Almost a third of my life was spent
immersed in the language and culture of Brazil. Hearing people speak Portuguese
warms my heart and makes me wish I were still living there. I spent four of the
five years we lived there in a native Brazilian school, my best friend was
Brazilian, and I spoke Portuguese better than I spoke English. I even remember
that I used to think in Portuguese; I wasn’t just fluent, I essentially spoke
the language as a native. Then, after 3rd grade, we moved to
Baltimore and then to Thailand and I used my Portuguese less and less.
Fast forward nine years later and I
am a senior at Lovett and I have lost most of my Portuguese. I started studying
Spanish in sixth grade and have been studying it ever since. I love the Spanish
language and I have almost reached complete fluency. However, as my Spanish got
better, my Portuguese was pushed aside. Every year I lost more and more of my Portuguese,
as I was not using it anymore and I have never regretted anything like I regret
how I let my Portuguese fluency slip away.
So, when I started my Diploma
Distinction and a senior project became a requirement, I knew exactly what I
would do. I would spend the month relearning as much Portuguese as I could
because at this point, I just needed to do something before I forgot the
language all together.
Even more, my project represented
the reason why Lovett has senior projects: to let a student pursue a passion that
they cannot follow with a traditional Lovett class. As Lovett does not offer a
Portuguese class, this was the only way I could do something I had meant to do
for years.
After my project was approved I
began planning how exactly I was going to reteach myself Portuguese. I found
all the Portuguese language books that my family still has, collected all of
our Brazilian movies, and bought additional workbooks. I also found someone
from Emory that would be willing to tutor me. Ana is a lecturer at Emory and
specializes in teaching Portuguese to Spanish speakers. As I already speak
Spanish, it would make sense to use my fluency in one language with the
acquisition of another. The transition from Spanish to Portuguese is a lot
easier than that of English to Portuguese. So I agreed to meet with her two
times a week and really what we did in class to what she assigned became a
majority of my project. I was worried about how to structure and fill all the
time during the week when I was not in class with Ana but the homework she
assigned gave me structure and made me set goals. We started with the past tenses,
to plural structures, to sentence structure, new vocabulary, and even the subjunctive,
which is the hardest grammar tense in Spanish and in Portuguese.
As some of my fluency came flying
back and began to enjoy making connections in between Spanish and Portuguese,
noting where they have diverged and where they remain extremely similar. I also
got back into learning a lot of Brazilian music, which is good for comprehension.
Overall, one of my favorites parts of my project is how much I learned from Ana
about the history and culture of Brazil. I lived in Brazil for five years but
as I was so young, I never had the opportunity to truly understand the country
and its past. With Ana I learned about the military dictatorship, what came
after, the political arena while I was living there, and the current political
situation.
This project is really special to
me because of how much Brazil and the language Portuguese mean to me. For me,
the power and potential in the act of speaking in another language is
intoxicating. My love for languages was corroborated during this month and I
look forward to how deep I can delve into language studies in college.
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