Speed-talking Professora: You Will Not Be Bored

Professora Motta makes a point and adjusts her hair

Yesterday, I wrote about a set of free video lessons dealing with Brazilian Portuguese grammar and usage, taught by Professora Céu Marques.

As it turns out, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and "Concurso Virtual" offers many other courses taught by a variety of teachers.

I sampled several of them, and even if you're not interested in the subject matter, it's a great chance to practice your Portuguese listening skills.

Professora Rafaela Motta will really give you a run for your money. She talks extremely quickly, slowing down only when she wants to emphasize a specific point. I found it somewhat more difficult to keep up with her than with Professora Marques, and besides the speedy delivery, Professora Motta uses her hands almost non-stop as she speaks. In between her "OKs?" and "Bellezas," she covers quite a bit of ground, and while much of it (as with Professora Marques) is fairly basic, it's a good review for anyone learning Brazilian Portuguese. (Note: in this particular lecture, the video freezes around the 6:00 mark, so you have to fast forward until it sorts itself out again). 

All of this makes for an entertaining virtual class. And with Professora Motta, there is never a dull moment, let alone a moment of silence. 

Free Course On Portuguese Grammar

There's a free video course, consisting of 26 lessons covering all kinds of topics in Brazilian Portuguese grammar and usage. The course is called "Português Em Questão," and while it seems to have been designed for native speakers, it's accessible to non-native learners as well. 

So far, I've only watched the introductory lesson (very short) and part of the first lesson, which is about 20 minutes long. 

You can access the course by "liking" it on Facebook. Once you have clicked on "Like," you'll see the first couple of lessons. You can also register (for free) to view the rest of the lessons. The only information required to register is your name, an email address, and a password.

The teacher, Céu Marques, is dynamic and the lessons move fast. The teacher speaks rapidly, but even with my rudimentary Portuguese, I am able to follow her. For one thing, she slows down when she's explaining something, and she uses visual aids throughout the lessons. 

This is definitely worth a look for anyone who has reached an intermediate level in their Portuguese studies. 

The videos are also available on YouTube. Here is the first lesson.

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! 

Why Americans Don't Speak Foreign Languages

It seems to me that Americans have a bigger struggle with foreign languages than people from most other countries, even if we have studied a foreign language in school. I can't count the number of times I have heard people say something like, "I took three years of French in college, but I don't remember a word," or "I studied German for a few years, but I could never really *speak* it enough to carry on a real conversation." And usually, these people got good grades and even enjoyed their professors and their courses, so it wasn't a question of them not doing the work.

Why is this? 

I suspect there are several factors at work. (Also take a look at this article from 2010 which covers some of the same territory, but which I read after I wrote my own thoughts about the subject). 

First of all, with languages, as with many areas of study, if you do not use it, you will lose it. In the US, you don't really have many opportunities to converse in a foreign language unless you are studying it in a classroom setting. So even if you do acquire a decent level of conversation skills, you will lose them over time unless you go out of your way to maintain them.  

Reading in the language will help you to keep your skills, but it's not the same thing as hearing and speaking the language. Foreigners learning English have more opportunities to be exposed to the spoken language, because of the widespread popularity of music, TV shows, and films from the US and other English-speaking countries. 

Second, foreign language instruction in other countries usually begins at a much earlier age than here in the US. From what I understand, it often begins in elementary school, while in the US, courses are not generally offered until middle school. While there has been a move toward making some study in a foreign language a requirement for graduation from high school, this isn't yet a national standard.

Third, time constraints require teachers and professors to focus more on reading and writing than on speaking and listening. When I studied languages at school, the first year was spent on learning (not necessarily mastering) the pronunciation, acquiring a basic vocabulary, and then an incredible amount of time on grammar. 

Don't get me wrong, I like grammar as much as the next person, in fact probably more. I am as much as visual learner as an auditory one, so I need to *see* the structure of the language by looking at things like verb conjugations, or in the case of Russian and other inflected languages, noun and adjective declensions. This sort of thing also appeals to my highly structured (some might say rigid) mind frame.

The second and third years of language study usually consisted of even more grammar, along with a major emphasis on the literature of the language we were studying. They would start us out with special anthologies geared specifically toward native speakers of English, with handy glossaries and if we were lucky, side-by-side translations or word lists keyed directly to the page we were reading. These books also usually contained long lists of questions about the text to check our comprehension, and we'd be required to write complete sentence answers to them.  That part wasn't as much fun. Sometimes, we'd discuss the literary selection in class, but that is not the sort of spoken language practice that prepares you to order lunch in a restaurant or ask where the nearest ATM is. It also does not prepare you to be able to quickly understand what a native speaker is saying.

Finally, we would be set loose on the genuine article: books or stories written in the language and published in the mother country, without any teaching notes or other aids as we plowed our way through, with only a dictionary at our sides. We would be expected to write long essays about what we had read, in the form of literary interpretations modeled on what you would do in an English or American literature course. We might be asked to write about how the author's life experiences were reflected in his or her writing, or to compare two different works by the same author, or to compare two works by two different authors, and so on. Again, there's nothing wrong with any of this, but in my case, I ended up being able to write a fairly long paper in a foreign language about the intricacies of a particular work of literature, yet unable to carry on much more than a basic conversation. Your passive vocabulary (words that you've looked up in a dictionary when writing an essay) may be pretty good, but your active vocabulary probably leveled out some time during the first or second year of instruction. 

One underlying question with all of this is why does foreign language instruction seem to be such a low priority in the United States? The obvious answer is that Americans do not learn a foreign language because we do not *have* to learn one. It's possible to travel all over the world with no knowledge of another language except English, armed at most with a phrasebook. 

Finally, there is this question: Is this necessarily even a problem? I believe that it is, because in an increasingly competitive global economy, American students are going to be at a disadvantage. Perhaps even more important, we tend to have a better understanding of a country, its people and its culture, if we have had some exposure to their language.  

But don't just take my word for it. This recent article from Forbes states that "in a shrinking world this (language deficit) reality constitutes a threat to our national security," and goes on to say that only "18% of Americans report speaking a language other than English, while 53% of Europeans (and increasing numbers in other parts of the world) can converse in a second language."

Assuming that the 18% figure includes people from bilingual homes, the number of Americans who have learned a foreign language in school would be even lower.  

As long as I'm standing on the "Learn a Foreign Language Now!" soapbox, here's another link to an article whose title is "Why Your Next CEO Shouldn't Be American." Hint: it has to do with our language deficit, and includes this interesting note: "research shows that we behave more rationally when we think in another language." Why? "The researchers think that the foreign language creates greater cognitive and emotional distance from our hard-wired biases."

Now I can point to research to prove that I'm more rational than my monolingual friends and family members. I'm sure they'll be very impressed.

New Study Suggests Anatolian Homeland for Indo-Europeans

Everyone knows that Portuguese and Spanish are closely related, with a shared vocabulary as high as 80%. Most people also know that both languages are part of the Romance language family, which also includes Italian, French, and Rumanian.  

But did you know that these languages are also related to languages as diverse as Welsh, Russian, English, Hindi, and Persian?  All of these languages, and many more, are part of a huge language family known as Indo-European.  Indo-European languages are the dominant languages in Europe, North and South America, Australia, as well as areas of western Asia. Indo-European languages are common second languages in many parts of Africa and Asia, a result of the old European colonial empires. 

This map shows how widespread Indo-European languages are. Areas in red show where Indo-European languages are spoken as the primary language:

The relationship among Indo-European languages has been clear for some time, with obvious similarities between number words, words used for family members, pronouns, and other frequently used words. In 1786, Sir William James delivered a lecture on the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian. 

This map, from "O Globo," shows the striking resemblance of three common words across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum (you will need to click on this graphic, as well as the ones that follow, in order to read it):

More examples:

The pronoun "I" in Russian is "ya," in French, "je," in Portuguese, "eu," in German, "ich", and in Latin, "ego;" the pronoun for "you" (singular familiar) in Russian is "ty," in French, "tu," in Portuguese," "tu," in German, "du," and in Latin, "tu."  

And here's a chart showing the similarities in numbers. Notice that the words for 2, 3, and 10 are almost the same across all the languages.

By applying well-accepted practices of historical linguistics, linguists have reconstructed a fairly complete proto-Indo-European language.  However, experts are divided about where the original speakers of the mother tongue first lived.  

We know that their descendants spread out to cover a huge portion of the world, and those movements are well documented in both ancient and modern history. However, the first Indo-Europeans emerged long before written history was recorded, which makes it much harder to pinpoint their original location.

Several recent articles describe the results of new research about the origin of the first speakers of proto-Indo-European. The newest research has been published by Quentin Atkinson and colleagues at  the University of Auckland in New Zealand.  Their study argues for a homeland in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

One article appeared in the New York "Times." It includes a graphic, with a map and a family tree, showing when the daughter languages separated from each other.  The map on the "Times" website is similar to this one:

Another article appeared in the "Scientific American," while a third appeared in "O Globo".

"Língua Portuguesa" on Facebook: Follow It!

Photo from "Língua Portuguesa" Facebook Page

I downloaded this from the photo album of the informative and entertaining "Língua Portuguesa" Facebook page.  The page has over 160,000 followers, and if you're not one of them, you should be.  

The moderator/author (what *do* you call the owner of a Facebook page? The owner, I guess, but it sounds sort of...well, controlling) is Céu Pimentel, who, according to her FB profile, is a teacher of Portuguese who lives in Rio de Janeiro. 

Her posts, which usually include a poster clarifying various complexities of Brazilian Portuguese, along with a comment or explanation, are always interesting and educational, and with enough humor to make it fun.