For this second language journal, I will be focusing on what my partner and I have accomplished in the month of February. After getting set up with my partner towards the end of last month, we’ve really been making good progress every week. This is my first time taking a language course where it is self-paced and I think that’s a huge benefit for myself and my aspirations. However, what I’ve found is that these weekly meetings are incredibly helpful to hold me accountable for my learning. It’s very easy to try and put this on the back burner, but by having weekly meetings and assignments from my partner, it’s made me much more focused than I otherwise might have been. With that being said, where we left off last month with my first post was just with very basic materials. I was being introduced to the language on a broad scale and really working through things like common words, the alphabet, and numbers 1-40. For this month, we’ve been trying to focus in more on the intricacies of beginning to speak the language of Portuguese, but of course only on a base level. However, it did take me a little longer than hoped to grasp the introductory things we started weeks ago. One thing that was really giving me a hard time was trying to shake some Spanish tendencies of mine. For example, we were trying to read some simple sentences and words, but I kept failing to really recognize when the ão in the portuguese language was used. That combination stayed very foreign to me for a long time when trying to recognize words. However, I have now learned that the Spanish ending of ion is more or less an equivalent to that of ão. Take the word administración in Spanish, that becomes administracão in Portuguese. Tips like this have been really helpful for me starting to learn how to read and speak things. In addition to this, I learned that the typical io/a diphthong in Spanish is not common to the Portuguese language at all. Instead, it would just relatively be an o/a for Portuguese. For example, espacio (spanish) vs. espaço. Those are just some interesting differences I’ve picked up and my language partner has done a great job trying to leverage my Spanish into our learning.
As for the new areas we’ve moved into this month, we’ve been trying to focus on speech regarding questions and answers. My language partner has been giving me a lot of assignments where you have to fill in blanks or open-ended responses to conversational questions. I’ve been sort of understanding this okay because a lot of the question words are super similar to Spanish. For example, quem, como, and quando are very similar. As for common responses, we’ve been trying to look at to be and have verbs. My favorite one I’ve learned so far is estou com inveja, which means I am jealous. Practice is the most integral part of these lessons for me because I really understand what we’re doing when in the meeting, but once I revisit it, I forget certain things about what I’ve learned. The weekly assignments have been super helpful, and I think that I’m moving in a really good direction. To couple with my weekly meetings, my partner suggested I watch the movie City of God in Portuguese with subtitles. This really helped reinforce a lot of dialogue that we’ve been working on in our meetings.
As for the future, there’s a few goals we have in mind. First, I would like to be rather conversational on a basic level and be able to fully understand these basic questions and phrases by next month’s post. In addition, I’d like to be able to identify different ways to respond to questions and how to ask the right ones within the language. For next month, my partner is going to show me the book pois não and see if it could help me transition from Spanish to Portuguese. However, we aren’t entirely sure if its the best resource for me, but we are going to try it soon. Third, we are hoping to set together some culmination of what I learned for me to practice and keep repeating so I don’t forget the foundation I’ve built. After that, I’m not entirely sure, but we definitely will keep progressing in the best way possible for me and my aspirations.
Comments
I shared these exact same struggles when learning Portuguese because I also have a Spanish background. A lot of the words are very similar and I had the tendency to say words in Spanish that were not the same in Portuguese. I do want to let you know that Dixon Abreu teaches a Portuguese for Spanish speakers class every year. He is a wonderful teacher and will really help grow your language skills.