Portuguese Speaking Teachers

bigdave · Post by **bigdave** » Wed Nov 03, 2004 1:49 am

Are there any other portuguese speaking teachers in here...that understand how a portuguese speaking student thinks and would translate certain things.

Where are you from? What languages do you speak? What languages do your students speak?

Metamorfose · Post by **Metamorfose** » Fri Nov 26, 2004 3:53 pm

Hello BigDave

Yes, there's me.. I speak Brazilian Portuguese and teach exclusively Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

José

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:37 am

There are lots of others here who speak Spanish. I have just claimed in another thread that Spanish/Portuguese are "dialects with an army". I would imagine almost all common student difficulties are transferrable between the two.

It's now time to tell me off and generally insult me.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:42 am

The main difference between Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese speakers is that the latter know ju jitsu and would gladly put you in a headlock, woodcutter.

How was that for a linguistically-principled argument?

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 12:53 am

Bah. Bring 'em on. I got Taekwondo on my side.

I'm fed up with the Latino domination of all my US produced teaching materials. Some question like - "I no want to go". Is it correct? on every page. Touching tales of Juanita and her temporary family in Missouri. We even have to listen to Latino English on the tapes all the time!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 1:06 am

I know this is a little off-thread but have you ever noticed how those c*cky overconfident strikers/kickers get their *sses well and truly PASTED by the grapplers in (so-called) "no-holds-barred" fighting tournaments?

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Nov 27, 2004 1:08 am

That being said, it is often embarrassing to see grapplers who couldn't punch their way out of a rice-paper bag standing up and trying to knock a guy down with their "punches" and "kicks". You might just stand a chance against some of them, then, woody.

JeanRezende · Post by **JeanRezende** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 1:21 am

woodcutter wrote:There are lots of others here who speak Spanish. I have just claimed in another thread that Spanish/Portuguese are "dialects with an army". I would imagine almost all common student difficulties are transferrable between the two.

It's now time to tell me off and generally insult me.

dialects with an army?

actually it would be the same to say that German and English are similar dialects.

According to some studies portuguese and spanish could be considered 50% similar in cases like grammar and vocabulary structure.

Maybe it is time for people to stop thinking that spanish and portuguese are the same.

It at laest unrespectful to say that you speak a bit of spanish and you dare to try to communicate with a brazilian.

Sorry. I forgot. If one start talking about formal language than one will really get lost.

There is one phenonemon happening right now that cause the mix - in the basic level - of those two languages. It is called Portunhol. In a rough translation " portunish", or something like this.

This is similar to Spanglish in L.A..

And please, try not to say that those languages are dialects or whatever one wants to namel.

If it is not a lack of knowledge, it is a lack of respect for two distinct languages.

No offense!!!

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 11:02 am

If Spanish and Portugeese are dialects it is dialects of Romance. The comparison with English and German is correct. But then Romance had already split up by the seventh century so I doubt if armies had anything to do with it.

Gallego is of course a dialect of Portugese, but you'd better have an army to back you up if you say it in the presence of most Galicians.

In many respects, particularly loose articulation, Portugeese is closer to Catalan than to Spanish. What happened was that Spanish forced itself down from the North and created a wedge between what had been a slow change in dialect forms as one went from one area to another.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 11:37 am

My experience of teaching to Portuguese has been limited to a few students in a class of mainly Spanish students. As far as I can see there is a specific problem of teaching the present perfect to Portuguese speakers, who have no equivalent or, if they do, tend not to use it.

This seems to be a feature of Spanish too, that as you go West across Northern Spain the use of the equivalent tense diminishes and almost disappears in Galicia, even when Gallegos are speaking Spanish.

This continues across the Atlantic, where the Spanish equivalent of "Did you finish?" is more common than "Have you finished?". If imported soap operas are anything to go by.

Interestingly all Spaniards are called Gallegos in Cuba. Was more emigration from here? I believe so.

A curious parallel with Present Perfect being less common in AmE. Is there a part of The British Isles where this may have originated?

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Sun Nov 28, 2004 5:11 pm

When I learned European, as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese at University many years ago, I was taught that there is a Perfect in Portuguese which uses the verb TER as the primary auxiliary. However, its meaning is closer to the English Present Perfect Continuous (here the use differs from Spanish). So, the question have you just had breakfast? would be almoçaste ja?, rather than tens almoçado? in Portugal. This, I understand, is similar to the way the Preterite is used in some parts of Latin America, such as Argentina.

Not sure what happens in Brazilian Portuguese though

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 12:06 am

The non-geniuses from the States I used to live with in Mexico spoke pretty good Spanish, but nothing special. They were able to understand items on Brazilian news shows. I have seen Portuguese and Spanish speakers communicate with each other, painfully but successfully, on a number of occasions.

You can be like that about it if you want, but don't you be saying the word "Chinese" anywhere near me. It is not a lack of respect, just a belief that the word "language" is fairly meaningless if we are going to be so Eurocentric in our definition of it.

Metamorfose · Post by **Metamorfose** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 1:38 pm

When I learned European, as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese at University many years ago, I was taught that there is a Perfect in Portuguese which uses the verb TER as the primary auxiliary. However, its meaning is closer to the English Present Perfect Continuous (here the use differs from Spanish). So, the question have you just had breakfast? would be almoçaste ja?, rather than tens almoçado? in Portugal. This, I understand, is similar to the way the Preterite is used in some parts of Latin America, such as Argentina.

Yes, indeed we have a perfect form with the verbs TER and HAVER but, at least and as far my knowledge of the language goes, it is most used in sentences when an English speaker would use a durative or a durative and retrospective forms, for example: Você tem almoçado fora estes dias? ( Have you been eating out these days?/ Are you eating out these days? ). When English has a limit as in I have been married for 10 years, we simply use our present tense Eu estou casado há (faz) dez anos. If English uses the perfect to show any fact that somehow reflects to the point now as in We have won!then the past tense comes to work ( Nós vencemos!)

So the retrospective aspect can be shown in a couple of tenses in Portuguese, that's why Brazilians have difficulties in learning the Present Perfect and the word 'aspect' is never tought here.

The Past Perfect is similar in various ways so it's easier for us to learn it, roughly speaking.

Spanish doesn't have /z/ sound and any time we, Portuguese speakers, see the letter 's' between two vowels we pronounce it as /z/ sound, so, in simple sentences like Yes, I do and this is one can tell whether they are talking to Brazilian or not.

And as far as I know, if Portuguese is a direct dialect of any language besides our grandfather Latin, that language is Gallego.

José

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 1:38 pm

You can be like that about it if you want, but don't you be saying the word "Chinese" anywhere near me. It is not a lack of respect, just a belief that the word "language" is fairly meaningless if we are going to be so Eurocentric in our definition of it.

Not sure which post you're referring to here woodcutter.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Mon Nov 29, 2004 5:20 pm

Thanks for the clarification, Metamorfose! I knew it had the durative sense but I was never taught about HAVER except to say there is/are/was/were... so maybe that's something Brazilian Portuguese has kept that Portugues de Portugal has dropped. Do you know anything about that?

You talk about the Past Perfect being similar in use; in Lisbon I was taught to use the mais que perfeito, or the -ra, -ras, -ra... forms, so I had spoken would be (eu) falara rather than tinha falado. Is it different in Brazil?