Learning Portuguese

The final countdown has begun! In less than two weeks, I’ll be boarding a flight from Chicago to Brazil to begin my Fund for Teachers fellowship. Before I land, I want to be able to communicate in Portuguese, even if it’s at a very basic level. 🇧🇷

Linguistic Foundations

To get ready, I’ve been diving headfirst into learning the language. The Pimsleur Method has become a fixture of my daily routine. 

👂🏻The Pimsleur Method is an audio-based language learning system that focuses almost entirely on speaking proficiency. It's structured around organic memory recall, and it works by prompting you to translate phrases at gradually increasing time intervals.  

👄This method locks the vocabulary & grammar naturally into your memory without explicit grammar-based instruction. As you learn more language, Pimsleur continually spirals back around to what you’ve learned before while constantly adding to it.

🕵🏽‍♂️Fun fact: the Pimsleur Method is used by the FBI.

You need to set aside at least 45 minutes a day (30 minutes for the audio lesson + 15 for practice exercises), but it gets you speaking your new language quickly! I’ve used it for Spanish 🇲🇽, as well as Twi (a major dialect in Ghana) for my Fulbright. 🇬🇭

😎I'm also trying to maintain my Duolingo streaks to keep my grammar sharp and watching YouTube videos to try and pick up authentic Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) slang and everyday expressions. 

The Art of Pronunciation

🤔On paper, I thought I had a head start because when you read Portuguese words, you can easily see how they’re related to Spanish. In essence, cognates really come in handy, but the moment you try to open your mouth, it's a total plot twist. 

😜The pronunciation is incredibly tricky. Letters like O, D, E, R, and M change sounds entirely depending on where they sit in a word, and the nasal vowels are difficult to hit just right. I feel like the sounds of Portuguese sit in completely different parts of my mouth than I’m used, like way in the front for many consonants and more deeply nasal on certain vowels.

To an English speaker (or at least to me), Ms at the end of words are pronounced very softly and sound almost like Ns; and D often sounds like a J or soft G. So the phrase Bom dia! (“Good morning!”) sounds like “Bon jia” to my ears. The verb in Vocȇ entende (“You understand”) is pronounced “en-ten-jee.”

🤯O trips me up too. A single O is usually pronounced “oo” (as in “choose”), and OU sounds like a long o (as in “ghost”). Thus the word for “money”, dinheiro sounds like “jee-nyay-roo”, and the word for “am,” sou sounds like “so.”

💡👍🏻Presenting sound before sight is one of the reasons Pimsleur works so well for getting you speaking quickly. You say Portuguese words & statements before seeing them, however they often don’t resemble the spellings I’m seeing in my head as I learn.

Back to Being a Student

Honestly, stumbling over my words every single day has been a pretty humbling experience. It forces me to think deeply about my own students in Chicago. More than half of my school consists of English Language Learners (ELLs), who speak over 60 different languages combined. 🌏🌍🌎

I work most closely with our level 2 & 3 students, who are at the “Beginning” & “Developing” stages of English language acquisition. Every single day, they courageously (and often sleepily) walk into a school building and stretch their brains to speak, write, and think in a completely new language.

As an educator, I think it is vital to step out of our comfort zones and into the shoes of our students. Experiencing just a small fraction of that linguistic vulnerability reminds me of the immense grit my students possess. 

If they can master English, I can certainly survive learning how to order pão de queijo and café com leite without sounding completely ridiculous. 😅

To my students reading this: get ready to see your teacher struggle on camera with Portuguese accents very soon!