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I've written about the Instant Portuguese course I did last summer twice before: my first impressions, and some thoughts having finished the course. Whilst it's now some time since I went to Portugal, I thought it might be useful to say something about how useful all that study proved to be.
On the whole, I found people understood what I was trying to say; the two exceptions that I remember both related to my pronunciation of "lavabos" (the first time, this caused someone on the sleeper train to say to her colleague something like "do you speak Spanish? I think he's Spanish", which I understood well enough to move to English!, the second time, after I tried again, they got my drift, and spent a while trying to correct my pronunciation). Of course, I have no idea whether people appreciated the effort I was making not, or whether people who interacted with me in Portuguese did so because they thought my Portuguese was BALGE or because they didn't speak / didn't want to speak English. There were times when I gave up and apologetically switched into English, but I think I made a reasonable attempt at using Portuguese (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
atreic can probably comment on this :).
There were a couple of occasions where speaking (some) Portuguese really helped (and I fear we might have struggled a bit in only English). The first of these was at "Casa Do Alentejo" in Lisbon, where we were charged for two bottles of wine, having only drunk one. When I expressed some approximation to this in Portuguese, the waiter (who had spoken no English to us, despiteatreic speaking no Portuguese) apologetically took the bill away and returned with a correct one. The second was a Coimbra B station, where the guidebook had lead me to suspect that catching the connecting train to Coimbra A (which is much closer to the town center) would be easy. It wasn't - the departure boards don't show the trains to A, so I ended up having to ask someone in the ticket off when the next train was, and which platform it went from.
One odd thing I hadn't considered was that learning some Portuguese made me our spokesman for many of our interactions.atreic is rather more outgoing that I, and normally we would each order our own meals in a restaurant. Doing the ordering-for-both-of-us thing felt a bit awkward to me, and I hadn't expected that.
I think, on the whole, that the Instant Portuguese course was a win - despite some limitations, it taught me a lot of useful Portuguese (and helped somewhat in understanding what people said to me), which I think enhanced our trip, and I could feel I'd at least made an effort to understand something of the local language rather than just assuming everyone would speak English with me. On the flip side, 6 weeks of 35ish minutes a day is a fair commitment to make; the jury's out on whether I'll try again with the next foreign language I might need for travel...
On the whole, I found people understood what I was trying to say; the two exceptions that I remember both related to my pronunciation of "lavabos" (the first time, this caused someone on the sleeper train to say to her colleague something like "do you speak Spanish? I think he's Spanish", which I understood well enough to move to English!, the second time, after I tried again, they got my drift, and spent a while trying to correct my pronunciation). Of course, I have no idea whether people appreciated the effort I was making not, or whether people who interacted with me in Portuguese did so because they thought my Portuguese was BALGE or because they didn't speak / didn't want to speak English. There were times when I gave up and apologetically switched into English, but I think I made a reasonable attempt at using Portuguese (
atreic can probably comment on this :).There were a couple of occasions where speaking (some) Portuguese really helped (and I fear we might have struggled a bit in only English). The first of these was at "Casa Do Alentejo" in Lisbon, where we were charged for two bottles of wine, having only drunk one. When I expressed some approximation to this in Portuguese, the waiter (who had spoken no English to us, despite
atreic speaking no Portuguese) apologetically took the bill away and returned with a correct one. The second was a Coimbra B station, where the guidebook had lead me to suspect that catching the connecting train to Coimbra A (which is much closer to the town center) would be easy. It wasn't - the departure boards don't show the trains to A, so I ended up having to ask someone in the ticket off when the next train was, and which platform it went from.One odd thing I hadn't considered was that learning some Portuguese made me our spokesman for many of our interactions.
atreic is rather more outgoing that I, and normally we would each order our own meals in a restaurant. Doing the ordering-for-both-of-us thing felt a bit awkward to me, and I hadn't expected that. I think, on the whole, that the Instant Portuguese course was a win - despite some limitations, it taught me a lot of useful Portuguese (and helped somewhat in understanding what people said to me), which I think enhanced our trip, and I could feel I'd at least made an effort to understand something of the local language rather than just assuming everyone would speak English with me. On the flip side, 6 weeks of 35ish minutes a day is a fair commitment to make; the jury's out on whether I'll try again with the next foreign language I might need for travel...