For my first introduction into the language of Portuguese and the culture around it, my language partner and I thought it a good idea to start off basic. We have not had much time to meet to facilitate learning, so this first post was used as more of an introduction to the language and some cultural aspects we’d try to focus on. The first piece of media that I looked at was an article about the sports culture in the region of São Paulo, Brazil. This article immediately drew me in and was a great starting point because of my love for sports. The article starts out with very common knowledge to me: that in Brazil soccer is almost like a religion. Like many places across the world, in Brazil and Portugal, soccer reigns supreme. However, what was news to me was the growing influence of basketball in Brazil. The NBA has been making steady inroads in Brazilian culture, and in the first quarter of 2021, fandom of the league grew by 31% within the Portuguese speaking county. The statistics peg the large country of 213 million at about 45 million identifying as fans of the league. This is a notable number considering the league only first started outreaching to Brazil in 2004, and many locals have noticed the difference. They now see much more NBA memorabilia especially the jerseys of “jogador” Lebron “King” James. This whole article was super interesting and gave me an insight into the sports landscape of Brazil along with some first-hand accounts from São Paolo residents. Since most of this piece was in English, I didn’t struggle too much with picking up on anything linguistically, but one thing my language partner helped point out to me was the differences in types of Portuguese that are spoken around the world. There’s Brazilian Portuguese and then a European Portuguese which have slight, but noticeable differences between the two. This is something that we’ll be exploring more as we continue to work together.
The next piece of media for this post was a short soccer news update article from “Ojogo.pt”. Ojogo.pt is a major sports newspaper based out of Porto, Portugal. The article I chose was a short sports update on a soccer player contracting Covid-19. Upon first glance at this article, it looked almost impossible to tackle. The whole article is less than 3 paragraphs long and it was difficult to get started, but I eventually started to dissect it slowly. At closer look, it was actually shocking how similar the language is in some respects to Spanish. This is where I was able to leverage my previous knowledge of Spanish to muddle through the article. Certain words like “totalmente”, “finalizar”, “transferência”, and “arguardar” were recognizable. Eventually, with some help from my partner, I was able to work through the meaning. Brazilian league center-back Tiago Coser was supposed to fly in for his signing at the Portuguese soccer club of Benfica, but he tested positive for Covid-19 before his flight. He will now have to quarantine, and the transfer will have to wait. This article was a great piece to look at introductorily because it’s similar to something I’d consume daily if I were a native speaker or Portugal resident. I was genuinely surprised at how I was able to navigate through this article using contextual clues and words I could discern from my history of speaking Spanish. This really left me hopeful for what’s to come as I have more time to work with my partner.
Overall, these two pieces were great to introduce me to the language of Portuguese and a little bit of culture from where it’s spoken. I was really surprised to learn that there’s a difference between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, and I will look to explore that further in my learning. As for the language itself, I was surprised at my ability to navigate through a relatively short piece of content, but I definitely still have far to go. In this early stage of my learning, I am going to have to keep relying on my Spanish background and other things to navigate around all that I do not know.
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