I’m enjoying the Instagram Language Challenge at the moment. There aren’t many people playing but I love a good challenge, me.
You can see the current entries here and the list of daily themes is here.
I’m 18ck on instagram and my favourite entry so far has been this one on the theme of “flag”. Bandeira is Portuguese for “flag” and for me it’s just a hop and a skip from there to punland.
It’s always a good idea to have some tricks up your sleeve for learning languages when you don’t feel like it, when you want to increase the density of [insert name of language here] in your life, or when you just want a change of pace. Here are a few of my favourites:
I found it pretty hard to find good apps for learning European Portuguese, but it’s relatively easy to find good quiz apps and many of them have other language settings. I have a copy of Trivia Crack which I’ve set on Portuguese so I can enjoy farting about playing games and still be learning new words, phrases and pop culture references and (crucially) facts about Brazilian football. It has its drawbacks of course: most of the questions are written by Brazilians so you get quite a lot of Brazilian grammar in there, but still, it’s more educational than Angry Birds.
If you’re feeling feisty, there’s even a “translate questions” feature that lets you translate Portuguese (or whatever) questions into English.
If you spend a lot of time online (ha ha ha, sorry, I’m kidding – obviously you do! It’s the twenty-first century and you probably haven’t left the house in weeks!) you can massively increase the amount of language in your life by tweaking the settings on your most-used websites. The obvious one for me is my Google Account settings, which affects all my search results, plus the menus in Google Chrome, names of folders etc in Gmail, spellcheck in Google Docs, names of days and months in Google Calendar and half a dozen other things.
I’ve also changed twitter, but that doesn’t do much except teach you some stupid pretend words like “tweetar” (shouldn’t that be “pipiar”???). I daresay if you use Facebook you could get some mileage out of changing the language settings in that. I would love to change Windows and MS Word too but that’s surprisingly hard to do.
Memrise is really the only dedicated language-learning app worth having. What makes it different from other apps is that it keeps track of the words you’ve learned and returns to them a short time later, to jog your memory so that they really stick. There’s some science behind it apparently. I dunno. It works pretty well though.
The decks are made by users, so they vary in quality. Some are mildly irritating. For example, they will count something as wrong because you used a lower case letter instead of a capital, then in the next slide you’ll use a capital and it’ll mark it as wrong because now it wants a lower case. That doesn’t stop it being a kick-ass language-learning tool though. I usually have a go on it while I’m brushing my teeth at night and while I’m eating my breakfast in the morning.
As with most things, make sure you specify European Portuguese, not Brazilian.
If you’ve got some mindless task to perform, don’t listen to the new Kanye West album, listen to someone speaking your chosen language instead. Portuguese (as opposed to Brazilian) podcasts are hard to come by but you can find them if you look hard enough. Some of my favourites are:
You could also look for “Grande História Universal das Traquitanas” which I’ve heard is very good but it doesn’t seem to be downloading when I try [*Another update: I’ve found a way of getting them: you have to open the page in Internet Exploder, not Chrome. .You still can’t subscribe, but you can download the episodes individually, so that’s my listening for tomorrow sorted out!*]
A lot of podcasts are quite hard to find in iTunes but I’ve found some interesting nuggets by looking on the websites of Portuguese broadcasting companies. Here’s Rádio e Televisão de Portugal’s for example. There is usually enough variety that you’re bound to find something that suits your interests and ability level.
Taking a left-turn at the traffic lights, there are some good, inspirational podcasts for language-learners in general. Have a look at “Actual Fluency” or “Creative Language Learning” in iTunes, for example. Personally, I can only take this kind of thing in small doses, but a little of it now and again is good. It reminds you that you’re not alone and it gives you some ideas from the hardcore language-ninjas.
If podcasts aren’t your thing, there’s always music. I’m a bit ambivalent about music as a learning method. A lot of people recommend it, including my wife, but I often find it’s like watching as a stream of syllables rushes by at speed. I think unless you’ve taken trouble to read the lyrics written down beforehand and compare with a translation, it’s difficult to pick the words out and appreciate them. Of course, you can still enjoy the music, but understanding the music adds a whole other dimension.
If there’s one thing Portugal has lots of, it’s music. I’ve already mentioned (here) my favourite song at the moment is by Deolinda. I also loves me some Mariza
Some of the old Fado music is pretty powerful, especially if you get the right singer, and singers don’t get much more right than Amália Rodrigues
I mentioned, last week, posting post-it notes all over my house with the names of things on them. That’s quite a cleaver way of bumping up your vocabulary a bit without really trying, although with hindsight I wish I’d written the words in larger letters with a big fat marker, as I find myself peering at the post-its instead of having the words thrust in my face.
Lindsay Does Languages has a brilliant variant on this theme. I came across it earlier today and decided to incorporate it in my life as soon as I get a free minute (2019, I think). While you’re at it, have a look at some of the other articles on her site. They’re pretty good fun.
If you’re clever enough to understand films made in your target language, that’s a great way to learn more. Me, I’ve looked at a few – like “A Costa Dos Murmúrios”, “Capitães de Abril” and “Ossos” but I found them too hard to follow.
Easier fare would be an English-Language film you’re seen before, dubbed into your target language. That usually means children’s animated films, since nobody ever dubs live-action movies. If you’re like me and learning Portuguese, try and check that the actors doing the voice-overs aren’t Brazilian. The last thing you want is all that Eejy Beejy Beejy thing that Brazilians do. We have three dubbed films in the house (*points* at the picture at the top of this section) and it’s good because my daughter likes watching them too. Turn on English subtitles if you are very new to the language, or Portuguese subtitles if you just want written clues to help you disentangle the words.
So once you’ve picked your book, what can you do with it? Well, as I see it, there are three styles of reading in another language, and I vary them depending on what I’m reading and what mood I’m in:
This is the hardcore, grind-through-it-with-a-dictionary option. The aim is to translate every word and understand every sentence to know exactly what is being said and what tense it’s being said in. You’ll need a good dictionary for this of course, and you’ll need a lot of patience, usually, or at least you will if your vocabulary is as pitifully limited as mine is.
If you are a fan of kindles, this method becomes a lot easier because of course it has a built-in dictionary so you can just highlight the word and it’ll tell you the meaning. I’m not a fan of Kindles but I’ve used this and I can see the attraction.
The aim with this one is only to practice your accent and your reading skills: read the text out loud and don’t worry too much whether or not you can understand it. Have someone listen to you and correct your pronunciation. Obviously the drawback of doing this with a book you’re actually trying to follow is that it become a black hole in the narrative, and you’ll have to go back and read it properly if you want to retain your grip on the plot, but if you’re reading a book of short texts like the running manual I mentioned in part 1, it won’t matter too much if you just read one section for phonetics, especially if it’s covering something you already know.
I saved the best for last. I sometimes like to read the text at a sort of half-and-half pace, without looking up any of the words, but slow enough that I can follow most of what is being said. I use it as practice for understanding the language as a whole, following enough of what’s being said to draw out the general gist. I only really use a dictionary if there is one word that comes up over and over again, and seems key to the text, but other than that I just skip over the gaps in my understanding. It’s a bit like watching actors on stage under a strobe light. There are gaps in what you can see, but your mind fills it in. I don’t think I could read a whole novel like this, but at times it can be quite thrilling and a good alternative to the hard work of looking up every unfamiliar word, and it forces you to think of words in their wider context rather than as individual dictionary-entries. In short, it’s the nearest thing I can really get to “Thinking in Portuguese” producing a stream of language and trying to process it without really having time to translate it all.
Want to know more? If you’ve read this post and the preceding one and you are hungry for even more reading tips, there’s an article on FI3M about reading that has some interesting tips you could look at. Have a look here. And when you’re feeling suitably inspired, go and find out…
Amazon have a few of course, but they’re gits who don’t pay their taxes or their workers. Foyles has a better selection and, if you’re in the UK they’re pretty much just as fast
Bertrand (My favourite Portuguese bookshop)
LIDEL (Mainly academic books, textbooks and language-learning materials)
FNAC (Not just books, actually – they have all sorts of stuff!)
Project Gutenberg (Public domain ebooks)
Kobo (Ebooks if you like that sort of thing)
I like reading, and reading in Portuguese seemed like a good way to increase my vocabulary, but do you need to be fluent to read a whole book? I mean, there are a lot of words in a book, right? Well, no is the short answer. The trick is to think about what kind of book you want to read, and to have a flexible approach to how you read. Here are a few thoughts. Here are a few thoughts about different types of book.
Books Like “Spot’s First Walk” (in Portuguese “O Primeiro Passeio Do Bolinha
Now we’re talking! Comics retain the main benefit of children’s books – the illustrations – but they tend to be longer and have more variety in subject matter, meaning you can read horror stories, comedies or adventure stories this way. When I was learning French at school I cribbed a lot of good words and phrases from Tintin and Asterix
I’ve really been enjoying the Walking Dead series in Portuguese. The european portuguese versions are easy enough to follow but be careful because there are some brazilian translations out there too, including on Kindle (serves me right for trying to read a comic on a Kindle, I suppose)
This can be a pretty good line of attack. You’ve read the book so you know the story and hopefully there won’t be too many surprises and that will save you a few trips to the dictionary. Be careful though: one of the unhappiest reading experiences I had was trying to read P G Wodehouse in Portuguese. I love P G Wodehouse, but what I like best is his playful use of language, and of course that doesn’t survive being translated slowly from Portuguese. It was a complete bust and I stopped after a couple of pages. Likewise, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Why not? You’ll have far fewer clues along the way, so it’ll be tougher going, but if you feel up to it, it might be a fun thing to do, and just as exciting as reading any other new novel. Just make it a good one.
Reading a basic introductory book about a subject you enjoy can be a very good way of starting out in reading. I recently finished “Do Primeiro Quilómetro à Maratona” (“From the First Kilometre to the Marathon”) by Jéssica Augusto. It’s a running book, and I’m a runner, so it had a few advantages:
Non-fiction can cover a variety of topics, of course, from car-maintenance to three-volume histories of the world, so maybe this section needs to be broken down more, but I haven’t tried to read Das Kapital or “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” (hm, what would that be? “Come, Tire e Parte” I suppose, but I bet there isn’t a translation) so I can’t speak with much authority.
I have shied away from this so far but it is definitely on my list of things to do when I am a bit stronger in the language because it’s a good way of getting to know more about the culture as well as the language. Are the two even separable? Discuss.
In Portuguese, I think the big four (as far as my limited understanding goes) would be
“, and very much the Portuguese equivalent of – say, Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes. If that sounds interesting but daunting, there’s a children’s version you could try. There’s even a sort of graphic novel version but it’s brazilian and I can only find it in ebook format.
(O Livro Do Desassossego
), who wrote as four different people, any of whom, on their own, could rank among the best poets in Europe.
“. He isn’t well known outside of Portugal these days, as far as I know, but he certainly was once . I just looked at his Wikipedia page, and it says that Zola once regarded him as greater than Flaubert, which is pretty high praise.
(O Ensaio Sobre Cegueira), among many others, and a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I’m definitely going to read all four eventually, but I’ll stick to the poems of Pessoa and the novels of Saramago at first. E de Q can wait a while, and Camões… well, I don’t know that I’ll ever be up to reading his stuff, I’m afraid. As for The Book of Disquiet, I believe it’s quite existentialist, so I am probably going to wuss out and read it in English. There are braver souls out there though, and there’s a guy on Memrise who has made a course based on new vocabulary he has learned by dictionarying his way through it.
I have some other books written by Portuguese writers too, like “Bichos)
I need to boost my vocabulary so there are post-it notes all over the house…
Luso 
