I learned a lot about the future of my language learning this semester. For the last ~seven years I had only studied Spanish. My previous background in French and Latin during elementary and middle school faded away during this time, to the point that the only language I had any real practical experience learning was Spanish. Beginning Portuguese reintroduced me to the process of learning a completely new language, which was a completely different experience that made me consider my strengths and weaknesses as a language learner independently of Spanish. This is very important for me, especially as I embark on a career in international public service that will probably require me to learn several languages over the coming years.
A lot of things worked well and came easily to me. This is no doubt because Portuguese is so similar structurally to Spanish and English. Any departures from Spanish grammatical structure are actually more similar to English, such as the personal infinite which resembles ways of speaking in English (and was likely borrowed from our language). In practice the personal infinite allows you to avoid the subjunctive by personalizing the infinitive: the differences looks like this:
Peço que você apague as luzes (I ask that you turn off the lights)
vs.
Peço voce apagar as luzes (I ask you to turn off the lights)
To a Spanish speaker this would look like the equivalent of Tarzan-English, but it follows more English forms of sentence structure. This made tenses easy to learn and easy to implement, as I used them like I would in Spanish with a slight English twist.
Basic vocab was much harder to pick up. It is more different from Spanish than the tense conjugations or the majority of verbs. I need to put in much more time before I can truly bring my Portuguese to a conversational level because I am missing too many basic words. To accomplish this I will simply need to use flashcards and repetition or immerse myself in the language in a way that forces me to pick it up over time. I was able to learn a lot about the major forms in the language, but to pick up much vocab it will take me far more time and much effort.
I really liked the linguistic history readings. Although I don't think it helped my Portuguese acquisition it was incredibly enlightening and I feel that I left the class with a far better understanding of how languages relate to one another. I entered the class personally interested in this and left it even more so. Portuguese was also an ideal language to be studying as we talked about linguistic evolution because it did relate to so much of what I was seeing as a Spanish-to-Portuguese learner. Recognizing trends like dropping the i in words like tiempo or miel (for tempo and mel) or ción off of organización or acción (for organização and acção)helped me extrapolate these to the language as a whole. Our topics made me more interested in these linguistic trends. I wish we had the chance to delve more deeply into how these influenced our individual languages, but I understand how fast-paced the class had to be with only one meeting per week.
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