Dear Members,

My sister called me to let me know about her adjustment period, after moving to a new city in a different State in Brazil. She made many comments, but what really amazed her, was the difference between the Portuguese spoken in Salvador, Bahia and the one spoken in Jundia­, Sao Paulo…..

She said that the kids made fun of my nephews accent ( regional northeastern accent) and that they kept asking them to repeat certain words such as porta, for them porrrta, for us pohta; the supplies list the teacher gave my sister seemed to contain alien terms, such as bolsa for backpack which we call mochila, pasta for binder which we call classificador and the list goes on….the teacher didn’t seem to know any of the terms used in Salvador since we were children, since our parents were children, for my sister: it was like being in a foreign language class and I had the wrong vocab and the wrong accent……

She didn’t really say that, but that is what she thought and her comment, knowing I have studied dialects, linguistic changes and orthography as the base of one of my favorite papers, had an implicit need to share her frustration and hope that I would explain it or at least let her know I understood what she was going through……

I recently had some children enrolled in our school to learn Portuguese, but they wanted to learn European Portuguese and I explained that the Portuguese we teach is standard Portuguese, basically what would be spoken and understood in any Portuguese speaking country and while I was explaining that to the parents, my sister’s frustration came to my mind…..and I caught myself thinking: she wasn’t understood in her own country, can you imagine for a foreigner, what a challenge!!

Soon I came back to the reality that we try to use the internet, songs, culture to bring the student closer to being immersed in the real language, dialects exist but they don’t stop communication from being processed, because there are always alternatives and words to explain and convey meaning…..and when everything else fails…….. the international signs to point to the target of our despair, the source of our frustration…..

I also wanted to share that despite all work involved in learning a foreign language, in dealing with diversity, there’s nothing more beautiful than opening the doors for another human being, revealing the secrets a foreign language contains……I have the privilege to be a facilitator in this process and enable many students accomplish that and hopefully one day, see them as passionate as I am for learning and speaking a foreign language!

Abracos,

Claudia Krusch

CK Translations LLC

Offering solutions for your foreign language needs.

www.cktranslations.com

www.easylearnlanguages.com