Back to School

I had my first week of classes this week. OU’s international programs are set up so that all exchange students take twelve hours, which means I only have three classes. Each one meets for two hours twice a week. I’m taking Brazilian Literature and Culture, Sociology of the Family in Brazil, and Portuguese for Foreigners (PUC requires that one). All three of my classes are taught entirely in Portuguese, and the literature and sociology ones are regular classes with Brazilian students in them.

We didn’t do much in my first sociology class, but my literature professor assigned a reading with questions to answer on the very first day. My professor talks slowly, so she’s not particularly difficult to understand, but even so, I walked out of that class with my head spinning a bit. Learning in Portuguese is so much more difficult than learning in English. I can understand most of what my professor says, but I definitely have to devote my full attention to her. Listening with only one ear while really thinking more about something else is definitely out of the question.

In addition to always having to pay very close attention, I also have to keep remembering to pay attention to what she actually says. That sounds silly, but it’s actually a bit difficult. I get so caught up in trying to understand the meaning of the individual words that it’s easy to forget to pay attention to the meaning of her sentences, of the ideas that she’s presenting. If I’m not careful, the words just go in one ear and out the other, and even if I understand every word, my brain won’t hold onto the overall meaning. It’s like the mechanism that tells my brain to file facts away for future reference breaks down somewhere between hearing the words in Portuguese and storing the ideas in English. If I concentrate hard I’m better at retaining information, but I’m sure my notebook is going to be my best friend this semester. I take notes mostly in English, though with the occasional word or phrase in Portuguese, because I would get too far behind if I tried to write everything in Portuguese. Plus, if I spend too much time writing, then I’m not devoting my full attention to what my professor is saying, and thus I don’t understand. Makes for an interesting situation…

The text that my professor assigned was only about five pages long, but it took me several hours to get through it and answer the questions. There’s no such thing as speed-reading or skimming in a foreign language. I have the same sort of trouble with reading as I do with listening to the lectures: if I’m not careful I only understand the words and not the meaning. In some ways reading is even worse because I spend time looking up words in my dictionary. I didn’t have a particularly hard time with this text, but sometimes with the readings that I had for a medieval Spanish literature class, I’d get to the end of sentence and realize I’d spent so much time looking up words that I had no idea what the sentence was actually saying. Hopefully the texts I have here won’t be quite as bad those! I’ve found that it helps to stop at the end of each paragraph and summarize what is being said. That seems to help cement the information in my head a little better, but it sure takes forever!

It’s one thing to learn the parts of the body, different foods, or other fairly useless things in Portuguese class in the US. It’s quite another to write responses in Portuguese in a Brazilian class about the different sociological and political tensions that led to a war in northeastern Brazil, and to then attempt to have those responses be of the same caliber as those of regular Brazilians. It’s a very strange feeling not to be able to express myself as fully as I want to simply because I don’t know the correct sentence structures to be able to do so. Complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses become infinitely more difficult in a foreign language. As a result, most of my sentences are fairly simple. At times I feel like a third grader because my sentences tend to be shorter than in English and my paragraphs lack fluidity.

The professor I have for my Portuguese class, Adriana, is actually one of the same ones that I had last summer, and happily she’s the nicer of the two. I placed into the highest level of Portuguese for Foreigners, which is a tad frightening, but hopefully with Adriana it won’t be too bad. At one point she asked one of my classmates if she’d read any books in Portuguese, and my classmate replied that she’d tried to a book called Os Sertões, but that it had been really difficult. Adriana laughed and said that she’d only assign that book to her enemies, it was so hard. As luck would have it, I’m reading at least part of that book in my literature class. How wonderful.

One of the American girls in my Portuguese class, Patricia, is also in my literature class. Our literature class meets right before Portuguese, so we’ve got a four-hour block together every Tuesday and Thursday. I also have sociology with another American guy from my Portuguese class. It’s really nice to already know people in my regular Brazilian classes; that makes them a little less intimidating.