrievably lost and that I would have to start at base one. 

After I finished all of the Spanish lessons, I decided to see if I could resurrect my Russian. This was going to be harder, because it had been much longer since I had used Russian, and it shares little in common with Portuguese aside from the fact that both are Indo-European languages.  At least, so I thought.  Imagine my surprise when I realized that I was hearing a similar intonation pattern for Russian questions as I had heard for Portuguese!  Using the same example of the question "Do you understand?", the Cyrillic looks like this: "Bы понимаете?", which is "Vy ponimayetye?" when transliterated (I'm not following the exact, official rules of transliteration) or in my own phonetic rendition, "Vy puh-nee-my-uh-tyuh?". In this sentence, the voice rises quite dramatically on the syllable "my", even more than in Portuguese.  The first fews times I heard native speakers asking questions in Russian, it sounded as if they were interrogating someone in a darkened room somewhere in the KGB headquarters. I even found an item online that explained that speakers of English sometimes think that a Russian is being rude when asking a question, simply because of the intonation.  

All of this is exactly the sort of thing that I love about learning a foreign language. You are not just learning a new set of letters and pronunciations, you're learning about the culture, and even about the way that people think. 

Like many Americans, I grew up thinking that languages like French or Italian were inherently more pleasant to the ear or even more romantic (in the amorous, not the linguistic sense of the word) than a language like German, with its (to my obviously biassed ears) harsher consonants and clipped diction.  I know that sounds naive, and it was, but I also know that I'm not alone. Think about the way that foreigners are portrayed in American films or TV shows. If you want a character to be a bad guy, just give him a German accent, and the job is done. If you want him to be a lover, have him speak with a French or Italian accent. On a darker note, if you want him to be a humble laborer or the downright slow-witted type, slap a Mexican accent on him, have him wear a sombrero, and the message will get through. This last stereotype is gradually giving way in the face of the huge influx of Latino immigrants to the US, but it still crops up.

Meanwhile, even though I'm currently focusing my language learning on Russian, I am by no means done with Brazilian Portuguese. In fact, my obsession with Brazilian music continues to grow, and I am finding that Brazilian music and movies are adding a lot to my still rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese. As with other languages that I have studied, I am able to read Portuguese with a higher level of fluency than I can speak or understand it when it's spoken, but even when reading, I'm amazed at the number of words, phrases, and especially idioms that I do not know and cannot figure out on my own.  But I'm not giving up!