Scrabble® for iOS Now Available in Brazilian Portuguese

Electronic Arts has just issued an update for its Scrabble iOS app. The update includes full support for the following languages:

English
French
Italian
German
Spanish
Brazilian Portuguese

When the app opens, you go to options where you can select which language you want to use for the menus, and by default, the app will use that same language for the game play. 

Features include a Scrabble dictionary in the language you've chosen, as well as instructions and feedback in the same language. This image shows the dictionary, with 2 letter words listed and a place to enter your word:

You can also view the words that have been played so far, along with their point value and a running total:

You can choose to play against the computer, or you can play with others online. If you play against the computer, there are four levels of difficulty from "iniciante" to "perito" which you select, as well as five game types, including "clássico" as well as games of 75 or 150 points, or 8 or 12 rounds.

You also choose whether or not to have the "profesor" monitor your game, as well as "melhor palavra," which gives you up to four "best word" suggestions during the game. This is especially helpful if you're staring at a set of letters and have no clue what to do with them. You can also attempt to play a word that you're not sure about, and if it's wrong, the game will simply inform you that the word doesn't exist in the Scrabble dictionary (it might still be a real word, it just can't be used in Scrabble). There is no penalty and no limit on attempting to play words, unlike in real-life game-play.

The "profesor" will give you feedback about the word you have just played. In this case, I played "gol," which the teacher said was "excelente," but then showed me how I could have earned more points by playing "larga" instead:

                               

For Brazilian Portuguese, "ç" is the only letter that differs from the English alphabet, so you can play the letter "a", for example, as "a", "á", "à", "â", or "ã". 

The iPhone app is $1.99, and the HD iPad app costs $4.99 (prices as of Monday, May 27, 2013). The game is available from iTunes. 

Playing Scrabble is not the best way to acquire a basic vocabulary of high-frequency words, of course, but it's a fun way to flex your language skills. 

What I found as I played was that the game really made me do a lot of active thinking in Portuguese. I found that I worked to come up with a word, even if I wasn't sure of its meaning, that sounded like Portuguese, or that fit with what I already know about Portuguese word patterns. For all the times that learners have cursed the seemingly endless verb forms associated with every Portuguese infinitive, this is a big advantage when playing Scrabble. 

If you've played a lot of Scrabble in English, you'll also have to re-think the frequently used strategy of making almost any noun plural by just adding an "s". This works with many Portuguese words, of course, but there are also many words whose plural form includes other changes. 

You'll also have to forget most of the 2-letter English words that you've committed to memory, as they won't work in Portuguese. 

My verdict: Scrabble on the iOS platform is a relaxing way to immerse yourself in another language, and if you get tired of playing in Portuguese, you can always try another language.

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!