As far as Portuguese language acquisition goes, I confess that I currently understand almost zero spoken Portuguese and can rarely make myself understood. I’ve assessed my current level of competence thoroughly with Uber drivers, restaurant professionals, and bureaucrats throughout São Paulo. 

During my most recent Uber ride, I told the driver “Eu preciso practicar portuguese,” which he indulged for a phrase or two before lapsing into the comfortable gringo/native pastime of naming favorite US popular culture icons (his included Metallica, Arnold Schwartznegger, and Guns n Roses).

We had difficulty finding the correct house, and when we did, I said “parar,” which means “to stop,” which is maybe what a crazy person would say to a sidewalk. He didn’t stop, so I repeated it several times, until finally I got him to stop by using a sideways slicing motion with my right hand, which he saw in his rearview mirror. A nice fellow, as are most Paulistanos I have met so far.

But I’m going to follow the attitude of Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He writes:

One time I picked up a hitchhiker who told me how interesting South America was, and that I ought to go there. I complained that the language is different, but he said just go ahead and learn it – it’s no big problem. So I thought, that’s a good idea: I’ll go to South America.

from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman

It’s been no big problem for me to learn a lot of words; Anki has helped me use spaced repetition to learn about a thousand of them. When I answer a flashcard correctly, Anki increases the number of days before I will see it again, and when the “retest interval” reaches 21 days, the card becomes “mature.” As the chart below demonstrates, most of my two thousand cards (two cards for each word, as it feeds you the front and back sides to test your retention) are “mature”:

The challenge, of course, is recognizing or deploying these words in real-time conversation, which requires practice in actual situations with real-life Portuguese speakers, and luckily enough there are plenty of unsuspecting live subjects right here in São Paulo.

I’m also using the Fluent Forever app to work on grammar–mostly word order and unique constructions of the language. As in Brazilians say “The baby is with hunger” instead of our English formulation and here’s how a card in the app helps test these constructions:

Aside from Ibirapuera, treadmills are basically the only running options in this city, so I listen to Marina Gomes’s Brazilian Pod Class episodes while on the treadmill. Since I have old-fashioned wired headphones, when I wiped my brow this morning, my hand caught the wire and ripped the earphones out of my ears and also pulled the phone off the dashboard. The phone landed on the treadmill and went shooting out the back, which caused me to slightly panic and I almost suffered the same fate. But I recovered and the phone’s just scuffed up a bit.

The larger point’s that the podcast contains native speaker dialogues with translations, with space for you to repeat the phrases.

Finally, I’m neck deep into part three of Casa de Papel, which Netflix serves up with dubbed Portugues and English subtitles.

One of my favorite new sayings: Tirar o cavalinho na chuva. Literally: Take that little horse out of the rain. What it means: Just give up; it’s not gonna happen. As far as Portuguese goes, the rain’s indeed falling, but my horse remains out at pasture, for now, anyway.

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(featured photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash)