Why, Oh Why, Oh Why, Oh . . .

A few years ago I had a very intelligent Brazilian lawyer taking private English lessons with me here in Búzios. But he had one obstacle in his otherwise solid progress, so I decided to try a visual aid. I came to class one day carrying a large letter Y with me. I plunked it down on the desk. "This is a Y," I said, "The 25th letter of the English alphabet. It is considered a semivowel. When you see it at the end of an English word, you must pronounce it. You must." My student nodded, laughed, and the lesson began. No more than ten minutes passed when he began to talk about the years he spent in the Brazilian Neiv. (I'm writing it phonetically because if I write it "nave," native English speakers will see and hear "neiv" but Brazilians will see and hear "nei-vee" because Brazilians pronounce that final e that is normally silent in English and, you see, it's all very confusing.) I held up my cardboard letter Y. "Say it again," I prompted. "Neiv," he said, confused. "Nei-VEE," I said. "Vee, vee, vee, you must pronounce the Y." This was years ago. Our lessons dwindled to a precious few, then ended, and I still regret having lost that battle.

It's a battle I continue to lose. Brazilians, as a group, learn English quickly and speak it very, very well, almost with no accent. But even some of the most competent Brazilian speakers of English drop the Y. And why shouldn't they? It's simply not part of their alphabet, or wasn't until 1990, when it was welcomed into the fold by yet another in a long series of spelling reforms. In fact, three letters were welcomed that year, Y, K and W. Brazilians do fine with the K, after all, they know all about kilograms, and the W is not a problem, given the penchant of Brazilians for naming their kids Washington, Wellington and Wagner. But they don't know what in the world to do with the Y. So most of the time they just ignore it.  I think they're hoping we won't notice.

Which leads to some charmingly confusing moments. Take Tom Brady. In the U.S. he's best known as the quarterback for the New England Patriots. But in Brazil, he's known as the husband of Gisele Bündchen, Brazil's greatest gift to the modeling world, and he's called "Tomee Breid" — dropping the Y and adding "ee" to the final M. In conversation, it takes a while for native English speakers to get it.

Same thing with poor Amy. When she died, we heard about it over and over again on the news. Took us a few beats before realizing who it was, since the announcers were all speaking about the tragic death of Eim WineHAUzee.

I was galloping along pretty well one day in Portuguese, talking about this and that, when my interlocutor asked if I liked "Bub SHORchee." Well, I couldn't think of anyone with that name in Brazil. "Quem (who)?" I asked. "Bub SHORchee, Bub SHORchee!" It took some minutes before I found myself finally saying, "Oh, yes, I love Bobby Short!" "Quem?" my friend asked.








Well, there are many examples, each more charming than other. We hear the most competent announcers on Radio MEC, Brazil's classical radio station, say, "You've just heard the Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35, of Tchaikovsk." I find that amusing, but I'm easily amused. And speaking of "easily," there's my biggest challenge in English classes. The word "ease" (eez) tends to be pronounced "ee-zee" here, and the word "easy" (ee-zee) tends to be pronounced "eez." As for that letter Y . . . I know it will continue to be dropped, and I know I will continue to lean forward, waiting for that last syllable that I'm wired to hear.

Language Learning Late in Life

Mon père returns to his Paris birthplace

I began to be interested in France when I found out that my father had been born in Paris. I was probably not even ten years old at the time, but I knew instinctively that there was something about Paris, something romantic, something very ooh là là. So as I got older I set about learning French. I figured it was in my blood. I memorized and sang French songs, watched French films, read Simenon, fell in love with Yves Montand, made French one of my best subjects in school. And it was all so easy! I was young, my brain’s grammar mechanisms had me conjugating and modifying and translating faster than you could say "Vive la France!"

But contrary to expectations — family’s and friends’, that is — and contrary to my own ideas about my life, it’s not on the Left Bank that I wound up pitching my tent. No, somewhere along the way my eastward trajectory took a sharp turn south, and I ended up in Brazil. And if I was going to be able to discuss symptoms with a doctor or argue about the telephone company’s charges, if I were to communicate with anyone at all, I was going to have to fire up my neurons and start learning a "second" language all over again. I knew this was not going to be easy. I remembered from my college linguistics courses that it’s young people who enjoy the language-learning advantages, not older people. Mon Dieu!

I hardly spoke at all during my first two years in Brazil. I really can’t imagine what people thought. I must have given off quite an impression, a quiet, demure person with no ideas or opinions of her own. Mark, who had learned to speak Portuguese when he first started visiting Brazil long before we met, did all of the talking for us. But this was incredibly frustrating for me — probably for him as well — so I set about learning this new language. I watched closely as people talked, trying to pick up on body language, much as a child would. I also used my own tried-and-true method: I memorized and sang Brazilian songs, watched Brazilian films, read Jorge Amado, fell in love with — well, I stayed true to Yves Montand. I watched Brazilian news shows, trying to mimic the over-articulating news anchors. I also read lots of murder mysteries. It was a favorite genre of mine in the States, and I knew that the dialogue would be easy, along the lines of, "All right, punk, where were you on the night of the murder?"

A few of my language tutors: Inspector Espinosa, Detective Bellini , Investigator Augustão

I know a lot of people think of Portuguese as some poor cousin of Spanish. It’s not. There are more native speakers of Portuguese than there are of German, Japanese, Russian or even my beloved French. Portuguese has some amazingly complex and interesting tenses: the personal infinitive (all but unique among the world’s languages), the future subjunctive (a "conjugated" infinitive), a future perfect subjunctive, and two pluperfects. And there’s plenty more to shake the confidence of a neophyte: for one thing, the imperfect tense is frequently used idiomatically in Portuguese in place of the conditional tense. There is also one use of the future tense in Portuguese which has no equivalent in English, and that is the use of the future to express what is probable in the present; the same thing goes for the conditional tense, which is sometimes used to express probability in the past. (Don’t worry, this won’t be on the test!)

Given all these complexities, and given my late start, I was convinced that I would speak only in the present tense for the rest of my life. And I did exactly that for years. Thankfully, most people still caught the gist of what I was saying. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, I began using simple past tenses, then a future tense or two, until one day I made a wild leap into the subjunctive abyss. I found myself discussing politics over dinner, laughing at jokes, chatting away with people in supermarket lines, and railing at the telemarketers. All in all, I’m feeling pretty confident. Confident enough to take on Mandarin if I had to move to China? No, not that confident.