I love to look back on my meetings with Leticia because they are just…fun! For the past few weeks, we have really found our rhythm and she also was kind enough to put my list of goals into a schedule for us to follow. Now, each day when I arrive to Portuguese we have a specific topic we are going to focus on that day and she has prepared various songs, other videos, or vocabulary for us to go over.
What I most generally hoped to accomplish this month is building my foundation in Portuguese. I feel as though the first month was becoming familiar with the different points of articulation that Portuguese has, many of which are farther back than English goes (at least they are in Leticia’s Rio accent) or are nasally in a way I am not used to. Leticia has been incredibly kind to repeat words over and over for me so that I can phonetically absorb the way that native speakers say the words I am learning. It is something as simple as the month of July, Julho, that I still struggle with. There are subtle phones that my ear still can’t detect and that my mouth still can’t wrap around. It is humbling and frustrating when you feel like you physically aren’t able to pronounce something, particularly not at a fast speed. I believe that I am learning a lot from the experience, however, and I am taking it slow in order to build a solid foundation that has less of an American accent!
We’ve gone over a lot of vocabulary and conversational phrases that have helped in familiarizing me with pronunciation as well as basic words. We reviewed the family tree and how to give directions. These were both fun topics because we were able to draw a family tree and draw a map of a town. Then, I would use the vocabulary I just learned to describe the relations between two people or to direct Leticia to a certain place. I enjoyed being forced to struggle through using some of the vocabulary on my own and see if Leticia understood.
We also learned about cultural topics, particularly art. For this lesson, Leticia went through the different museums in Brazil and what each of them displayed. She showed me some of her favorite Brazilian artists such as Kobra, a graffiti turned mural artist that had breathtaking works splayed across multiple cities in Brazil, and Sebastião Salgado, a photographer of Indigenous peoples she was particularly excited to show me. I didn’t learn much Portuguese in that lesson, but I wasn’t worried. I learned so much about the cultural context of Portuguese as well as what can be communicated without words. It was a definitive highlight of our meetings together.
Overall, I think we have made a lot of progress in how the meetings are more structured now that they are centered around a topic. I am also excited because Leticia has found a textbook that we will also be working out of for our future meetings.
Comments
Spending the first month of becoming familiar with a new language I think is very important and something that I had to focus on more myself with learning Korean. That's awesome that you and your partner went through different museums in Brazil and observed the different works each one held. Is there a favorite piece or work that you found interesting or that resonated with you the most?
A textbook will offer so much structure! I know before I found the website that I use now, making lessons and topics to talk about was very draining and made it hard to keep being motivated to continue learning. I hope the textbook allows you to enjoy learning the language more now that you might not have to stress so much about finding and/or organizing new content.