I stumbled onto Real Brazilian Portuguese by accident while searching for new resources on the web. At first, I was turned off by the familiar sight of the ‘endless webpage of hype’, not to mention the ‘ew, grammar is so dull and complicated!’ line, which…please. I am generally not a huge fan of the “let’s never speak of this thing horrible scary thing called grammar” approach that is unfortunately becoming very popular amongst people trying to sell you language courses.
But in my exhausting quest to review anything and everything for learning Portuguese, I decided I should at least sign up to get the first 3 free lessons and see if the hype was worth it.
- What you get: $27 for 20 pdf lessons
- Focus of the program: Reading, aquiring core vocabulary
- Level: Absolute beginner
- Weaknesses: Written pronunciation glosses are poor, mnemonics may not be effective, and lack of any audio materials means this is not a good course for learning conversation.
- Strengths: Uses a novel ‘chunking’ approach that gets beginners expressing complete thoughts right from the start.
- Verdict: I would not recommend this as a standalone course, but it would make a good reading supplement for students using Pimsleur.
First and foremost, this is a system for learning to do one thing exclusively: reading Brazilian Portuguese at a beginner level. Each of the 20 lessons comes in the form of a pdf and there are no audio materials to help with pronunciation. Every lesson introduces 7 new words, mostly verbs, by way of mnemonic stories. Then come a series of exercises asking you to use the new words by translating Portuguese sentences into English, and then English sentences into Portuguese.
The three conceits of this program are:
- the use of mnemonics to learn vocabulary
- the use of core vocabulary, getting maximum benefit out of the most commonly used words
- an approach I will call ‘chunking’, which teaches short phrases in a way that makes it easy to combine them to express new thoughts
While I can get behind core vocabulary and chunking as effective principles of language learning, I’m not so sure mnemonics are really all they’re cracked up to be, at least not at the beginner level.
Pronunciation errors
The first problem is that the mnemonics are all based on written pronunciation glosses. No written gloss can ever convey the sound of a spoken word — imagine trying to write out the sound of a nasal vowel versus a normal vowel, like pão vs pau. Or writing out the sound of open e versus closed e. You can’t do it, at least not without using the International Phonetic Alphabet. But ok, if you’re going to try to give written glosses, at the very least, get it right. The pronunciations given in RBP are sometimes ambiguous and often just wrong.
For example, eu posso (“I can”) is transcribed in Lesson 1 as “(ay-oo) po-soh”. This is terrible. The first o in posso is actually an open o, which sounds more like [aw] in English. And the second o, as with the o at the end of most words in Portuguese, is pronounced more like a [u]. Finally, the “ay” could be mistakenly pronounced as [i] instead of [e] by some English speakers, and the use of glides like “y” and “w” will lead to poor pronunciation of dipthongs. So a more accurate (but still inadequate) transciption would be “(ei-oo) paw-su”.
More examples. eu preciso (“I need”) is transcribed as “(ay-oo) pre-see-so”. But the s in preciso, because it comes between two vowels, is pronounced as a [z] sound. So it should be “(ei-oo) pre-see-zu”. ir is transcribed as “ear”. I guess if you’re from São Paulo, you might say it like that, but otherwise the American r will sound strange. de novo is transcribed as “je no-vo”. Most English speakers are not going to pronounce that right, because the pronunciation of j and e are ambiguous in English. There’s a bit of an art to creating glosses that are unambiguous to English speakers. A better gloss would be “dji no-vu”.
The problem with mnemonics
To make matters worse, the mnemonics given for each phrase are based on these faulty pronunciations, so the student will be internalizing very bad pronunciation. For example, for the phrase eu quero (“I want”) we’re given the gloss “(ay-oo) ke-air-o” and then asked to imagine wanting to get into an apartment and having our friend toss down a key, which flies through the air. But there is no dipthong in this word in Portuguese. If I think back to this mnemonic and then say “key-air-o”, I will be speaking with great pronunciation — in Spanish! (“ay-oo kair-u” would be closer to the Portuguese pronunciation, though again, it’s almost impossible to convey the actual pronunciations in writing).
It’s not that I think mnemonics are a terrible idea. But they necessarily force your brain to remember Portuguese words in terms of English syllables. This might not be too bad, if you had an audio reference so you could practice hearing and speaking the native pronunciation, but there’s no audio at all in RBP. A student using only this method will end up speaking these words with a comically anglicized accent, to the extent they learn to speak at all.
Another problem with mnemonics is that they work much better in one direction that another. For example, for the verb comer (“to eat”), we’re supposed to imagine a monkey combing another monkey for fleas to eat – the monkey being a comber. Now, whenever I see the written word comer, I might instantly think comber, think of the monkey eating fleas, and arrive at the meaning to eat. So far so good.
But what if I start with to eat and want to remember the Portuguese word? Now my brain has to go through a torturous series of steps. First I have to search my memory, “What was that mnemonic about eating again? There were several of them. Was it that one about eating lots of carrots? No, that’s ver. The one about the restaurant? No, that’s eu gostaria. Oh right, the monkey eating fleas. What was the monkey doing again? Oh, now I remember, he was picking through his friend’s fur. Something about combs. Comber? Was that it? I think so. Ok, so the verb is comber. I mean, comer.” Thirty seconds later, if I’m lucky, I might arrive at the correct word, or more than likely I will arrive at a comically Americanized version of the word, because I’m remembering it as a string of English syllables and I don’t yet have the sound of Portuguese in my head. Needless to say, this is not a great way to learn a language.
I suppose you could argue that the fact that I eventually remembered the word at all means that the mnemonic worked. Maybe the mnemonic is just supposed to be a crutch to help you until you can remember the word by it’s sound or spelling alone. The problem is, you will never learn the true sound of the word using this method. And sound is how you will recognize the word in actual conversation. If you hear the sound [ko-mehh], pronounced like a real carioca would with the r heavily aspirated, and have not learned to associate this sound with the word comer, then you have no chance of remembering your mnemonic at all. Nor will you recognize any of the possible conjugations other than the infinitive.
The ‘chunking’ approach
Since I’ve been pretty harsh on RBP so far, let me mention something I really like. Many of the mnemonics that RBP teaches are for short phrases rather than standalone words. For example, we learn the short phrases eu quero, eu posso, and com você without actually being taught the individual words eu, querer, com, or você. I can see where they are going with this — it’s an interesting way to reduce the number of verb forms a beginner needs to memorize.
For example, if you learn just the eu conjugation of the most common auxilliary verbs (eu quero, eu posso, eu vou, eu tenho, eu sei, eu preciso), then you can take those eu phrases and combine them with a bunch of other verbs that you learn in the infinitive (falar, comer, beber, trabalhar, viajar) along with a few prefab prepositional phrases (com você, para ele, para a praia, em casa) and string them all together to create a great variety of complete thoughts:
- Eu preciso + falar + com você.
- Eu quero + ir + para a praia.
The result is that even a complete beginner is able to express their needs and wants using complete thoughts right off the bat, without thinking about grammar too much. I imagine that gaining this ability quickly is incredibly motivating to beginning language learners, as well as being pretty useful for tourists.
(As an aside, the more I study Portuguese, the more I realize how much I rely upon short phrases and “chunks” to get by in conversation. Although I know the grammar of the language very well and can use it to create correct sentences on the fly, much of the time when I’m speaking I’m just stringing together well-worn phrases: Eu acho que…, Se fosse você…, tenho que ir…, que tal a gente…, o que é que.., daqui um pouco…. and then using my knowledge of the grammar to fill in the gaps between them. Using these pre-memorized chunks liberally when I’m conversing with someone means I can speak at a more natural pace without having to task my brain with grammatically processing every phrase.)
So I credit RBP with using a novel approach well-tailored to beginners. I think it makes a lot of sense, at the beginner level anyway, to teach only the most common conjugations and tenses of verbs, and to teach nouns along with their most common prepositions (em casa). The exercises given in each lesson let you practice using the words you’ve learned by translating Portuguese sentences into English (fairly easy), and then English sentences into Portuguese (much harder), and they’re cumulative, so they build on vocabulary you’ve learned in previous lessons. It’s certainly impressive that using the chunking approach, RBP is able to teach the student to translate some relatively complex thoughts even in the earliest lessons: “I need to go to my house now” (Lesson 1) or “I’d like to speak more Portuguese with you soon” (Lesson 3). This is a lot richer than the usual “Hi” / “How are you?” / “My name is…” that you usually learn in the very beginning of a language course.
But the problem remains that most of these sentences are things that it would be very nice to be able to say, not just read or write. There is no way to practice them in the context of an actual conversation. Which means I think you’d be much better off going the library and getting the Pimsleur course, which will also teach you to construct thoughts in terms of useful chunks, but crucially it will teach you to listen and speak these chunks in a simulated conversation, with good pronunciation.
And there’s a limit to how far the mnemonics can take you. I may have learned how to say eu gosto de, but when it comes times to say você gosta de, do I really want to learn a whole new mnemonic? Wouldn’t it be better to actually – gasp – learn a tiny bit of grammar so that I understand the relationship between the individual words and the different verb forms? At some point it becomes easier to just teach the grammar that to invent ever more convoluted ways of never having to mention it.
Despite these problems, might Real Brazilian Portuguese be useful for an absolute beginner who wants to dip their toes in the water? Sure. But here’s how I see it being used most effectively. Because Pimsleur uses a very similar approach of chunking + core vocabulary, yet it offers so little in the way of reading practice, I would suggest RHB as a great complement to Pimsleur. Each would make up for the other’s weaknesses: RBP would give you good reading practice and a visual way to remember the vocabulary; Pimsleur would give you practice with pronunciation, listening, and translating English thoughts to Portuguese thoughts.
