Doesn’t time fly? It seems like only yesterday that I first shared my thoughts with you about the difficulties I was experiencing in trying to learn Portuguese. Judging by your response, it struck a chord, and I obviously wasn’t alone in my struggle.
Five years later, and I’m still struggling.
I’ve improved enormously, of course…. but I’ll never be fluent in the language of my adopted country. The reasons for this are various, but we’ll come to that later. The important thing is that I have learned a lot in the last five years, and it’s not just about the Portuguese language.
For example, I have learned more about the English language than I ever learned at school, where grammar was rammed down our throats. It meant nothing to me. What did I care about nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs, prepositions and past participles? I was much more interested in boys! Some of it must have sunk in though, because I’m aware of dredging this information from the depths of my mind in my attempts to formulate a coherent sentence.
I still give tenses a wide berth though, preferring to stick with the here and now. If I want to talk about the past or the future I simply add yesterday, next week, or whatever, and continue in the present tense. The other sixteen can stay in their box as far as I’m concerned. It’s not correct but no-one seems to mind too much.
The important thing about a language, any language, is the art of communication, and it’s taken me a long time to fathom that you don’t have to ‘speak proper’ in order to communicate. Just as well.
My initial perception of the Portuguese language was that it is back-to-front. My grumpy husband becomes my husband grumpy in Portuguese-speak. But so he is in French, Italian, Spanish and German. It makes no difference really. He’s just as grumpy whichever way you say it. So perhaps it is the English language which is back-to-front. Even the United Kingdom is back-to-front!
My next problem was the gender-bender. Every noun is either masculine or feminine, and everything associated with that word must follow suit. White is white in English, whether it’s describing a house or a wine. Not the case in Portuguese … uma casa branca or um vinho branco. There is no apparent logic to the application of these genders, so you just have to suck it and see. You have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right or wrong. All part of the fun.
Plurals add a further complication. If the noun is plural, then everything surrounding it must be plural. And I mean everything. Plural of the white house becomes the white houses in English. But not here. A casa branca becomes as casas brancas. My favourite example of this is ‘all day, every day’. I’ll let you work it out for yourself. Just keep adding ‘s’ and you can’t go wrong.
I began to realise that in English we use the verb ‘to be’ in almost every sentence without even knowing it. “I am cooking dinner” … “It is raining” … And of course we abbreviate it with the convenient apostrophe. No such thing in Portuguese.
To make matters worse, there are two versions of the verb ‘to be’ in Portuguese. Permanent and temporary, both of which I soon discovered are irregular verbs. What!? This threw me into a minor panic at first, until I learned that the Portuguese conveniently do away with it as often as they can. “I cook dinner” .. “It rains” Simple!
On the subject of verbs – which I would happily avoid if I could – I do think the English version is less complicated. You just take the infinitive (to speak, for example) and replace the ‘to’ with I, You, He, She, etc. and add an ‘s’ to the third person. Here in Portugal (and everywhere else non-English speaking) you have to conjugate the verb from its basic form, which means adding lots of different endings, and that can be quite daunting.
Pronunciation was a big hurdle at first … such weird sounds that came from behind my nose somewhere. But it soon became apparent that Portuguese is a phonetic language, and with very few exceptions you pronounce every letter you see. This makes it so much easier. English is not phonetic, and it’s not until you stop taking it for granted and analyse it more carefully that you realise just how jolly difficult it really is!! I pity the foreigner trying to learn English at my time of life.
So the big question is…. why am I still struggling?
Firstly because I still can’t understand what is being said to me. It’s no secret that the Algarveans speak a very lazy form of Portuguese, and most of the people I have daily contact with were brought up in this neck of the woods and learned their language from their parents, many of whom had little or no formal education.
Words are truncated (we Brits are just as guilty of this), strung together in a haphazard way, and delivered at the speed and volume of a machine gun. Grammar doesn’t come into it. What chance do I stand?
Shopkeepers, bartenders, waiters and the like (very much a part of my daily life) prefer to speak English, and they do it so well I sometimes wonder if they speak it better than their own language. Most of our close friends are expats like ourselves, so English is the common language. All this means I don’t get much practise.
Secondly, the old grey matter is letting me down a bit. My vocabulary has improved, my pronunciation has improved, and I’m getting the hang of the grammar. But when I’m put on the spot I can hear my brain grinding to engage gear like a vintage motor car.
Last but not least, I’m a Brit. I look like a Brit. I act like a Brit. I talk like a Brit. And no amount of integration is going to change that. My attempts to speak the lingo bring beaming smiles to many a Portuguese face. But these lovely, generous, kind and friendly people know that I can only go so far. I can see it in their eyes.
Whoever said you can’t speak a language until you can think in that language is absolutely right. It doesn’t stop me trying though. Here’s to the next five years!
By June Lover
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After 35 years in the TV and film industry, June Lover retired to the Algarve in 2006. Having owned a holiday property out here for over 15 years she now lives in the hills above Almancil.
