Learning the Language

Having a background in French, with some exposure to Spanish, is helping immensely. However, I do find my brain slipping into French as a natural reaction to "how do I say xyz in another language?" ("Comment le direz-vous en une autre langue?", in case you were wondering). And Portuguese is so horrible close yet so distinctly different to Spanish, it is taking a lot of will-power not to say 'Gracias', but rather 'Obrigado' in thanks for a service.

While studying my Portuguese phrase book I'd picked up in Christchurch, I discovered some peculiar phrases that were included. Now I'm not sure, but by the time you need the phrase "I won't do it without protection" ("Eu nao faco isso sem proteccao", again, in case you were wondering), I think you would be a bit beyond needing a phrase book! (Honestly, it's in there, along with a whole set of pickup lines and other sentences on the same topic.)

Actually my little pocket book to Portuguese is reasonably handy for someone accomplished in other languages (and I barely qualify in this category). Having listened to some books-on-CD before coming really helped with the all-important pronunciation. But my little cheat guide to the language is definitely missing, is how to conjugate verbs in all but the present tense. You can guess all you like by connecting the dots from the examples given, but the language has a straight-forward formula for 95% of cases, so why not dedicate another 3-5 pages on that, huh?

Well eventually I dedicated a day to finding a grammar book.

I seem to plan most of my days this way – with one, or two, to-do items that take so much longer to accomplished due to the new learning that is necessary, but which you take for granted in your native environment.

And I was quite proud to have a good length conversation on this topic with a patient lady shopkeeper in a school supplies store that didn’t speak any English, but enunciated her Portuguese well enough for me to follow (or at least get the general gist). She found me a number of books, but I felt even the one of 3-4 years olds was a bit above me. It is a wonder what we intuitively learn as children that they will know the language well enough by this age, but just need to have the structure reinforced; whereas I understand the necessary structure but need the content.

Eventually I tracked down an English book store, ‘The Owl Story’… but that is another topic (or two) in itself. The short story is that I decided to look on line to fill in that missing 3-5 pages I wanted.

Everyone says immersion is the best method, thus I also looked at getting a second job for the night time. But decided against this after a good look around, as they are earning so little (more on this in another topic).

The learning continues…