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.
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