the stages of Portuguese

heh, funny, I'd sent a commentary to one of the Roda de Samba blog posts... and in that commentary I mentioned, by way of explaining my poor Portuguese, that I am an estrangeira here studying samba. One of the two blog authors, Leonardo, wrote back saying "tell me your story!" & asking about international samba. So a few days later I gathered my Portuguese neurons together and wrote him a long letter in Portuguese about it. A long long long letter. I didn't hear back from him, but a couple days later I looked at the Roda de Samba blog and there was most recent post, "Tem estrangeiro no samba!" (There's foreigners doing samba!") - with my ENTIRE letter reprinted verbatim. I guess I kind of knew he was going to do that - emails sent to the blog authors can go on the blog - but I didn't QUITE realize - or I would have phrased some things a little differently or at least had somebody look over my Portuguese!

In the letter I just told my little story of how I got hooked on samba, and then tried my clumsy, poorly-informed best to describe how there are little samba groups, and even little Carnivals, all over the world now. I think I made a lot of mistakes, both factual and linguistic, but at least the idea got across. A bunch of Brazilians have written back some really nice comments about it all. Pretty cool!

They have since gotten completely side-tracked on another topic - the Mangueira bateria is forcing some kind of "stagemanship" training on all its directors - such is blog life!

You know what's funny, my emails are just as long in Portuguese than they are when I write in english. The Portuguese doesn't seem to slow me down at all! It's pretty easy to write. I make a steady stream of little grammatical errors, but can write about just about anything now.

I guess my Portuguese really IS better. It's so incremental that I had't really noticed... but now compared to five months ago, it's so much better. I get different reactions now from friends whenever I say my usual "My portuguese is still so bad" - they flat contradict me now with "No, it ISN'T. Really. You're talking WELL now." I still stop and hesitate over certain verb tenses, little black holes of lost vocabulary that temporarily suck me into silence, but I can almost always tear free of those now and move on with the sentence. It's fragile & I fear I will lose it, back in the US; I've got to find some people to speak Portuguese with.

My vocabulary surprises me now and then: Why was I able to say "Look, it's a bat!" to the caixa player next to me when a poor lost bat was flying around inside the hall at Monobloco's last Fundicao show? Where did I ever learn the word for "bat"? Where did I pick up "paw" and "doorknob" and "landslide"? When did I stop needing a dictionary for the newspaper? I catch myself starting sentences with Brazilian introductions like "Look only, look only" and "The business is the following" - and sometimes accidentally use those phrases in my English speech too.

But I'm not fluent. Anyone with a strong slurred favela accent can still knock me into slack-jawed, drooling puzzlement. I lose little things if people start going fast. And still can't talk about heartfelt things... well, I can, but it's slow. I don't even really "believe" in fluency any more. It's sort of like losing your faith in true love or world peace; I just don't think it can truly happen! There are glimmers here and there, the fog slowly lifts, the veil thins, but it never clears entirely.

But slowly it improves. Looking back I can remember a lot of stages to the process:

The Two-Year-Old:
"Want coffee. Want now. No coffee? No coffee? Want coffee! Want coffee now!"

The Illiterate Country Hick: (a la David Sedaris)
"Can youse folkses gave me some of them those cow meats?"

The One-Word Wonder:
"Did you like my show?"
"YES! It was great! Great! It was great! You were great! It was VERY GREAT! You were VERY GREAT! VERY VERY GREAT!"
"Hey, thanks. Did you go to that other club later?"
"It was not great."

The $100,000-Pyramid Contestant:
"So I went to get the - the - the thing that you open a door with."
"Key?"
"Key! Correct! Yes! But it became ... it became... When something will not come out of something."
"Stuck?"
"Yes! So I went to ask the.. the... the man who is on the corner."
"Doorman?"
"No, the man who is on the corner who has many keys and works with keys and doors."
"Locksmith?"
"Yes! Correct! And he said he could not... could not... When you take a broken thing and make it not broken."
"Repair?"
"Yes!"

The Poet: (tackling something that is a bit beyond your vocabulary)
"There is a church the color of lemons,
Beyond is a stone, in shape of horse and man.
Beyond the horse of stone, a place where buses sleep.
At that place, the place where buses sleep, when hours are twelve, when sun is hot,
I wait for you."

The Mystic: (accidentally using the wrong words entirely)
"This music, I understand an ocean, but to my drum come turns and owls. I play the third owl beyond the moon. I play the box of claws. Do you understand?"

The 95%-Comprehension-Is-A-Long-Way-From-100% stage:
[music director is talking:] "Now, gather round, caixas, I've got something really important to stay. Can everybody listen up and pay attention? We're about to start our first major stage show and I just wanted to give you one really crucial last-minute piece of advice. I think this is the most important thing to remember. And it's this: Xboshgr, ngUNGUNGpfsy! Grlakblshfs! Okay? Is that perfectly clear to everyone? Now let's go and knock 'em dead!"

The Living-In-The-Moment stage: (you don't know any verb tenses except present tense)
"I run to bus. But the bus go. I run run run. The bus stop! I go up! I am on bus. The bus goes. I arrive at club. The band plays! It is great!"

The Catatonic:
"I went to the club but I had no ticket! But I ...................................[vacant stare, silence]............
......[mumbling: "would....could?.....would?... losted? losed?.... "].............
- COULD NOT HAVE LOST the ticket."

The Broken Record:
"I was walking along the beach and then a hhhhhelllllppppooooopterrrrrrrrrr ?"
"Helicopter."
"helplicopterrrr?
"Helicopter."
"Heliclopter?"
"Helicopter."
"Helicopter?"
"Helicopter."
"A helicopter went right over my head!"

The War Veteran:
"What would you have done if I hadn't been there?"
"Oh...." [glazed stare, shudder of fear] "I don't want to talk about it."
"Why not?"
"I... I... I can't explain."
"What's wrong?"
"I can't remember the conditional tense."