In English

Learn Portuguese: Listen to Braziliance Every Week!

Christopher Larkosh, Elena Como from Atlantico Books, Dário Borim

Dário Borim, a Portuguese professor at UMass Dartmouth, produces a weekly radio show for the UMass Dartmouth Radio Station: “Braziliance.” It streams live on Thursday afternoons from 3-6 EST, and at that time you just go to the website to listen: UMass Dartmouth Streaming Server – WUMD 89.3 Webcast. Braziliance features music of the Portuguese-speaking world. It’s always a great mix of Brazilian, Portuguese, and Luso-African music that keeps me tapping my toes and smiling. I always recommend listening to Brazilian music in order to learn Portuguese, and Dario is a great DJ, choosing wonderful music to learn with!

Dario is a Brazilian from southern Minas Gerais, who teaches all levels of Portuguese at Dartmouth. His students are beginners all the way up to PhD students. Dário also produces a weekly radio show on the local radio station, WUMD. You can tune in and listen to his show, “Brazilliance,” on Thursdays, 3-6pm, local time (Eastern).  Dário is a batuqueiro, a drummer, and he plays a nice variety of Brazilian, Portuguese, and African music on his show.

UMass Dartmouth has 10,000 students, and about 300 are Portuguese students. There is lots of local support and funding for the  Portuguese program because of the large Portuguese community. The PhD program is in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies

Learn Portuguese: Birth of a High School Portuguese Club (Guest Post by Adam Mahler)

This is Adam Mahler’s second guest-post for our blog. Thanks again, Adam!!

Adam Mahler and Vasco da Gama in Times Square

September 9, 2010: This was the day I met my first big high school crush. I did what my generation calls, “lurking.” I checked her facebook, took note of her classes, interests and tried to stir up conversation with her. I had heard through some of my friends that she knew Portuguese. A good student, and always with an ear for foreign languages, I figured what way would be better to impress her than a quick snippet of Portuguese. The task ahead of me was hard. She was familiar with European Portuguese. I spent days trying to find resources on “Português de Portugal”, and made little progress. I found one phrasebook, but other than slipping through the section “Sex in Portugal” for quick laughs, I made little progress. Meu deus, mais rápido!

The notions of learning Portuguese to woo a girl failed fast. It turned out her padrasto was from Portugal, not her herself. She had a certain fondness for Portugal and Portuguese, she didn’t know much Portuguese. We ended up dating, but surprisingly Portuguese didn’t go on my mental back-burner, or even worse… trash bin.

I first found myself in my Portuguese crossover phrase, I would listen to Portuguese-English songs, such as those by Nelly Furtado–speaking of which, isn’t it a shame she does more in Spanish than in Portuguese? Anyway, I word by word became engrossed, and slowly, I had mastered pronunciation more or less, and also could form basic Portunhol sentences.

It became an obsession– I became known as Vasco da Gama, and soon even the girl I first discovered Portuguese by was telling me I was crazy. But, I was unstoppable. This past summer, I finally embarked on my first Portuguese class, and took weekly lessons. I did awesomely; not because of my talent, but because of my passion. I wouldn’t be able to wait for each lesson and I would spend nearly all my free time doing workbooks rather than my vast summer assignments. While I am by no means fluent, at this point I am fairly proficient, and at the very least able to understand the majority of the Portuguese I encounter, and am able to communicate fairly well. I eclipsed my 6-7 years of Spanish studying in a few months. Every Latin class, I would talk with my teacher, I would tell him how Portuguese descended from Latin and had some of its strange peculiarities.

After these lessons, which I still continue, came my next step into Portuguese learning: Portuguese teaching. I started the Portuguese club at my school. There were more members than expected, and granted that everyone takes Spanish, there was a good foundation and there are quite a few people in my schooling “fala-ing” as they call it. Teaching enriched my own knowledge of Portuguese– it was good to hear it and dissect it to answer others, to really comprehend and translate on your feet. When I didn’t know how to translate something from Portuguese to English, I smiled. This was the mark of true learning, I had thought in Portuguese. The club is still new, but both the faculty and students love it, and more than anything I’ve exposed people to perhaps the most advanced culture and unappreciated language in the world. Brazil, Portugal, and all of the Lusosphere have a culture that is the culmination of half a millenium of global contact. Even though many nations colonized, and languages adopted loan words, no culture of language seems as unique as Portuguese. As Mia Couto said, “Português é uma lingua que aceita muito.”

I have been a sort of Renaissance man over the years. I have been the avid guitarist, the dark poet, the sports buff, and everything in between. But in the end, those passions, no matter how strong, were to impress others and raise my self-esteem. Yet it would be the passion that started out as the most vain attempt to impress of them all that would become my long-standing passion. I need to teach and work with Portuguese for the rest of my life– my dream is to do so at Yale. No matter what though, Portuguese is my first tangible, permanent, and perhaps even only true passion.

Portuguese for Business: Book Review of Brazilians Working with Americans- Cultural Case Studies

Are you an American planning to work with Brazilians? If so, you should read this book before you start working with Brazilians!

This book review is by Maria Antonia Cowles, Professor Emeritus, Lauder Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, and it originally appeared on the Portuguese American Journal website.

Brazilians Working with Americans – Cultural Case Studies

Brazilians Working with Americans- Cultural Case Studies
2007, 218 pp. ISBN: 978029271474731
by: Kelm, Orlando R. and Mary E. Risner

In an interdependent world where intercultural communication and foreign language proficiency are a critical tool for effective business practices, dedicated texts that draw on authentic experiences and discourse are few and far between. The English/Portuguese bi-lingual 2007 publication by Orlando R. Kelm from University of Texas and Mary E. Risner, from University of Florida presents a unique collection of real life cases which illustrate cultural issues in business related transactions leading to miscommunication and/or leading to less than optimal outcomes.

The volume comprises ten non-sequential units, each relating a case based on actual experiences that Brazilian executives lived through during their work with North Americans. Each chapter follows the same format: (1) the background story contextualizing a critical incident involving a cultural issue; (2) comments from three Brazilian and three American executives expressing their personal opinion on those issues; and (3) a number of topics and questions for discussion.
In addition, supporting QuickTime movies of the executives’ personal opinions permit viewers (students or businesspeople) to see and hear the entire text in both English and Portuguese.

The main strength of this text is its adaptiveness in serving multiple functions and multiple audiences:

1. As a text for business students, it provides for insights into real-life cultural issues from the business environment. Management style and approach to problem solving, models of the discourse used in a particular domain (e.g.: repertoire and register) as well as opinions and interpretation of the cases by peer Brazilian and American practitioners in both languages inform a broad spectrum of learners.
2. As a teaching tool, it provides the instructor with a wealth of materials from which to draw and incorporate into a business language and culture curriculum.
3. As a broad spectrum resource for North-American and Brazilian business practitioners and faculty, it can be used as a primer for the first encounter as well as a rich resource for validating existing assumptions and asking new questions.

English/Portuguese and Portuguese/English glossaries, and suggested supplemental readings on intercultural communication studies complete the document.
“Brazilians Working with Americans” should belong in the library of every student, teacher, and practitioner dealing with business between Brazilians and North-Americans and to the global manager who at some point will be doing business with Brazil.
Although there is concern for the life span of any book dealing with current issues, its well conceived format has the flexibility to permit content updates to serve its broad audience for years to come.