Learning Portuguese: why cram irregular verbs into senior brains?

Arrrgghh (and don’t forget to roll that rrr)! Learning Portuguese is muito difícil. I rode a confidence roller-coaster after starting our advanced class in January, but amidst the prepositions and irregular verbs, I discovered why I’m subjecting my senior brain to these exhilarating highs and lows.

We’ve been learning Portuguese, formally and informally, for two years, and we’d progressed well beyond “Bom dia,” “obrigada” [Good day, thank you] and other short-term tourist fare. We even passed the beginner level of government-run Portuguese-for-foreigners classes – A1 – a year ago.

But then we hit the big stuff in A2: four more verb tenses, active versus passive voice, and oh so many irregular verbs.

Eu sou, eu fui, eu era [I am, I was, I used to be] and on it goes – a never-ending parade of verbs to conjugate and figure out when and how to use, on their own or in combination. Some days I was sure I could master this tongue-twister of a language. Other days, the prepositions and irregular verbs defeated me.  

Could I do this?

I panicked during our first A2 class.

“I don’t understand anything!” I whispered to Bill as all the introductory information and paper-signing was conducted in high-speed Portuguese – way too fast for me to decipher. Other students, many of whom had been in Portugal for several years, seemed to be speaking in rapid-fire Portuguese.

“There’s no way I can do this!” I thought. “We’ve forgotten too much since A1!”

By comparison, our A1 teacher had babied us. Fernanda had spoken slowly for the first few weeks, then began speeding things up. I had to concentrate to understand, but I got most of it. (Bill has always been better than me at getting the gist of what’s being said.) We learned the present tense of verbs and understood written words pretty well.

But in the year between A1 and A2, we travelled a lot in other countries and our Portuguese suffered. Hence my panic. I felt like I’d been thrown into a deep pool of oral and aural confusion.

I managed to stumble my way through the questions our teacher – Susana – asked me, speaking way slower than the students before us. Then she handed out a six-page test so she could gauge our levels of Portuguese and my panic arose again.

“I’m going to get kicked out of A2 and sent back to A1!” However, as I perused the questions, I settled down, realizing I understood more than I’d thought. Susana came around as we were filling in the blanks and reviewed what we’d done. “Muito bom,” she said with a thoughtful look on her face. That gave me hope. I also recognized that all those fast-talking students were Venezuelans speaking mostly Spanish; it’s easier for them to understand Portuguese.

Once I calmed down, I realized I’d come a long way since the chicken incident.

The chicken incident

I’d been successfully ordering “um galão” (a coffee similar to a latte) for many months, but one day at lunch a glitch happened betwixt brain and tongue. I confounded our poor waiter when I said I would like “uma galinha, por favor.” Where had that come from?! I had ordered a chicken! A live female chicken, to be precise.

“Um galão, um galão!” Bill quickly interjected. To be fair, I had just consumed the small jug of wine I’d received when I’d ordered a glass of wine.

We laughed it off, since the first language lesson we had mastered was how to take our inevitable mistakes in stride. Other early errors included ordering a pastry of poop (instead of coconut), toast with frozen (instead of jam), and a homemade stick (instead of a loaf of homemade bread). Pau [stick] and pão [bread] are both are pronounced “pow” but for bread you must add a nasal twang. Pinch your nose and say “pow” – now you’re asking for bread, not a stick! Even though we know this, we still forget it during the heat of a conversation.

And the mistakes continue. Bill amused our class when he said he was “cansado há 37 anos,” which means he’s been tired for 37 years instead of his intended “casado” [married]. Well, really, one could argue they’re interchangeable.

Stages

We’ve traversed various language stages over the past two years.

• Short-term tourists: polite words, menu items, where’s the washroom?
• Dogs: At first, I looked at dogs with awe, knowing they understood more verbal Portuguese than we did. Now I look at them as equals. I can sit – “sentar-se” – when a café clerk tells us to have a seat and she’ll bring the coffees to us. I can speak – “diga” – when our teacher encourages us to stumble through our questions in Portuguese. However, no one has yet asked me to shake a paw.
• Cavemen: We were brave enough to not consult our translation app before every conversation, but then we forgot the connecting words and blurted out the just the major nouns and actions. “Me want chicken.” All that we missed was the grunt.
• Young children: I was thrilled when I understood a three-year-old girl calling “Avó! Avó!” [Grandma! Grandma!]. The other day, a mother told her son to “Cuidado” [Be careful] and I also looked out for the pothole.
• Eavesdropping: We can understand more of the Portuguese we overhear around us.

Pronunciation

We’ve come to some nuanced understandings about the different challenges people have with pronunciation, depending on their mother tongue. As Canadian anglophones, we have difficulty rolling the rrr, putting the nasal sound where it belongs, and remembering that words ending in ‘o’ are pronounced ‘oo.’ The city of Porto, for example, is pronounced Por-TOO, not PORT-oh. The Venezuelans, however, can roll their rrrs like pirates, but they mix up the ‘b’ and ‘v’ sounds that we find easy.

All of us, however, had trouble with the word cabeleireiro [hairdresser]. Susana made everyone say it five or six times until they got close to the correct pronunciation. “Kaa-buh-lay-RRRAY-rrroo.” Now try saying it five times quickly!

Even when we think we’re getting things right, I’m sure we entertain Portuguese people. This funny video of an English-language study group illustrates what we must sound like in Portuguese, with our emphasis on wrong syllables, limited vocabulary, and wrong words and verb tenses used.

False friends

Many Portuguese words are easily understood because they’re so close to English: democracia, comunicações, hospital, guitarra. But then you have the so-called false friends – words that sound like English but mean something different.

• Constipado means nasal stuffiness, not stuffiness elsewhere. “Estou constipado.” = “I have a cold.”
• Ultimamente means lately, not ultimately.
• Idosos means elderly, not idiots.
• Cão means dog, not cow.
• Excitante means arousing, not exciting. Close, but not to be confused!
• Pasta means briefcase or folder. If you want the food, ask for massa.
• Puxe (pronounced “push”) on a door means pull, not push!

Hired a tutor

After a few A2 classes, I relaxed more, thinking I could keep up with the class.

Until we got to prepositions.

My confusion took me to the crest of the roller-coaster again. Prepositions just don’t translate directly into English. Are you on the bus or in the bus? Do you live on a street or in a street? Even in English, we have differences: the British say they live “in the High Street,” for example, while in Canada we say we live “on Main Street.”

Duarte came to our rescue. He speaks fluent English, has a keen interest in grammar (which I appreciate), and can explain Portuguese grammar in English to us. We began meeting once a week or so by Skype to review what we didn’t quite understand in class. Why are there two ways to say “to”? For example: “I am going to Lisbon.” becomes either “Eu vou para Lisboa.” or “Eu vou a Lisboa.”

Duarte explained that if you’re going to Lisbon for a short time, you use “a” but if you’re going for a long time, or moving there, you use “para.” What’s the time cut-off for using one or the other? No firm answer there; it depends on the context. Which makes it difficult for us to choose when we can’t figure out the context.

Impromptu Portuguese lessons

Living in Portugal gives us the huge advantage of practising the language every day, with kind Portuguese people who are usually keen to help, although they often want to practise their English.

Saying “Preciso de practicar o meu português” [I need to practise my Portuguese] or asking “Qual é a palavra para isto em português? [What is the word for this in Portuguese?] helps show your interest. In Madeira, a waiter wouldn’t bring me my passionfruit drink until I’d mastered the rolled rrr and proper emphasis on the final “a” in “maracujá.”

I’ve had many entire conversations in Portuguese, including a medical appointment with my gastroenterologist, whose limited English matched my limited Portuguese. But I came away confident that I’d understood everything.

One day we saw a lady fall on the street. We helped her get up and limp to the curb to sit, talking entirely in Portuguese, albeit simple. “Posso ajudar? Precisa um hospital? Precisa um dotor?” She spoke slowly and we understood that she just wanted to rest. She’d been visiting her husband in the hospital and was going to get money from a bank machine. After five minutes, we helped her stand again. “Obrigada.” “De nada.” And she limped off towards the bank.

A real turning point came during our Gruta do Carvão lava-tube cave tour on São Miguel island in the Azores. The tour guide said he’d overheard me checking in, confirming our reservation entirely in Portuguese. He complimented me and said – get this! – that I had a good European Portuguese accent, not Brazilian. I was thrilled to know that I had any Portuguese accent!

Why are we doing this?

Stumbling through short conversations is one thing, but mastering the grammar rules and all those new irregular verb variations needed to pass A2 was quite another. As our test on verbs – the perfect and imperfect past, plus the perfeito composto – loomed, I got tense again. We spent days and days trying to cram conjugations into our senior brains.

“I’m weary. Why are we doing this to ourselves?” Bill asked, after successfully memorizing four tenses for three verbs. “Only 500 more to go.”

Indeed. Why are we doing this?

We have several pragmatic reasons:

• So we know what’s going on around us. So we can read billboards, museum displays that don’t have English, the fine print on parking meters, grocery flyers and newspapers. So we can watch TV and listen to radio. We’ve been to choral and orchestral concerts where the conductor talks about the music in between pieces, and I want to know what they’re saying.
• Learning a new language is good for mental acuity: it builds grey matter, improves memory and helps stave off cognitive decline, among other benefits. Indeed, our classwork often involved mental gymnastics. During two group projects with Mileidy and Odalis from Venezuela, they spoke in Spanish (we understood a bit), Bill and I conferred in English (which they didn’t understand), we all tried to share our thoughts and suggestions in Portuguese, and then we wrote our story in Portuguese and presented it to the class. That exercise should have grown a lot of grey matter!
• After five years, if we want to apply for Portuguese citizenship, we won’t have to take the language test if we’ve already passed A2.

But, even more importantly, we have our idealistic reasons too:

• So we can learn and understand more about this beautiful country we’ve adopted. Language is the key to unlocking the mysteries of a culture. There’s only so much you can learn by reading books and visiting museums and castles and wandering the streets; you must connect with people. And how can you connect with people if you don’t know the language? Granted, we have become friends with many Portuguese people who speak excellent English. But what about those who don’t? If we want to converse with our older neighbours, for example, who don’t always know English, we need to know Portuguese.
• So the kind people here don’t mistake us for the arrogant English-speaking immigrants who think everyone should kowtow to their language. It’s all about attitude. I get upset when I read condescending comments on social media and hear expats say they can’t be bothered learning Portuguese. It’s rude and presumptuous to move to a country and not try to converse in their language. (Very few, if any, Torontonians are learning Portuguese so they can better serve the Portuguese people who’ve emigrated to Canada; they must learn English.) Native English-speakers are truly spoiled; since ours is a dominant world language, we can get by without having to learn other languages, so we don’t. That arrogance is eloquently described by LaDonna Witmer, an American living in Portugal, in her blog story about how English speakers expect the world to accommodate them. I don’t want Portuguese people to think I’m like that.

Like it or not, learning another language involves grammar and irregular verbs. So we slowly mastered those testy tenses. Along the way, more of the world opened up around us. We understood the March 9 national election slogans. We became more polite and nuanced than at the Caveman stage. Now we can say “I would like a pastel de nata” rather than “want pastel.”

It all came together during our class field trip to the Museu Nacional do Vinho. We’d visited this local museum many times with guests, enjoying the guided tour by João in English. But that day, João spoke in Portuguese and I understood most of what he said. We recognized past tenses on the signs. Of course, the wine tasting part of the tour helped me understand even more.

After all the studying and angst, we finished A2 on Easter weekend. Although Susana marked all our tests, assignments, presentations and class participation, the results get sent to a government office in Lisbon for someone to review and issue our certificates, if we’re deemed worthy. In line with Portuguese bureaucracy, it will take months to receive our certificates in the mail… or not.

On the last test, which covered active versus passive verbs, I got 98 percent and Bill got 94 percent, so there’s a good chance we’ll receive our certificates. Fingers crossed!

We studied Portuguese again from January to March 2024. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.