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!!

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.

Next Post: Translate Portuguese: 2012 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation