I am now at the fag end of my stay in Lisbon. I arrived here towards the end of July, after much running around for a visa. I began my intensive Portuguese courses from August. The original idea was to finish three intensive courses up to B1 and then continue the semester-long B2 course. Unfortunately, due to the delay in procuring a visa, I had to miss the first intensive course in July. So I did A1 and A2 as intensives and started with B1 in the semester format. I must say that this was one of the best things to have happened, and the trip here has been a success indeed, barring the visa delay and missing the classes in July (and $$$ I paid for it).
I have been wanting to write about my experience, and today, as I was sitting in my class, it suddenly occurred to me that I don’t find myself translating from Portuguese to English anymore. I was listening to my professor speak in Portuguese. Not until recently would I listen to the professor (who compulsorily speaks in Portuguese) and do a mental translation into English. Even at B1 levels, we are not expected to follow through the entire conversation but have a basic sense of what is being spoken. I still find it difficult to make sense of native Portuguese speakers who speak rapidly and often swallow their vowels. Perhaps the pronunciation of this specific professor is easier (for my standards) to understand because he has taught Portuguese for thirty years in Macau. I still find it extremely difficult to answer listening exercises where they play recordings by native speakers.
Whatever may be the reason, it felt like I had progressed in my understanding of the language, not having to translate in my head. I hope the streak continues. I think the other reason why this has helped is that I am immersed in a Portuguese-speaking milieu. Not that I speak with my Portuguese friends in Portuguese (even though Luís Cabral insisted on texting in Portuguese so that I could improve). My apprehension stems from the lack of vocabulary and gasping for words (‘como se diz?’ is the greatest hack I have at my disposal).
The other thing is that I often think in Portuguese these days when I sit to write. If I have to write “I don’t know many Portuguese words”, my mind actually produces something like ‘I não sei many Portuguese palavras,’. As I said, I don’t speak Portuguese outside class, and I am not even listening to Portuguese radio as much as I should at this stage. But, I live by myself most of the time so there’s no other language overriding whatever Portuguese I retain in my brain. The only exercise I do is that I have followed several Portuguese news accounts on Twitter, and I try to decipher the noticias (news) and then check if I am correct.
Another thing is the existence of Portuguese words in Konkani that I am already familiar with. It doesn’t surprise me as much, but coming across these words is like remembering my grandparents. My grandfather would often use Portuguese phrases to express his frustration with us. He would use this one phrase particularly, ‘assi não posser’, which we too picked up later as an expression of disagreement. Now I realize it was ‘assim não pode ser’ (it can’t be like this). Another one was vassimbor (वाशिंबोर/वासीम्मोर), when either of grandparents wanted to shoo us off. It was also heard during the Konkani Marathi conflict in the famous slogan ‘घरचे भेदी भायलें चोर, सांगात तेंका वासीम्मोर,’ which I’ve come to realize as vais embora (go away).
None of this means I can interpret a 18th century primary source fully. Far from it. But they don’t seem unfamiliar now. I can make out in few glances if the source is important or not. I remember tweeting about this and a native Portuguese speaker responded that even they find it difficult to read. Moreover, the difficulty lies in deciphering the cursive hand writing where the scribes wrote as if their handwriting was a mating display.
So overall, it has been fun to learn Portuguese. Moreover, it it always great to be in Lisbon. To be honest though, I didn’t follow my plans of discovering Lisbon all over again. I went out when Ameen and then Amritha visited. But since October, I have mostly been going to the university and back. Since the semester course was from the afternoon, my visits to Bibliotheca Nacional and Torre do Tombo were also reduced. My lone visit to Arquivo Historico Ultramarino has traumatized me for life, and I know that my next stint here would involve more regular visits to that place. I think the visits and adventures at the archives require a separate entry.
The other reason this has been fun is that I am not in the murderous routine of a coursework semester and I am already counting my days before I get back to Philly to do that routine (and more thanks to comprehensive exams) one last time. Probably when I am back to Portugal next, I will finish the remaining courses so that I could finally begin to read Pessoa the way he was meant to be.
