Recently, through conversations with my friends, I discovered a piece of Brazilian culture or society that was new to me. Similar to the Italian lottery, there is a game in Brazil called Jogo de Bicho (or Animal Game). It is a type of gambling and is illegal in Brazil. The game consists of numbers from 1-24 which each correspond to an animal. For example, 1 is the Ostrich, 2 is an Eagle, 3 is a Donkey, and so on.

            The reason I heard about it was because my friend was telling me about how the number 24 is generally avoided in Brazil, almost to painstaking lengths, because the animal it corresponds with in Jogo de Bicho is the deer (veado). In Brazil, veado is pejorative slang for homosexuality. An already existing slang term exists, viado, and because they are pronounced almost the same, the deer is associated with gay men. In society, many people will take lengths to either avoid or incorporate that number. Politicians wanting to appeal to the LGBTQ crowd will use it in the telephone number for their campaign, while others will make sure it does not appear in their phone number. In the Brazilian Senate, out of 81 senators, the cabinet 24 does not exist. Senators and other government officials are issued special license plates, and there is no plate with 24 on it. Sports players will often avoid that jersey number as well, and after Kobe Bryant’s death (number 24 for the Lakers), Brazil saw a large response of anti-homophobia protests. It came up in my own conversations as a friend sent a picture of his birthday cake. He was turning 24, and instead of putting the numbers 2 and 4, his family had put 23 mais um, or 23 plus one.

            The betting can be superstitious, and various connotations evolved with different animals. Seeing different animals or symbols in one’s dreams can be taken as a sign to bet on that number, but perhaps the most interesting one is the elephant. It is said to be associated with death, so any accident or loss of life when a multiple of the elephant’s numbers appear, the bankers and operators see a heavy flow of bets on that number. However, if too many people bet on one number, it is removed from the lottery to prevent the bookies from bankrupting and having to draw on their personal funds to repay.

            Other impacts of the animals from Jogo de bicho are found in various football (or soccer) clubs. One called Treze Futebol Clube, or Football Club Thirteen, have a rooster as their mascot because the rooster is the animal for 13 in Jogo de bicho.

Bossa nova is a now internationally famous style of music that evolved and grew from jazz in the 1950’s and 60’s in Brazil. It primarily originated from Rio de Janeiro, and even though Brazil was going through a rough patch at the time due to the unequal distribution of wealth between classes, it was enjoyed in primarily middle- to upper-class spaces. It moved away from the more traditional styles of music that were performed live in ballrooms and each had their own special dance that accompanied it to be played on the record players and music devices in parlors. This being said, the culture of Brazil is vibrant and social, so the image of a more casual, toned-down parlor is still different than what we might picture for the American versions at that time.

The bossa nova beat is traced back to samba, which is then traced back to jazz, and in order to really understand bossa nova one must have a basic understanding of these two genres that it belongs to. If jazz is an enormous umbrella term to refer to many different nuances, origins and styles of music (which it is), then samba is a slightly smaller but still very wide umbrella under the category of jazz. Jazz is thought to originate in the South of the United States, which in many ways it did, but there are many different well-known and talented jazz musicians in South and Latin America as well as many different styles of jazz that developed there along with them and were then brought to the United States. Samba is also mostly known for its development in the United States as well, mostly as a form of almost exoticized, flashy dance competitions, but outside of that conception it has many popular musical variations in almost every Latin country. From this branch on the tree of jazz came bossa nova, as a cousin of salsa with a hint of blues.

Bossa nova in Portuguese means “new wave” in English, and often centers on ideas of longing, homesickness, love, women, and the beauty of nature (particularly of Brazilian nature, of which there is much rich variety since it is such a geodiverse country). As mentioned before, its apolitical nature has been noted as strange in context of the time that it emerged in, as there was much social unrest due to a huge lower class and small middle and upper classes.

Some of my favorite bossa nova songs are “Corcovado”, a mountain in Rio de Janeiro, by Joao Gilberto, “The Girl from Ipanema/Garota de Ipanema”, and “Manha de Carnaval” and “Ahiê” by Joao Donato. All of these songs, as do all of the songs of this genre, have a circular rhythm and repeat several patterns of chords in a natural, relaxing way instead of following a more traditional sheet music style.

For one of the weeks of this two-week period, I was feeling under the weather and sent into the isolation housing in Keller, so we did not have class. Thankfully, I did not have COVID and it was just a flu. We continued the following week with reading a bit more of Alice in Wonderland, or Alice no Pais das Maravilhas, which I am continuing to enjoy. I have noted that the further we get into the story, the more difficult it becomes. More vocabulary is incorporated, more nuances in the story, or subtext, and more plot to keep track of. As I mentioned before, it is very helpful to be familiar with the story when reading it in another language for the purpose of language practice. I have not noticed much difference in the stories between the English and Portuguese versions, and I am glad that the translation still managed to maintain Lewis Carroll’s light, witty, and at times slightly absurd tone.

In terms of my language progression, I definitely feel that I am improving. I noticed a difference in feeling rustier after being sick for a week and not practicing my Portuguese, as to be expected, but overall, I note a definite sense of improvement. I am more confident in our conversation classes and am referencing dictionaries and my notes less while doing my write-up essay exercise for Thursday.

As we begin to wrap up for the semester, we are mostly finished going through the material that I hoped to cover in the textbook Pois Não. The final section that I had copied had a section of Capoeira and about the Berimbau, a musical instrument that accompanies the practice of capoeira, and my third cultural post will be about this topic. I thought it was fun to read about it now, having some knowledge of both of those. I had seen capoeira as some of my friends in Cuba attended lessons there and discussed what a berimbau was with my music instructors for Brazilian Music and West African Drumming. However, I did not know much about the roots of capoeira and its actual history, and it was really interesting for me to read more about that. It appears in the popular TV show “Bob’s Burgers” as a novel hobby that is more about getting you to buy lessons and DVDs similar to karate lessons in the United States, but its history is really a story of resistance and teaching slaves to fight back and rebel under the guise of traditional dance. Slaves on sugar plantations, the overwhelming colonial crop of Brazil, would practice capoeira as a form of fighting when you are outnumbered and focuses on constantly moving and outsmarting your opponent, under the pretense that they were preforming traditional dances when the plantation owners would ask. When slavery ended, capoeira was outlawed as the government was afraid the newly freed slaves would use it to rebel against the government, and they were forced to keep it a secret again. Now, it is almost a tourist attraction and one of the internationally known cultural attractions of Brazil.

            One of the sessions in the past two weeks fell on my birthday, and I got the chance to learn a lot about what it is like to celebrate a birthday in Brazil! As we both have a bit of a sweet tooth, we talked a lot about food, desserts in particular. There is a certain type of small, round sweet made from condensed milk called a brigadeiro which is my language instructor’s favorite. Funnily enough, my mom surprised me with a big birthday party in a box, and she had actually made me some brigadeiros without knowing that we had just talked about them in class. I have not tried the real thing, the real brigadeiro straight from Brazil, so I’m not sure how much I can evaluate them, but I can certainly say they are very sweet. They are very similar to a truffle size, but more sweet than rich, and usually with sprinkles. I look forward to trying them should I ever visit Brazil. Until then, I am looking forward to going back home and being able to try my hand at making them myself.

            This week from the textbook, we practiced some irregular verbs like poder and ter (to be able to and to have, respectively). I find these difficult as I am not too comfortable with many verbs in Portuguese. I need to practice my conjugations and my tenses because even though I almost always get them correct when I guess, I am slow and not confident because I get them confused with French and Spanish. While Portuguese generally has the most crossover with Spanish, the amount of vowel usage is very French. We also practiced the different “r” sounds that Portuguese has, per my request. Also, much like French, Portuguese has a pretty distinct “r” among the Romance languages. Nothing so complicated as the American [ɹ], but the Portuguese written “r” can be pronounced a handful of different ways. There is the more standard tap [ɾ], such as in Spanish, but there is great variety in the two other main /r/ sounds. The first is written as /rr/ but the same phoneme can also be written as /r/ when it is at the beginning of the word and sometimes when it is between two vowels, but not always in the intervocalic instances. Speakers in the South will roll it sometimes like the trilled [r], but generally it is a fricative and close to an aspirated “h” sound that I learned in Arabic, close to [χ]. When /r/ appears at the end of a word, it is sometimes dropped entirely, pronounced like the American [ɹ] (a sociolinguistic element mentioned in the book), or like [h].

            I was so excited to see a section in the book about sociolinguistics, even if it was a brief overview in many ways, I’m sure. I learned that the rural people of Brazil called caipiras who are a generally mountainous group and have their own holiday, festival or celebration in Brazil. During this festival, people will put on cowboy hats, hang colored bits of paper, and dance in traditional caipira fashion.

Capoeira is popular in a lot of places in the world, and one of the main elements that Brazil is known for, besides their soccer, the beautiful Amazon rainforest, and vibrant culture. However, it has not always been this way. Capoeira developed among enslaved Africans who were brought to the country of Brazil and worked on sugar plantations owned by the wealthy, white Portuguese colonists. It was a way for the enslaved to practice fighting back without the plantation owners realizing. The self-defense and strategies that are designed to teach how to win a fight when one is outnumbered by being faster and one step ahead of the opponent, getting them to use the most energy and trick them into a vulnerable position that makes it easier for you to give a critical hit. All of this is paired with music and designed fluidly to disguise it as a dance. Slaves that fought back against their captors and escaped their plantations fled to Quilombos, or villages of escaped slaves.

This continued largely without any interference on a national or legislative level until May 1888 when slavery was declared to have ended. At this point, the government had much less control over the previously enslaved population and feared that the freed people would organize a rebellion, and fight against the oppressors with the same methods that had shown success in the past: capoeira. Because of this, the government banned the practice or performance of capoeira entirely. As the dance had been created, taught, spread, and used almost entirely in secret for so long under the very noses of the same oppression that was now actively trying to eradicate it, it is unclear how effectively the Brazilian government thought that they could catch them. Capoeira groups continued to meet in secret, using only nicknames when they met to avoid leaving any traces that could lead back to them and their real identities should one of them be caught. They eased capoeira into society by again presenting it as a folk dance, which was not altogether untrue. At this point, capoeira could certainly be considered a cultural tradition and part of the experience of being a black person and former slave in Brazil. Capoeira was de-criminalized in the early 1930’s, but it was not until 1936 when capoeiristas, or practicers of capoeira, were invited to fight and perform in front of the then-President.

The word capoeira refers to a “short grass” found at the edges of the plantations where the slaves would practice under the guise of traditional dance. Another element of the dance-fighting is the “ginga”, or swaying motion. This refers to the state of constant movement that the capoeiristas are in while in the “roda”, or the fighting or performance stage. Along the edges of the roda, there gathers onlookers, other dancers or fighters, and the musicians that set the beat or play the musical accompaniment. Types of instruments typically used are called the berimbau, an interesting string and percussion instrument, pandeiro, or tambourine, and atabaque, a special type of drum.

Week 5 Reflection

            In order to address the slight lack of Reading or Writing skills that I felt like I needed a boost on, I went back to the list of resources on the syllabus that I had compiled at the beginning of the class. I liked the idea of starting a book together that we could both follow along with, and a translation of Alice in Wonderland in Portuguese was available online through the website paralleltext.io. I had already read the original English text many years ago, and of course, almost everyone is familiar with the story of Alice and the Mad Hatter which helped a lot as I was going through it. I learned a new group of vocabulary words, such as “well”, “hedge”, “hole”, “tunnel”, “vest”, “pocket watch”, etc. The website also has a feature where it will read you a sentence if you click on it, which was a great complement to learning new vocabulary words. I then wrote a literary analysis on the chapters that we had read that week to submit on Thursdays, which I felt required more thought and effort on my part than reflecting on a topic we had talked about on Tuesday, so I was happy to be stepping things up in both departments.

            This new strategy, alongside weekly grammar lessons and exercises from the book, I feel really pulled together all of the goals that I had outlined in my conception of how I wanted to learn Portuguese this semester. I was able to talk about something creative, a work of art that I was familiar with and excited about reading but that was also slightly different than the tale that I knew and develop my language skills as a byproduct of discussing this engaging topic. This was the method that I had been inspired to do because of the way that Professor Abreu styled his Portuguese classes, and in many ways was the reason I found myself wanting to do a self-directed language study in Portuguese and go to Brazil in the first place.

            If I were to design this class for a group or for somebody else, I think this setup would be ideal. However, I probably would not use this particular website because it is definitely set up more for leisure and perhaps does not anticipate that the viewer really plans on getting through the whole book and would just like to do a bit of casual practice as you can only flip through one page at a time. I would probably find a side-by-side print book or online version to purchase, maybe of a famous Brazilian author. In any case, every part of this has been a learning experience and I am glad to have progressed to this point where I have found something that is working for me and if it would not work for someone else, how I would go about adapting it.

Week 4 Reflection

            At this point, we are really starting to settle into a routine. The format and schedule that we laid out in the beginning is panning out perfectly and I am very happy with the way things are going. My goals of improving in Speaking and Listening are really developing, but perhaps I could do more in terms of Writing and Reading. While I practice it weekly for the same amount of time that we have our discussions, I feel like it is maybe less intensive and there is less immediate pressure on me while doing it so I do not feel the improvement as much. I do not mean that pressure and situations that are typically more higher stress situations for language learners are necessary or the only way to really learn a language, but in my experience they certainly help. For example, direct language immersion in the region where the target language is spoken is generally one of the fastest ways to learn a language for a variety of reasons, one of them being surrounded by it and regularly finding oneself in more high-pressure situations than a classroom in order to order food and survive there.

            We have finalized our syllabus and are starting in on the first chapters of the book. One of the concepts that I struggled with and that we needed to spend the most time on was the difference between the verbs ser, estar and ficar. Ser and estar exist in Spanish and thankfully the difference between them is the same in Portuguese as it is in Spanish: ser is used for more permanent, unchangeable, characteristic concepts and estar is used for changeable states and aspects. However, ficar was an entirely new word and concept as there is not really an equivalent in English or Spanish. It was similar to estar but with very nuanced differences, in my opinion. It can be used to describe locations, or sometime temporary states usually in the past tense. For example, you could say :the restaurant é [ser] on Main Street”, “Jorge está [estar] sitting in the restaurant”, and “Jorge ficava [ficar] in the restaurant a long time before the waiter noticed him”. So here ficar has a more similar meaning to “stay” than “was/be” (even though they would both work), but you could also say “she vai ficar mad that you canceled the show”, meaning she will get so mad or be so mad, which is closer to “be” than “stay” even though it almost has the connotation of both.

            I tripped up on those in a lot of exercised that we did and I felt like it changed meanings and rules every time, but eventually I got a good enough grasp of it to get the general concept, use it a couple times in our conversation the following week, and leave the larger grasping of the concept of it in every situation that exists for something that will come with practice and better overall knowledge of the language. 

The movie Cidade de Deus is one of the most famous Brazilian movies, nominated for four Oscars. It is a breathtaking story of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between the years of the late 1960’s and early 1980’s. It is based on a novel of the same name written in 1997, and the move was released in 2002.  

The film is committed to showing an authentic vision of grisly life in the favelas and seems to do so with much success. Only one actor in the entire film had previous acting experience, and the rest were recruited from the actual favelas and given a short training before they started filming.     

Favelas, for a bit of background historical knowledge, are settlements that emerged in the late 1800’s as soldiers had come to Rio to fight but had absolutely nowhere to live so they built their own houses that grew to become entire communities on Providência hill, between the city center and the sea. The government gave these soldiers the right to do live there in this way, but as soon as many former African slaves moved in, the areas quickly became overcrowded, dirty, and suffered outbreaks of disease. These communities were largely abandoned by the government, meaning they had no governmental justice system, sanitation, electricity, water, etc. and were associated with intense squalor, crime, and poverty. At the same time, many wealthy white Europeans were moving in (at this time, Rio was the capital of Brazil) and wanted to live near the coast in the center of the city, close to where the favelas are, and the government began their first wave of attempts to vacate the favelas and relocate the people to make room for gentrification. Later on, another wave of people joined as Brazil saw a massive wave of urbanization in the early 1940’s and 1950’s. Leading up to then, many of the cities were succeeding in gentrifying: becoming wealthier, pushing out the lower classes, and as the wealth began to concentrate in the hands of the relatively few elite in urban areas and the majority of the population had become poor and rural, soon many people had to commute into the city to work where all the money was - often traveling several towns over. (Interestingly, this is the meaning behind the song “Trem das Onze/11 o’clock Train” by Adoniran Barbosa comes from, a song we listened to in Portuguese for Spanish Speakers with Professor Abreu, referring to the commuter lifestyle of many at the time.) With this second influx came another wave of attempts to remove the inhabitants out of the favelas during the reign of a militaristic government in the 1970’s.

One of these government housing relocation sites was the famous Cidade de Deus, which exists in real life (also interesting- Former President Obama visited the favela of Cidade de Deus in 2011). However, after relocating them, the government for the most part ceased investing in these government housing locations and they fell back into the same state of favela from which they had been removed. At this time, the drug trade was growing internationally and cocaine became a major element of the crime in the favelas, among accompanying arms trade and gang violence, which are the main elements of the movie.

Week 3 Reflection

            Now a handful of weeks into class, we have gotten a structure up and running for sure. Making the syllabus and planning out class content was more challenging than I anticipated. I thought it would be something I could do without following a textbook, but it was such a relief from the director side of this class experience to progress through the logical steps and vocabulary lists that someone else has already planned and thought out with much more care than I would have been able to. From the other side, the student side, I had been against using a book because I had found them dull and had always questioned how effective they were in any classroom, not even just a language learning setting, as the majority of students will not read them, or if they do, will not read them closely and effectively. Since I am now wearing both hats, I have a better understanding of why many teachers use books as a guide. I am sure it saves them many headaches and late hours.

            Our goal these weeks has been to get a final syllabus. I also had to find time to photocopy the pages we wanted as it would be much easier to send her a PDF than to have her try and somehow get the book down there, so we had to look at what chapters and what pages we wanted to focus on. As I had used this book before in Prof. Abreu’s class, I had seen a bit of it before, but, as I had mentioned, he also worked hard to incorporate a dynamic element into every class so we would look at the book every now and then but it was not as central as an element to that class as we are thinking it will be to our class. I wanted to be sure to include the vocab list from every chapter so that I could learn about 60 words a week, but other than that I included a brief overview of about ten chapters that we could go through in the following weeks at our own pace. I was sure to include sections about grammatical concepts that were more difficult or that I knew I struggle with.

            I test how well I have learned and really retained these words, concepts and am advancing in my language journey through a variety of ways. Primarily, I implement them all, or as many as I can, in our Tuesday meetings where we fill the entire time with speaking and listening skills. It was shaky at first, but I have been able to progress to a more conversational, fluid pace and I get better, or more “fluent-sounding”, each week. As a linguistics student, I know that oftentimes the terminology used to refer to the bilingual process can be questionable, such as the concept of an “incomplete” bilingual or an inherent notion that every person and learner should always aim to achieve monolingual fluency in a target language when the measure of a complete monolingual is not precisely defined and is such a high bar that it discourages many people from even trying. In this case, however, my goal is to advance as much as I can and get the tools that I would need to be as comfortable as possible talking with and leading speakers with a definite dominance over my target language.

Week 2 Reflection

In this initial week of our SDLAP Portuguese journey, we spent the first session chatting and evaluating what kind of baseline knowledge I had. Through our conversation, we both got a feel for where my skills are in terms of each specific category of speaking, reading, listening, writing, and more or less the size of my readily available vocabulary. Our main goal for this week was to create and finalize our syllabus.

We are still not exactly sure of all the details of our class this semester, but we did nail down our meeting times. We settled on meeting twice a week and having a free, loose drop-in time for a couple hours on Friday to answer any questions I had as I went over the material from the week. We determined that we would have an immersive conversation every Tuesday (or Terça-feira) and on Thursdays (Quinta-feira) I would do some type of reading and writing activity to boost multiple types of fluency and performance. I put the Portuguese words for the days of the week because since we coordinate and plan our classes actually in Portuguese, it feels a little strange to refer to these concepts and the mental space and time in English. This, in and of itself, is progress and a certain sign of fluency that I was excited to share!

I have been working with my Language Instructor and had a couple meetings with Dr. Marsh-Soloway about various online resources and databases that would be helpful in developing the skills that I want to achieve by the end of the semester. I hope to incorporate as many platforms, activities, and types of engagement as is helpful. I think that this method – keeping class format and activities dynamic - has been the most effective in my past experiences as a new learner in a language classroom. Professor Abreu would often utilize this, and his class was one of the most engaging and effective long-term learning experiences that I have had. Generally speaking, his approach focused most on imparting the culture and fostering a love and passion for the language by exploring cultural items and concepts while discussing those same elements in the target language. I found that focusing on a piece of music, song, or work of art and expressing my thoughts through the lens of the target language was teaching me both the language and the culture without consciously forcing anything or pushing me or the other students to do so.

With this experience in mind, I am hoping that the structure we have been discussing will achieve this by using different methods on different days. However, true to the nature of the self-directed study, within this framework we will have the option to tweak our schedule as necessary or if it is not playing out as I hoped. I plan to incorporate Brazilian movies into the curriculum as well, which would be something that we could discuss in length in our Tuesday session and could be the topic of reflection on Thursday, giving me the chance to build upon any ideas we had. 

Week 1 Reflection

            At this point, I had not yet registered for the class! I was going through the process of applying for a Fulbright in Brazil and was taking a course in the Music Ensemble department on Brazilian Music, but for one reason or another all of the elements had not yet clicked in my brain to point me to wanting to take a Self-Directed Language Study for Portuguese. I believe, in fact, that at this time I was trying to join Japanese 101 to start learning another language, but I quickly saw that even joining a week late that the professor’s teaching style was much more intense than what I was looking for or had anticipated. After attending one class I knew I had to find another solution to fill my spare time and keep up with my pattern of using about three to four languages every week.