Faking Out Portuguese Speaking Immersion

They say one of the best ways to learn a language is immersion. That is often thought of primarily as living in a country and being forced to use it on a day-to-day basis. That is obviously one very good version of immersion but there are other methods to getting daily practice with a language. One of the hardest ones for me when learning Spanish was getting over the hump of “Think in English->translate to Spanish->Speak in Spanish”. I really never got over that hump over four years of learning it in high school. Ironically I did get over that hump more when I did a year of Spanish learning through DuoLingo a few years ago. I’ve decided to try to get past that hump right away while learning European Portuguese by practicing real world listening, reading, writing, thought and conversation even with myself. This post will focus on what I’m doing for the last two, since I think it is potentially more unique.

According to my knowledge book spreadsheet I’ve hypothetically learned about 150 nouns/expressions, 26 adjectives, 6 adverbs, 20 verbs, and 3 prepositions in European Portuguese. With a lot of overlap MemRise says I’ve fully learned 433 words/expressions. That’s all done over the last 45 days. It’s amazing how big some of those numbers sound yet how limited that ability is. The bigger thing than, assuming those words/expressions are technically in my head, is on-demand recall. I’ve always found it much easier for me to read a language and understand it, or even hear a language and understand it. The falling down part is on demand pulling up the right word/expression for what I want to say. A precursor to that is not thinking it in English but thinking of it in Portuguese first. The foundation to that is repeatedly trying to do so over long stretches of time. Since I don’t live in a place with lots of European Portuguese speakers I have to practice on my own.

One of the first things I started doing, one step before the thinking in Portuguese rather than English, is start doing responses to things in my head in Portuguese instead of English before I speak English. Right now that is mostly falling into salutations and small talk stuff since that’s the bounds of my capabilities. If I walk up to the receptionist at a doctor’s office and they say, “Good morning, how are you?” Before I answer them out loud with, “I’m good, how about you?” I’ll respond in my head, “Tudo bem, e tu?” As my vocabulary grows so too do the places I use the exercise. As I’m learning more food names I’ll think the Portuguese name for the food as I pick it up at the grocery store rather than in English: “uma garrafa de azeite…quatro maças…um saco de queijo Cheddar”

Stretching things a bit further I try to think on demand of how I’d say a certain thought in my head with what limited knowledge I have and say “fuck it” if it isn’t exactly correct, or even completely wrong. I write and speak English at a very high level. I’m a bit of a Grammar Police kind of person with my own English. I’m not perfect, not by a long shot. I’ll end a sentence with a dangling preposition, sometimes even intentionally. I’ll write in the passive voice, again, sometimes even intentionally. I’ll throw in “SAT words” that I probably don’t need because that’s what seems to flow from my thoughts. I’m very sesquipedalian that way. (See what I did there :)) I need to ditch all of that when thinking on the fly in Portuguese. I haven’t been formally taught how to conjugate verbs yet! I have a miniscule vocabulary. I haven’t mastered when to use which preposition and more often than not use the wrong one! That doesn’t matter right now though. Right now what matters is without thinking about it getting the thought out as best I can. But for practice to make perfect I do want to learn whether I messed something up so I can work on fixing it and learning more about the language. Making mistakes is actually very helpful in learning. To accomplish this I do a multi-step process.

I start with the thought in my head. With as little delay as possible I just think the equivalent Portuguese expression, warts and all, as best I can. With that out of the way the next step is to go through an online dictionary like Linguee to look up words I didn’t know. Sometimes it is I forgot the word and couldn’t recall it. Other times it was I inserted a Spanish word or English word for the one I didn’t know. It’s surprising how close the Spanish word can be sometimes even if the pronounciation is different. With that one pass down I can start massaging the sentence more. We are now well past the point of immediate recall being the point of the exercise and now filling in the gaps being the point of the exercise. It’s at this point I’d also use an online conjugation dictionary to fix conjugation errors, especially for past and future tenses.

With this now massaged sentence in hand I then run a pass through Google Translate. First step is to put the Portuguese sentence in and see what English comes out. Google Translate is very forgiving in this though. You can put in some pretty messed up sentences and it comes out as not too bad sounding English. If it didn’t get there then I have to massage the sentence more if I can. The next step is to do the reverse translation with Google Translate. At this stage this can really transform the sentence around. It’ll at the very least fix grammatical errors, wrong gender of articles/words, using the wrong preposition or wrong contraction for a preposition, et cetera. It’ll also replace a less common way of saying/writing something with what it thinks is a more common way of doing so. I know Google Translate isn’t perfect but it is way better than I am at this point and it has shown to be good at picking up colloquialisms rather than just doing straight transliteration. For example it translated “It’s going to be a total shit show” into “Vai ser um completo desastre” (It’s going to be a complete disaster) when doing some live translation of a YouTube video. Because of that I feel comfortable using that as my crutch. With all that in hand I can now practice with the fully massaged sentence. I can add any new words that I want to keep around and practice into my Knowledge Book spreadsheet. Hopefully some of this will stick the longer I do that. Here is how that worked in a real world example.

We were getting a ride share from our hotel last week. The car turned out to be a Volkswagon ID.4. As it was pulling up I thought to myself, “This is my first time riding in this model car.” I then said to myself, “How would I say that in Portuguese.” So I started executing the above steps.

First up, just spit out something along those lines even if it was wrong. I came up with “Este é meu primero tiempo en este modelo carro.” This is basically a transliteration of the English expression. Would it be the same type of expression in Portuguese? I don’t know. I’ll find out in a few steps. First, I didn’t really know the words for some of the pieces of the sentence: time, first, or model. I thought I had seen the words for “time” and “first” before but I wasn’t sure or couldn’t recall it exactly. I guessed with Portuguese pronounciation of Spanish words I did recall. We now go to the next step, consulting the dictionary. For this I use the site/app Linguee.

What are the correct Portuguese words for: time, first, and model? It turns out my Spanish-based guess wasn’t too far off. The word “time” isn’t “tiempo” it’s “tempo”. The word “first” isn’t “primero” it’s “premeiro”. The word for “model” turns out to be “modelo” in Portuguese as well, but perhaps the word I was looking for was “tipo” instead, another option that Linguee suggested. So the second pass of the sentence in my head was now: “Este é meu premeiro tempo en este modelo carro.” Now let’s see move on the next phase: running the Portuguese through Google Translate.

Putting the second version of that sentence into Google Translate returned the English as, “This is my first time driving this car model.” That isn’t exactly what I meant but I guess if I said the Portuguese sentence to a hypothetical Portuguese driver then I would have gotten some idea across to him, so that’s a win. What happens if I reverse it and ask it to spit out the Portuguese for “This is my first time in this model car.”? I got some good and bad stuff out of it. Google Translate returns, “Esta é a primeira vez que conduzo este modelo de automóvel.”

So the first part I like, “Esta é a primeira vez que…” is “This is the first time that…”. So cool that I got the “Esta é a” part in the ballpark when doing it off the cuff. It flagged that “vez” was the right word not “tempo” for time in this context, and in this case the adjective is before the noun. I could probably get a lot of use out of “Esta é a primeira vez que…” in other contexts so I’m adding that to my list of expressions in the Knowledge Book Spreadsheet. I’m not thrilled with “automóvel” instead of “carro”. Both are “correct” but I don’t know if one is more prevalent than the other. The bigger issue with it is I did it as “modelo carro” instead of “modelo de carro”. So that’s another grammatical note to put in my memory bank the next time I try to formulate an expression similar to that. The biggest issue is the verb. For some reason Google Translate is insisting on “conduzir”, which from what I can tell in this context means to drive. I’m trying to say it’s the first time I’ve been in this model car. So to force it’s hand I look up “to ride”, which is “andar”. Putting that all together my third attempt at the sentence turns into: “Esta é a primeira vez que ando en este modelo de carro.”

Running that through Google Translate again it still wants to force it to “driven” instead of “ridden” in the English translation. Nothing I can do about that but doing the reverse translation again, swapping “ridden in this” for “driven this” I do get another small tweak: “Esta é a primeira vez que ando neste modelo de carro.” where “neste” means “in this”. I’ll take this as the final form of this exercise.

Is this the way a person in Portugal would express this exact expression? I don’t know. I haven’t run the sentence by anyone. The point of the exercise for me is primarily immediate recall without self consciousness and being okay with “screwing up” when getting the words out. Just get the idea out and don’t be ashamed if it is only in the ballpark. The secondary point of the exercise is to use it to fill in the gaps. I missed the “de” between “modelo” and “carro”. I learned the expression for “first time” is “primeira vez” not “tempo primeira”. I learned I did well with “this is…” and so on.

This sort of exercise becomes even more interesting on my training runs. When I’m doing my runs I’m often doing math in my head. “I have 1.35 miles left,” or “I have to run 1.35 more miles” etc. Counting off things in Portuguese double reinforces numbers, thinking in Portuguese, talking in Portuguese. There is a term called “Runners Math” because for some reason it is harder to do even basic math things while running than when sitting there at your desk. That’s in your first language. Doing it in a language you are learning is even harder! So thinking, “cinco milhas menos três vírgula seis milhas é um vírgula quatro milhas a mais” takes ten times more mental energy than “five miles minus three point six miles is one point four miles more”. Then I can play with the idea in my head saying it in multiple ways. “Tenho um vírgula três cinco milhas a mais” or “Preciso de correr três milhas a mais”. Again the purpose of the exercise is to practice immediate recall and thinking in Portuguese first as much as possible to create aspects of an immersive environment.

In terms of faking out speaking and thinking immersion that about wraps it up. I have some other things I’m doing for reading and listening immersion I hope to blog about soon.