Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, bits of French)

[iguanamon]

Great that you're learning Portuguese, garyb! There will be no "Spanish prism" lecture from me. Unlike most people who use the "from Spanish to Portuguese materials" this is your fourth Romance language... not your first one after Spanish. Yeah, you'll have interference, but since it's your fourth romance language, you won't have as much as if it were your second. You are accustomed to learning similar languages with French-Italian-Spanish. Ironically, for two members who have a high percentage of Romance languages under the belt, we have only overlapped in Spanish, until now. With my choice of languages and my native language, I am a "colonial" in all of them, except Catalan!

Catalan is my fourth Romance language. Having Spanish, Portuguese and Ladino (and to a certain extent, Haitian Creole) under my belt made it quite easy for me to jump right into reading with a dictionary. Still, it's the common, everyday language that most needs to be mastered when going on a trip and interacting with natives.

Living in the Americas, I gravitated to Brazilian Portuguese. Even so, I've probably spent equal time in both Brazil and Portugal. I had no trouble at all with my Brazilian Portuguese in Portugal- being understood or understanding. Later, if you want to learn Portuguese more deeply, you may want to at least expose yourself to Brazilian Portuguese, especially if you ever want to visit Brazil. You'll also run into Brazilians all over Portugal.

Since you are going to Portugal, I'd look into doing the DLI Portuguese Headstart course. It teaches Iberian Portuguese and has all the daily needs covered. There is a video course on YouTube with a Spanish base from Canal Extremadura in Spain called Falamos Português which teaches Iberian Portuguese from a Castilian base. Boa Sorte!

[garyb]

Thanks for the thoughts and recommendations, Iguanamon! The Spanish prism thing was of course a little joke. I didn't consider FSI Headstart but it might be a little more appropriate to my situation than MT. I've watched a couple of Falamos Português videos and they're nice, although I'm not sure if the Spanish subtitles are helpful or just confusing at this point!

I'd love to visit Brazil at some point in my life and I'm sure I'll get some exposure to Brazilian Portuguese sooner or later. There do seem to be a lot of good resources for it.

[iguanamon]

With your experience with Romance languages, you can start reading now. You just need to acquire basic speaking and I think the DLI Headstart will do that for you. I know what you mean about hardcoded Spanish subs, but it does make the Portuguese comprehensible. Maybe watch it once with the subs and a second time (just the conversational part) with a piece of paper or tape over the subs, perhaps?

I used to have more resources for Iberian Portuguese but so many links die over time and websites stop offering what they used to offer. There used to be a great online course about 10 years ago from Galsgow University but I can't find it now. Of course you know there's an Assimil course with a Spanish and French base. There's also from Portugal itself, the following courses: Aprender Português and Novo Português Sem Fronteiras. They're for sale at a reasonable price. For free, I found Portuguese Lab Acadaemy A1; some resources from Centro Virtual Camões- especially A falar for speaking, which has pronunciation and a conversation guide; my favorite monolingual dictionary Priberam; bilingual dictionary Linguee PT; verb conjugation Conjuga-me.

If you want to try to jump into listening and reading, there's Deutsche Welle Learning By Ear which has a series of Radio Plays about 10-15 minutes long with pdf transcript and downloadable mp3. The English and in your case, French, is also available to make a parallel text. I recommend starting with the 10 episode African Fables series for simpler language. The African Fables series should be quite approachable for someone with your language background English; Portuguese; French. The Portuguese, English and French are African. In the case of the Portuguese it's Mozambican. It's much closer to Iberian pronunciation than Brazilian. Boa sorte, garyb. If I can be of further help, pm me.

[garyb]

Thanks again Iguanamon for all the resources!

Sadly I really don't have much time to make the most of them. I'm leaving for Portugal in just over a week, and since I booked the trip I've had little free time. I'm preparing to move house next weekend, plus various social commitments, a bit of extra work I've picked up, and all the rest.

I gave up on MT Portuguese after the first chapter. I just lost patience with one of the students. I can empathise, I realise that learning a language isn't easy, but constantly hearing words being mixed up and mispronounced really isn't helpful or productive to someone with my language background and between the lack of writing and different people pronouncing things in different ways (for example "tem" sounds variously like "ten", "tein", "tene", "teine"...) I'm just getting more confused. I'll try FSI Fast instead. So far it seems a little repetitive and doesn't exactly live up to its name (maybe that's the Millenial in me wanting quick results though!), but looks like it's thorough and focuses on the right things.

Overall though, I've had a very stressful year and I'm just hoping I can relax a bit, in Portugal and afterwards. As I implied in an earlier post, the last thing I want to do is turn a nice holiday into a high-stress "language practice" trip. At times I wish I could just sit down and watch a nice (Italian or Spanish) film and not think about anything else but I just have too many things to do.

[garyb]

I'm leaving for Portugal this evening and guess what, I've done practically zero Portuguese studying since my last post. Moving house and preparing for a holiday is time-consuming, who knew?

I have tried a couple of jumps into the deep end though: listening to some Practice Portuguese podcasts (some of dialogues are quite easy to follow if I pay attention, while others are basically incomprehensible) and reading a few pages of O Alquimista since it seems to be the Portuguese-language book, a bit like Le Petit Prince for French, and it's been on my to-read list for years so was the first thing to come to mind (so far again a mixed experience: the introductions needed a lot of dictionary use but the actual narrative seems quite simple).

This "input-first" method isn't really my preference, not even for a language close to ones I know; I'd rather use courses and resources like the ones discussed in the last few posts but as I say I got sick of MT quickly and haven't been able to get into any others since working through a course requires having consistent time to sit down and focus on it, while I can quite easily listen to podcasts while exercising and getting ready in the morning and read a bit at lunchtime.

I've abandoned any ideas I might have had about speaking during my trip, although I might try if the situation calls for it (friendly people encouraging me to try like in my experience with Russian in Estonia, or needing it to communicate), but being able to understand some will be nice and I'll no doubt pick up some more while I'm there.

[garyb]

I'm back from Portugal!

I can say quite unequivocally that knowing more Portuguese definitely would have enhanced my trip, so it's a shame I didn't have as much time as hoped for it, but I sure enjoyed myself anyway. Plenty people there speak great English but plenty also don't or at least aren't that comfortable and prefer to use Portuguese if possible. I did struggle a few times, and I managed a few basic interactions such as ordering tasty pastries entirely in Portuguese. Understanding conversations was still way too hard for me, but I did understand some of the questions I was asked and most of the announcements on trains and so on. As expected I did pick up quite a bit of basic language just from listening and reading to what was around me, but I can't exactly call it significant progress.

I got a little practice at my other languages too as there were French, Italian, and Spanish speakers everywhere. One time a French couple asked us if any of us spoke French and I automatically replied "oui, un peu" (and then proceeded to help them with with no problems whatsoever), a response that I felt a little ashamed about. I studied that language for around a decade, I used to speak it very well, and I still regularly read books and watch films in it; I may be somewhat rusty now and I can think of many ways I would have preferred to spend all that time, but still, I know more than just "a little" and I should be proud of it instead of letting the vocal minority of discouraging native speakers win. I'll try not to do it again.

As a destination, Portugal isn't quite love at first sight but rather a place that you start to appreciate and fall in love with gradually. Porto was pretty but felt a little soulless since it's a former industrial city turned tourist destination. Enough to see and do, but it just didn't feel like it had a whole lot of life and the nightlife was very generic (turns out that Portuguese-language pop music is even worse than Spanish!). I still had fun there thanks to events and tours organised through the hostel. Coimbra was far calmer than I had expected for a university town, but did feel a lot more "authentic" and had enough to see and do. Lisbon hardly blew my mind but as I say it's a place to be discovered slowly: there are lots of nice little shops, bars and restaurants in different neighbourhoods and it's a lovely place to walk around and take in the atmosphere and architecture. I found it quite a relaxing place: I had plenty opportunity to see the sights and go out at night yet also chill out and take my time. It's very touristy but as always you just need to step outside the main areas to get a genuine experience. And the food was tasty and cheap and abundant, as I just posted about in another thread. I'd love to go back, although there are enough other destinations on my list that I'm not in any rush.

I liked the people and the culture a lot. The temperament and attitude to life felt more calm and profound than in Spain, and more open than in Italy and France. Good balance with many of the great parts of Southern European culture and pride yet just a bit more down-to-earth and, well, nice. Seemed like a place where I'd fit in quite well.

As for the language, I'm certainly keen to learn a bit more of it! However I'd also like to improve my Spanish as my speaking and listening still aren't the greatest (and feel that Portuguese would be easier if I first took that to a more solid level) and I'm still keen on German, so I'll see how things work out. Maybe I'll take advantage of the post-trip motivation to at least build some basic knowledge and listening comprehension, then put it on standby until I plan another trip to Portugal (or Brazil; who knows!). I feel like beginner courses are too slow but native input is still too hard and I'd benefit from some structure and explanation, so something like Assimil in Spanish or another Romance language base could be ideal. After years of quite focused study and avoiding wanderlust I'm feeling like a beginner who wants to study everything at once again. My goals aren't too lofty so it's really just a question of being sensible about time and order.

I'm making a bit more time for input again, and catching up on the latest series of Elite, Baby, and La casa de papel.

[Expugnator]

Glad to hear about your trip to Portugal! You're welcome to Brazil (and to learning Portuguese) anytime!

[garyb]

After Portugal, I ended up having a last-minute trip to Madrid!

It just made me realise what I already knew and even wrote about in my last post: my Spanish is okay but not great. Obviously after Portugal it felt great actually understanding people and being able to interact beyond just a few words, and I got by fine in short interactions, but things did get a bit challenging.

My friend's phone got stolen and we had to report it at the police station, where after a four and a half hour wait we got an agent who didn't speak English and since my friend only knows basic Spanish I had to explain the situation and interpret. We managed fine but I found it way harder to form sentences than it should have been; it might have been easier if we hadn't been tired, hungry, and almost going delirious from the wait!

The last night in the hostel, I was having dinner and there was an English-speaking table and a Spanish-speaking one. I ended up at the English one but thought it would be nice if I could join the Spanish one; after the meal I did and it turned out to be a bit of a "be careful what you wish for" type of situation as there were a Uruguayan, a Colombian, and a pair of Argentinians - all accents that I'm not very used to - so following and joining in the conversation wasn't exactly easy. Again though I rose to the challenge and tried my best.

Definitely a bit of motivation to work on my Spanish again. I've said before that I often feel that it's a useful language but not one I really have a passion for, and that's still fairly accurate but a bit of time in Spain always helps make it a bit more appealing!

[garyb]

I finally gave in... and started on Michel Thomas German!

My Portuguese experience was almost enough to put me off MT, but the German one (a "proper" course with Michel himself) seems good so far: things are explained well, the order is sensible, and the students are competent.

With yet another addition to the list, it was time to put some order and prioritisation into all this. I've decided that priority number one is Spanish for now, for the reasons I've described in the last couple of posts: I still don't speak it that well and my comprehension could be much better too, I have some motivation for it again, and related languages (Portuguese in my case) will be easier and less confusing with stronger Spanish. I'm still keen on Portuguese but don't feel any urgent need or desire to work on it so I'm happy to play the long game.

I've now shifted most of my podcasts, TV, and reading to Spanish. I'll start doing Kwiziq again within the limits of the free package to keep my grammar sharp, and will try to do more writing and speaking. The exchange meetup that I had had mostly good experiences with has now been cancelled, but there are always other options and even self-talk could get me pretty far at this stage. I'd be fine with conversing just once every week or two.

I still love Italian but don't mind putting a bit less attention on it now especially since I'm at a level where anything more than very slow progress is difficult without immersion and time-wise I'd get a lot more bang for my buck with Spanish.

As for German, I think I'll just follow my classic strategy of MT (basic and maybe advanced too) then Assimil, although I'm open to other resources too and it seems like there's no shortage of them in German. I just need to avoid too much emotional interference: the other day I started watching an Italian Youtuber's video about Berlin and after a couple of minutes I started feeling upset and the regrets were coming back and I had to stop... Although if it makes me more interested in the country and culture that'll be a good thing. I'll try to keep it up for the next couple of months to learn the very basics and then see how I feel about continuing with the language.

Greek is sadly dead for now. I just can't find much motivation for it when I could work on easier and seemingly more rewarding languages. I'm not even keeping up with my Anki cards anymore, and when I try I realise I've forgotten a lot and my attempts at Portuguese and German are pushing it out. It's a shame, especially with the family connection, and I really do hope to come back to it at a later point.

[DaveAgain]

As for German, I think I'll just follow my classic strategy of MT (basic and maybe advanced too) then Assimil, although I'm open to other resources too and it seems like there's no shortage of them in German.

I second your plan, but just to let you know that from a scottish IP address you should be able to use the Goethe eLibrary, which has a variety of books/audio/graded readers/courses.