Matthew's Journal

atreic and I are off to Portugal later in the year. In a probably-vain attempt to avoid being one of those annoying monoglot English tourists, and because I can only remember about two words from my previous trips to Portugal (with MWW, years ago), I thought I should try and pick up a bit of the language before then. There's a bewildering range of teach-yourself courses available (although the number is slightly reduced if you want European Portuguese), but I eventually settled upon Teach Yourself Instant Portuguese, since 35-45 minutes a day for 6 weeks seemed about the time I had available. Perhaps this redefinition of "instant" should have been a warning...

Anyhow, I finished week one on Sunday, and manage a respectable 89% in the test for the week. Having had yesterday off (you get one day off a week), I'll be starting week two later today. I don't yet feel I can say anything terribly useful, but I guess that's to be expected. It's obviously aimed at a certain type of person, though: one of the things I learned how to say is "A minha esposa tem um Mercedes", or "Trabalho para três bancos grandes. O trabalho é chato, mas o dinheiro é bom." It's pretty grammar-light, which is probably sensible, but can be a bit frustrating: I ended up looking ahead to see what the difference between "sou" and "estou" is, for example, and I'm not clear why sometimes it's "Tem uma casa em Londres", and other times "Sim, tem casa em Londres", or why sometimes you say "Estive em [place]", and other times "Estive no [place]". The author's view is that the little words aren't necessary to being comprehended, and that one is better off saying something approximately right but plausibly pronounced and confidently. She may well be right! I guess the test will be to see how useful it is in Portugal, or whether everyone will hear my badly-mangled Portuguese, wince, and reply in English...

Whilst looking around for a suitable course, I noticed Rosetta Stone[0], and Linguaphone, both of whom claim to be able to teach one to a plausibly-proficient level in a not-very-large period of time (although both shy way from claiming exactly how long, I note). I've always wondered if they are actually any good - if not, how do they stay in business, but if so, why don't we use them in schools, rather than taking 5 secondary years to get to GCSE level?

Finally, the course I have includes some flash-cards. I didn't want to cut my nice new book up, so I LaTeXd up some of my own (this involved debugging the slightly-bitrotted-flashcards package). pm215 suggested that I consider Anki, as a more intelligent way to do flashcard-type learning. So, having used only the old-fashioned flashcards last week, I'm going to give this a go this week. One difficulty, though, has been entering accented characters - LaTeX lets you specify them in ASCII, so \~a for ã, but that doesn't really work for Anki (you can feed it LaTeX, but it looks very odd having one LaTeX'd character in the middle of a word). After a bit of googling, I used xev to find out what X thought my Alt-Gr key was (ISO_Level3_Shift), and told X to use it as the Compose key: xmodmap -e "keysym ISO_Level3_Shift = Multi_key". This means I can generate most of the symbols in the WP page, although the rune for generating ǎ, for example, still doesn't work, and there should be a nicer way of setting this up.

This should be documented more usefully, I feel (I shouldn't be looking at WP, for example), and it would be nice to have something like the OSX app that shows you what the keyboard "looks" like (e.g. I'd hold down Alt-Gr, and it would highlight the keys that I could press to generate an accented character, as well as what accent would be about to appear)...

[0] who only offer the wrong sort of Portuguese