The iguana's tale- Portuguese, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Ladino

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iguanamon
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The iguana's tale- Portuguese, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Ladino

Postby iguanamon » Thu Jul 23, 2015 12:28 am

Iguanas are all over the place on the island where I live. We see them crossing the road. Their gait is hilarious. I've seen them in the mangroves, on the tops of walls and even swimming from time to time. The iguana's tail is long- longer than he is, and so is my tale. With the situation at HTLAL still up in the air, I have decided to make this my new home. That doesn't mean I won't go back and visit our old home from time to time, but I still can't access old HTLAL via the domain name from here. We're always on island time.

I plan to write about my languages and what I am doing with them to improve. My Portuguese and Spanish are advanced. My Haitian Creole is at basic fluency and I am actively improving it. Ladino is for fun, though, I am at basic fluency in it too. I will update some of my most popular posts at HTLAL here. Moderators have my full permission to use myHTLAL posts here.

Lately, I have been working on Portuguese and Haitian Creole quite a bit. Portuguese, because I want to build on what I have accomplished and Haitian Creole, because I would like to get it to a better level. M ta renmen pale kreyòl. I have managed to find sufficient resources to improve it through books, some tv, twitter, news sites, music and blogs. I am enjoying the process very much right now. It's fun. Resources aren't as easy to find for HC as they are for Portuguese and Spanish but they're out there. It's a fascinating culture to learn about and the people are very friendly. I doubt that my Haitian Creole will ever reach the level of my two main languages, though, simply because of the fact that there aren't quite enough resources available without living in Haiti.

I've been going through a few series in Portuguese in the past few months. One that I have really enjoyed is "Toma lá dá cá"
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It's a well written comedy about two(?) totally dysfunctional families. Two families live across the hall from each other in the same condominium complex in Rio but... The husband in Unit A (Arnoldo) used to be married to and has children with his ex wife (Celinha) in Unit B. Celinha's current husband (Mario Jorge) used to be married to and has children with his ex wife (Rita) in Unit A who is married to his current wife's ex husband. It's a hilarious mess. Add in a crazed nymphomaniac grandmother, a nutty condominium manager whose husband is omnisexual, a beautiful daughter with the IQ of a tomato plant, a maid shared between the two families who revels in telling stories from her hometown in Paraná (lá em Pato Branco...) and a teenage boy who just wants to be normal and... hilarity ensues.

I have finished all 91 of the 40 minute episodes over three "seasons" ("series" for the UK). There are no subtitles. This was a real challenge because of the slang and vocabulary unique to Brazil, not to mention the Carioca accents. Thanks to the help of Brazilian friends and Dicionário Informal i got much better as the series went on. The show has a lot of "bordões" or "catchphrases" like Dona Copelia's "Prefiro não comentar", Celinha's "Ta-na-na", and Mario Jorge's derogatory nickname for his daughter, Isadora- "Olho junto" and "Mau Caráter".

I have also finished all the episodes of Preamar

Preamar is an HBO Brasil series about a family man who loses his job as a high powered corporate banker by having made some dubious trades, goes back to his family and lies to them by telling them he's on a "sabbatical" from work. Their apartment faces Ipanema Beach in Rio. He soon notices the rather large underground economy taking place on the beach and starts to get in on it by providing the local boss with marketing tips. Of course, his kids are messed up and the wife still thinks they have money. Wouldn' t you if you had a maid and cook and lived in a highrise apartment overlooking Ipanema Beach? "Preamar" means "high tide" in English and the show has all the consequences of that word.

Right now I am watching "Magnífica 70" another HBO Brasil Original

This series is only up to 9 episodes at present but it is majorly cool. It's set in 1970's Brasil , during the military dictatorship. Films were censored. The main character, Vicente, is a federal censor. He also moonlights by directing "pornochanchadas". A pornochanchada is a sort of Brazilian very soft core porn with just a tad of nudity and lots of suggestion, very tame by modern standards but scandalous to the military regime. Think "Mad Men" in Brazil. The show is quite well produced and acted with a high quality of production.

I found the opening theme on youtube. The "groovy" music of the intro theme is from 1973 and called "Sangue Latino" (Latin Blood) by the group Secos e Molhados


That's enough for now, I just got a copy of Hamlet translated into Haitian Creole in the mail today and can't wait to start reading it.
Last edited by iguanamon on Wed Mar 29, 2017 12:49 am, edited 4 times in total.
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tastyonions
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby tastyonions » Thu Jul 23, 2015 1:01 am

Ever since I first heard Portuguese I have loved listening to it, even though I understand only a small fraction. It's easily the coolest-sounding Romance language, in my opinion. One day I will get around to learning it.
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby basica » Thu Jul 23, 2015 1:19 am

You've chosen an interesting list of languages to learn - would you mind giving us an insight into what drew you to each and how you use them (if it's not too personal)?
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby Expugnator » Thu Jul 23, 2015 1:20 am

Fascinating! You make me want to learn Portuguese. Have you managed to find all the episodes from Toma lá-dá-cá online or did you buy DVDs? As for the others, ever since the cable channels were "forced" to produce local content, we have seen a renaissance of series with more mature language and less of the conservationism of novelas. Pity that I don't know how to access them other than watching them on the broadcasted time.
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iguanamon
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby iguanamon » Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:52 am

basica wrote:You've chosen an interesting list of languages to learn - would you mind giving us an insight into what drew you to each and how you use them (if it's not too personal)?

Actually, I am no longer actively "studying" Portuguese and Spanish as I have an advanced level in both. I just slowly try to improve them over time by using them- speaking, reading, writing and listening. I will most likely never be completely satisfied .

Spanish has been with me the longest of all. When I was a boy of about 11 or 12 years old, I remember lying in bed on a cold winter's night (where I was born and raised in the upper South of the mainland US) listening to my AM (MW) radio and hearing a baseball game being transmitted in Spanish from Cuba. I loved baseball and to hear it on the radio in wintertime (well before ESPN Classic appeared) was nothing short of amazing. After the baseball game I heard Cuban Son and Salsa music. I was hooked. The first time I could go to the nearest (to us) big city, I went to a bookstore and bought a paperback bilingual dictionary and Charles Berlitz' Spanish Step by Step. I was off to the races! Little did I know, but even back then I was using the multi-track approach. There was no Hispanic immigration back then in my little town, no Spanish-language cable tv, no itunes or internet. There was no audio with my textbook. The only way I could hear Spanish was on the radio.

I was fascinated by all things Cuban. Cuba was "forbidden". It was an irresistible draw. After finishing the Berlitz book, I was probably A1. In a couple of years I was able to take Spanish class in high school where I was easily the best student. My teacher, who was a non-native speaking local woman, took an interest in me and provided me with magazines, books and music in Spanish. I aced =both Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 and that was it. No more formal Spanish learning was available for me.

So I wrote to Radio Havana and I got a free weekly subscription to Granma, the Cuban Communist Party propaganda newspaper- think Pravda. I was also able to get a free subscription to the OAS (Organization of American States) monthly magazine "Américas". I had, in the meantime read my first novel in Spanish with a dictionary. I continued to listen to Spanish-speaking radio on shortwave. Shortwave was the closest thing to the internet, pre-internet. I had an amateur radio license as well and actually began to seek out conversations with natives. At first I used morse code and later audio. By the time I got to university, I finally had access to a large library and read as much as I could get my hands on in Spanish. I hung around the international students and learned even more by speaking. I then took and passed the CLEP exam and earned 12 hours (4 semesters) credit in Spanish without ever having had a university class. (Those tests are still available in the US and a cheap way to earn credit hours, if the university accepts the test, mine did.)

After university I did a stint in the US Army where I had Hispanic roommates. After the Army I traveled through Latin America and Spain. In the early 90's immigration started to occur, even in my lttle town of 6,000 people. With it came satellite cable and Univisión. I watched telenovelas with closed captions and that was a huge boost to my Spanish. Finding HTLAL brought me more efficiency and I learned about new resources and was able to take my Spanish to the next level.

Portuguese came about via my love of Brazilian music and a desire to speak the major languages of the Americas. Without HTLAL, I wouldn't be speaking Portuguese today. I found out about the free DLI (Defense Language Institute) courses on HTLAL. The Portuguese Basic Course is the most thorough course I have ever seen. Because of Spanish I was able to jump in at Volume 4 of DLI. I also used Pimsleur and had a non-English-speaking Brazilian tutor, and native resources from the beginning. I didn't "just do Assimil", use srs, or the official LR. I just learned the language with my course, tutor and by using it- listening, reading, writing and speaking. (Valeu NHK Serviço Português, RFI Brasil and FGV OCW e Gabriela).

Haitian Creole came about because I live in the Caribbean. There's a small community here and I had a Haitian friend at the time who is now off-island in the States. To see how I learned it, look at my link to my former log M ta renmen pale kreyòl. HC is the only language that all Haitians speak. I also have a massively huge discount with the Lesser Antilles French Creole. I can speak HC and be understood and I can listen to LAFC and get a heck of a lot of it. The cool thing about HC as a language is there is no gender in nouns and adjectives, spelling is phonetic and sensible, and most importantly there is no verb conjugation- tenses are made with particles. After Spanish and Portuguese, I couldn't face French conjugations and illogical spellings and gender agreement. Still, French is the last major language hole for me in the Americas. I may learn it some day.

Ladino {Djudeo-espanyol) came about because I became interested in learning about how and why a people expelled from Spain in the 15th century living in the former Ottoman Empire managed to retain medieval Spanish and make it their own by adopting words from all over the Mediterranean world. A Rashi Decision- Ladino Log

Expugnator wrote:...You make me want to learn Portuguese.

Ha! kkkk! Imagino!

Expug: Assisto todas as series online porque eu não posso consegui-las dos sites brasileiros por falta de um cartão de crédito brasileiro e um CPF. É muito difícil para um estrangeiro comprar numa loja brasileira online. Já comprei alguns dvd's de um vendedor no Mercado Libre por um preço razoável mas, a pesar da qualidade alta dos discos, eles não são legítimos, e não me avisou disso, sabe não? Rs, rs, rs. Prefiro não comentar. Assisti TLDC e assisto as outras series todas online. Adorei TLDC, era.... maraaaaa! Posso te passar os links por pm se quiser.

That's the iguana's tale for today- M a wè nou pi ta zanmi mwen yo. Até mais, meus amigos. Hasta luego, mis amigos. Boa noite...
Last edited by iguanamon on Thu Jul 23, 2015 12:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby kujichagulia » Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:10 am

Good to see you writing a log!

And how kind of you to go through all the trouble of starting a log, just to provide me with some links to interesting Portuguese videos! You shouldn't have! :)
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby kimchizzle » Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:03 am

I found it quite interesting how you came about learning the languages you study. Haitian Creole seems very interesting, I never knew it did all it's verb tenses with particles, that is pretty neat. I had never heard of Ladino until I saw you studied it, it seems to have a very intriguing history.
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby getreallanguage » Sat Jul 25, 2015 9:15 pm

Si nos pudieras contar mas de como estudiás/estudiaste ladino me encantaría. Es una lengua que me gusta mucho, tanto por el cancionero sefaradí como por las similitudes con el castellano antiguo.
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iguanamon
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby iguanamon » Sat Jul 25, 2015 10:39 pm

getreallanguage wrote:...Es una lengua que me gusta mucho, tanto por el cancionero sefaradí como por las similitudes con el castellano antiguo.


Sí, getreallanguage, por eso me gusta mucho también. Estudié el djudeo-espanyol (el ladino) usando dos cursos (con audio, claro) con un base inglés para empezar Usé (y uso) un diccionario bilingüe, leyendo libros, escuchando a las noticias del Servicio Ladino de Kol Israel Radio diariamente y escuchando el programa semanal de RNE. Para mi, el idioma es bastante especial y muy divertido. Me gusta tanto porque está llena de historia y nos cuenta de la supervivencia de la gente sefardí después de la triste expulsión de la península ibérica. Los sefardíes huyeron al Imperio Otomano donde fueron bien recibidos. Mantuvieron su lengua e incorporaron muchas palabras de las lenguas que les rodearon creando una riqueza lingüística hasta que el holocausto casi eliminó la comunidad de la tierra. Era una vez cuando Salonika fue el Jerusalén de los Balcanes. La mitad de la población de la ciudad griega era Sefardí, antes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Podía decir que hablo pero, con tan pocas personas (100.000) que hablan el idioma... pues no hablo. De vez en cuando, escribo un poco en un foro y twitter. Puedo hablar el idioma si quería viajar largas distancias- Israel, Seattle, Estambul, hasta Buenos Aires tiene una comunidad pequeña- eseferad. Hay mucho sobre el idioma en este sitio. Me gustan los cuentos de "Djoha". Intento escribir mas sobre el djudeo-espanyol en breve, en inglés. Pero, todo está en mi log en HTLAL: A Rashi Decision - Ladino Log.
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Re: The iguana's tale- PT, ES, HC, LAD

Postby James29 » Sun Jul 26, 2015 1:16 am

It is definitely good to see you writing a log. Your story/history with Spanish was inspiring and quite interesting to read. One regret I already have is that I never visited Cuba before the change in relations with the US.
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