Below is the link to the podcast I made with my language partner! There is very little audio time in English as the majority of it is in Portuguese. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DjMhPyghxhtmFE1m_Mxg5bSWITCNJSxu/view?usp=sharing

The link below is for my Cultural Presentation video. It touches on some aspects of Brazilian history and the effects it has on society nowadays. 

https://urcapture.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=84db9faf-2e98-42b3-a09c-adf80139a861

Brazil is sometimes known for being a laid-back country with much more laid-back and open people compared to a place like the United States. For my last cultural post I tried learning more about Brazilian culture and how they live their day to day lives. Interestingly enough, I found out that Brazilians have a term that can be used to describe their cultural tendencies and behavior. Brazilians call it “O Jeitinho Brasileiro” which can translate to “The Brazilian Way of Living”. Reading Brazilian blogs about the topic, others described it as finding creative or kind solutions to solve everyday problems that arise. This description has led to Brazilians being thought of as some of the happiest people, who are always carefree, welcoming, and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

 While this “Brazilian Way” can certainly be positive, it also comes with a few negative aspects. For one, when I asked my Brazilian language partner to state what “O Jeitinho Brasileiro” means to her, she said “Well I grew up hearing it was always something bad, but then I realized that for rich people it can be more about trickery, corruption and deception, but for the poor it can be about enjoying life and figuring out a way to get by when a problem arises”. This comment was super interesting because it brings the topic of class and wealth to the forefront while recognizing the “Brazilian Way” has both positive and negative connotations and implications for the real world. 

With regard to negative connotations, I found that the “Brazilian Way” was associated with corruption, lack of education, and lack of civility. The image below highlights an example of this negative Brazilian lifestyle, where one coworker asks another colleague  if he is going to participate in the movement against corruption and the colleague’s response is “How much money am I going to earn?”. A more practical example that I read about would be an individual cutting others in a large line at a bank because he is only going to ask a quick question, while the correct thing to do would be to wait in line just like everyone else. However, through “o jeitinho brasileiro” he found a quick way to avoid waiting in line at the disdain of others waiting in line. 

At the same time, a lot of what I read about the “Brazilian Way” was largely positive and is considered to be one of the best characteristics that Brazilians have. The people of Brazil are often well known for being cheerful and relaxed even in the most stressful situations. In terms of positive connotations, the “Brazilian Way” is associated with a light, creative, flexible and optimistic way of leading life and solving situations. 

I enjoyed being able to learn a little more about this cultural aspect of Brazil while being able to have my language partner as someone to almost verify the information I was reading and learning about. It certainly appears that Brazilians appreciate their more casual and laid-back approach to life.  I also believe it can sometimes be the opposite of an American lifestyle that emphasizes a fast-paced work/life environment with very little time to relax or deal with problems and stressful situations in a lighthearted manner.

My language learning thus far has been wonderful and I am grateful for the opportunity to further build on my Portuguese knowledge before I head out to Brazil for my study abroad experience. The task I worked on for this cycle of the class was my final podcast/interview for the course. It was great to look back at all the work and topics that my language partner and I covered since the beginning of the course. I also found it quite useful to see everything that we covered because it served as a refresher for the Podcast/Interview that I had with my language partner. We were actually able to record the entirety of the podcast using only Portuguese, which I think shows how much more comfortable I am in holding conversations now compared to when I first started the course. More specifically, I was able to talk about my experience in self-learning Portuguese as well as discuss several academic and cultural topics like the history of carnival in Brazil. 

Throughout the podcast my language partner really wanted me to reflect on my language journey since the beginning, explaining how it is that I first started learning and got interested in Portuguese up until the recording of the interview that we made. In addition, I was asked to build on the concepts and perceptions that I had about Brazil based on all of the topics we covered during our sessions. For example, I had to talk about three words that I would use to describe Brazil, my favorite Brazilian holiday tradition and the biggest cultural difference compared to the United States. My language partner decided to create a script and set of questions that I would be asked during the podcast, but going into the recording session I had no clue what I was going to be asked. My language partner and I decided on this strategy so I could answer the questions in the most natural way possible, although this method definitely led to some less detailed responses than I would like. I still think it was effective because I had to dig deep into my Portuguese vocabulary on the spot in order to talk about culture and history in Brazil. Although being able to have some background knowledge beforehand would have allowed me to give more comprehensive and exhaustive answers. 

This was definitely a successful experience and honestly a learning strategy that I hope I get to use more in the future. Being able to sit down and have a one-on-one conversation with someone about things that have been learned, and read about is much different than having a regular day to day conversation with that same person. For the creation of my final cultural presentation, I am going to use the audio from this interview as an additional resource when choosing the cultural topic that I want to explore. The podcast will also serve as a reminder that I am indeed capable of having an in-depth conversation with a Brazilian and in the future, I hope I can integrate more one on one audios or recordings in general when I am reflecting on my learning experiences. 

My focus for this cultural post is carnival or “carnaval” in Brazil. More specifically I tried to learn as much as I could about the origin, history and evolution of the event in Brazil. Additionally, I researched what the current plans are for hosting carnival this year under the conditions of COVID and how the celebration is being altered or modified. 

One of the first things I learned is that Brazil is not the only country to celebrate carnival in such an animated and large manner. Places like Venice, Italy and Nice, France also celebrate in such fashion. I also discovered that the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans, Louisiana is a form of carnival. More importantly I had no clue that the two (or any of the aforementioned celebrations) were in any way commemorating Lent and the commencement of Ash Wednesday since I am not familiar with any religious customs. This made reading about the tradition in Brazil really interesting because of my limited background knowledge. 

In Brazil, Carnaval originated with an event called "entrudo", which was brought over by the Portuguese conquistadors. The event was a form of a game where people threw water, flour, eggs, and paint at each other during the days leading up to Ash Wednesday. I mentioned this aspect of the origin of carnival to my language partner and she hadn’t heard of it before and instead told me that afro-brazilian customs, culture and traditions contributed to the development of the event. A research article by Reginaldo Prandi, a Brazilian anthropologist who works at University of Sao Paulo, mentioned the event of “entrudo” by the Portuguese as the basic foundation of carnival but also highlights the importance of african culture to the evolution of the event. For one, during the entrudo enslaved Africans entertained themselves to the sound of drums and rhythms brought from Africa, which would eventually be mixed with Portuguese musical genres. This mixture would be the origin of the “marchinha de carnaval” and the samba, among many other musical rhythms that are a staple to Brazilian carnival. The creation of this type of music and dance then led to the establishment of “escolas de samba” or samba schools in which different congregations of cities practice and organize their dance routine, music playing and floats for the carnival. These dance communities in cities now are critical to the celebration, as they often require year-round preparation and heavily involve large parts of the community. 

In terms of celebrations and plans for this year in Brazil, most major cities are currently planning to host the event again after a one year hiatus in 2020 due to COVID. Most cities have outlined that they plan to have little to no restrictions in terms of social distancing or masks.. In some of the interviews and comments for news programming, some Brazilians call for no carnival to be hosted as COVID has not been resolved and the event is considered one of the largest parties in the world. Others fully support the return of carnaval as they state it is a cultural staple and that regardless of the governmental decision people will celebrate at large. 

As a whole it was great to learn about the origin of carnival and its evolution across time.  Having a discussion about the perception of the event and its history with my language partner was also helpful, as she has a more personable and open perspective about Brazil and answered/clarified any questions I had throughout the process. 

The main task I focused on for this cycle of my language learning experience was eliminating some of my Spanish tendencies when using Portuguese. Some of these include using false cognates, mispronouncing a word and using incorrect syntactic structures. My native Spanish speaking abilities have helped me greatly in being able to read and comprehend most Portuguese texts at a high level, although I do make mistakes when it comes to my pronunciation since the phonology varies significantly.  Although both languages share a lexical similarity of about 89%, some of the most frequently used words are false cognates and can also lead to errors in my speech production. 

The resource I have been using the most to address this learning goal of mine is a language learning book titled “Pois não: Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers”. I thought this book would be a great resource because it is specifically designed for Spanish speakers who are also fluent in English. Additionally the book has lots of activities and drills curated to eliminate some of the Spanish cross over that usually occurs when learning Portuguese. One activity that really caught my attention and helped with my cognate dilemma was a short story called “False Friends: Eu Não Falo Português” by Daniel Samper Pizano. The story synthesizes a lot of humor with vocabulary traps and false cognates to try and highlight the vocabulary differences. I learned a lot from seeing the vocabulary in context and will have to review the word list in the book a lot more in the future to really understand and grasp some of the differences. Although I do generally well in differentiating between some of these cognates now because of the time I have spent learning Portuguese, adding this lesson to my short term goals is a good idea. If I had been in Brazil right now I would have easily confused the name of multiple professions and used the wrong adjectives and verbs for a couple different situations. 

Additionally,  the section of the book that covered morpho-syntactic differences between Spanish and Portuguese was extremely helpful. For one, I learned that the future subjunctive is not used in Spanish anymore, except in some literary expressions of very limited usage, meanwhile it is used frequently and productively in Portuguese, such as in  “Se Deus quiser” (God willing”), Seja o que for (Whatever will be),  and quando eu puder (whenever I can). These are the types of phrases that I try and translate in my head from Spanish but really struggle to construct. It can be quite frustrating trying to express the Spanish equivalent correctly in Portuguese because of the syntactic differences. 

For the future, I think I will keep using this book as a resource in tandem with my language partner, with whom I can practice new vocabulary and sentence structures. This is my first time in quite some time using a textbook to aid my language learning but I think it has been a successful experiment thus far because there is some structure to separating my Spanish from Portuguese, while in other books there is a sole focus on English that doesn’t help my cause much in this case. 

For my cultural learning this week a lot of information I covered intertwined with my Cultural Anthropology course. Specifically, I focused on Chapters 5 and 6 of the book ‘Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age’. In these chapters I read and learned about the cultural construction of class, gender and race in Brazil. The book explicitly mentions that Brazil is a good location to explore the cultural basis of such ideas because it is one of two of the largest multiracial countries in the Western Hemisphere, with the other being the United States. My goal then was to try and compare the United States to Brazil and see how each country frames these different identities and social hierarchies. 

One amazing video that I watched to help me understand the Brazil’s system of racial classification was a TED-talk by Brazilian artist and photographer, Angélica Dass. In the video she talks about her photography and how it should challenge the way society views skin color and racial classification. Angélica Dass conducts a portrait challenge in which she takes photographs of different people with different colors of skin, and although some photographs contain members of “different” races, their skin tone and background color are exactly the same. 

I found this project by Dass quite interesting because it challenges the notion of race in great detail by color coding people who one would generally assume to be of completely different backgrounds. The project also speaks on the Brazilian system of racial classification, which has a much more expansive and detailed focus on color coding which in term bodes to a larger collection color terminology than here in the US. The US typically categorizes people into Black, White, and Brown but Brazil encompasses hundreds of different color categories. Some terms that I read about included alva (pure white), alva-escuro( off-white), alva-rosada (pinkish white), branca (white), clara (light),, branca morena (darkish white), branca suja (dirty white), café (coffee colored), café com leite (coffee with milk), canela (cinnamon), preta (black) and pretinha (lighter black). I think these racial categories show a continuum of appearance rather than the very structural and rigid color and race construction we have here in the United States, which was one of the biggest takeaways I had from this lesson.  

The next portion that I focused on was seeing how such racial categorization affects people in society. To do so, I read the beginning chapters in ‘Laughter Out of Place’ by anthropologist Donna Golstein. The book explores the relationship between poor working women of color in Brazilian favelas, and how such workers support the families and homes of middle-class and lighter skinned Brazilians. In general the book demonstrated a lot of similarities to the United States. For one, darker-skinned Brazilians face higher levels of exclusion and injustice, which I find to be a systemic correlation between color and a capitalist society, much like it occurs in the US. All in all I think both Brazil and the US face similar problems across society albeit reaching such problems through different paths. Brazil did not outlaw slavery until 1888, a full generation after the US outlawed slavery in 1863 and I wonder how much of that impacts how physical diversity is viewed across both countries. 

I started my first pair of weeks in the program without a language partner, but I still had 4 very productive lessons with a private teacher through iTalki. I specifically chose a tutor on iTalki who was from Rio de Janeiro, as that is the city where I will be studying abroad. I thought this would be a good starting point to hearing the regional accent and getting a head start on some of the vocabulary specific to the area. 

From there, I had two lessons where the main focus was to compare some of the cultural differences between Brazil and the US. I learned about the openness of most Brazilians and how friendships there work a bit differently than they do here. For one, I learned that simply showing up to someone’s home is acceptable and seen as a good act of friendship and demonstration of trust. I told my professor that here in the US it would be more common to schedule something like that and there is more of a standard for always making sure the other person is available and free to meet. In Brazil it is also typical to arrive at someone's home with a gift or food, as arriving empty handed anywhere is usually a sign of being raised poorly or not having respect for the visitor. I mentioned that such an act is not completely nonexistent in the United States but that it is typically reserved for times of meeting elders or a people who one has not seen in a long time. 

My next two lessons dealt with a lot more conversation and I really got to put my speaking abilities to the test. My professor brought in a local college student to teach me more colloquial speech, slang and day to day words that locals shorten in conversations. At first it was tough to understand the slang words the college student was saying without context, but once I heard them in a conversational setting they made much more sense. One of my favorites was “Dar um bolo” which literally translates to “give a cake” but it means to miss a compromise or get stood up at a date or event. I thought these lessons were extremely helpful because I felt like I had been engulfed in formal and academic speech this entire summer as I did my Critical Language program. Improving my informal speech and general speaking skills is one of my long term goals and I am glad I was able to practice that with two native speakers from Rio de Janeiro. 

After my iTalki lessons,  I was fortunate enough to begin communicating with my language partner, who is an exchange student from Brazil studying film studies here on campus. For our first couple encounters, we went through the basic acquaintance process and tried to figure out the best times to meet and what I wanted to get out of the language partner portion of the program. I was ecstatic to finally have the opportunity to speak Portuguese with someone in person. After months and almost a year of traversing through my language learning process via Zoom and other online platforms it was rewarding to hold a conversation with a person in real life. Meeting my language partner was definitely one of the proudest moments I have had in my language learning journey and I am thankful to have a friend that will be able to help me learn more about Brazil, its culture and the language. Funnily enough, I am also proud that I knew enough Portuguese to help my language partner during our first meeting. She was having trouble with cashing in a check through her mobile banking app, so my first ever conversation with her was about checks, signatures and bank apps in the United States. All the more reason to never skip specific vocabulary sections on Duolingo. 

For my first interactions with Brazilian culture and my language partner, I engaged with some prominent Brazilian cartoons and films. The first piece of media was a well known and popular cartoon called “Turma da Mônica”. I decided to read a bit into the history of the series and discovered it originated from a newspaper comic strip called “Folha da Manhã” in 1959. Since then it has been adapted into other media like movies, although I saw a cartoon marathon instead. 

The cartoon was very funny and I can see why the series is so successful with children and teenagers in Brazil. All of the stories were not interconnected and started with a new plot in each episode. However, there were some missing links that I missed at the beginning of the episodes because I did not know who the characters were. “Cascão” for example is a young boy who refuses to shower and “Cebolinha” is another boy who has a very heavy lisp. In addition to trying to learn more about the characters, while I was watching the cartoon the first thing I struggled with was the amount of slang and shortening of words the characters produced. My language partner actually told me to look out for speech and grammatical errors that the characters produce since the comic is supposed to mimic the language behavior of children, as that is the target audience. As a whole, I learned a lot of different slang and some shortening of words that Brazilians produce, so I will continue watching some videos here and there to brush up on my informal vocabulary. 

The second piece of media my language partner recommended was a comedy called ‘Minha Mãe É Uma Peça”. This film included famous actor and comedian “Paulo Gustavo”, who I learned passed away from COVID earlier this year. He was very much a cultural icon and my language partner mentioned “basically all of Brazil cried when he passed away”.

 Knowing this while watching the movie made it much more engaging and I enjoyed the performance put on. The movie is actually a representation of his life as a child, although he plays the role of the mother in this film. The plot is about the mother being upset after hearing a phone call from her children in which they bash her as a mother figure and the way she continuously babies them. The mother then departs from their home and spends some time hidden away at her aunt’s house reminiscing about her children’s younger days when they still needed her for everything. The movie is then a compilation of funny moments and interactions with the children as they grew up in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Language-wise, I again struggled with the amount of slang used throughout the film. It also did not help that the movie had no subtitles, but I managed to understand 90% of what was being said and followed along with the storyline quite easily. Overall, the film provided great insight into the day to day cultural life of a middle class Brazilian family. It also introduced me to some of the common expectations for children in Brazil and some of the humor that comes along with it. 

I just recently added this course to my schedule, so I feel a bit lost and behind in terms of structuring my language learning, but I am still very excited to continue practicing my Portuguese. 

This summer I received a critical language scholarship to study Portuguese and got to be immersed in Brazilian culture for about 8 weeks through an online format. Although the program was supposed to be in person, I still greatly enjoyed my time learning Portuguese virtually and met a ton of professors and friends who were eager to assist my language learning journey. In a couple weeks I will be receiving my pre-program and post-program OPI test results and I am excited to see where I stand in terms of my speaking ability. Throughout the program I also improved my reading and writing abilities. Along those 8 weeks I wrote short essays, read academic texts and even gave presentations strictly in Portuguese. I definitely would not be as comfortable as I am with the language right now if it weren’t for my scholarship this summer, so I am very grateful for the opportunity. 

With this course my objective is to have someone with whom I can continue practicing my Portuguese with as I prepare to study abroad in Brazil next semester. The University of Richmond only offers one Portuguese course, which I already completed, so the SDLAP is a wonderful option in terms of not letting all that I learned this summer go to waste. I hope to use this course as an opportunity to build on my speaking abilities and become comfortable with talking about more specific or specialized topics like education. I also think it will be beneficial to document my progress through my language journal, since I will be able to reflect on the learning strategies that are most effective for me. In addition, I am really looking forward to finding more academic resources in Brazilian Portuguese and discussing all the options I find with my language partner or professors from this summer. 

This semester, another important goal of mine is to make more connections with the language and Brazilian culture while experimenting with different learning styles. This summer I was able to learn a lot about how to use Portuguese, but I did not make as much progress in connecting the language to the culture. Beyond that, I really just want to be as prepared as possible for my study abroad experience so I can better take advantage of my time in Brazil and actively contribute in class while I am there. All the elements of this course will allow me to do so, as I will have to update my language journal, create cultural posts and have multiple conversations about varying topics with my language partner. This will also be my first time speaking Portuguese with a native speaker outside of Zoom, so perhaps I will be able to pick up on specific hand gestures or certain facial expressions that are more difficult to notice through a screen. After a very busy summer learning a language in my room, I am eager to apply my language skills into to the real world and make the best use of all the resources that are available to me.