Make a Fool of Yourself Friday - Issue #5

plus some exciting facts about Brazilian Portuguese

One evening last week, after eating the last bite of her peanut-butter-and-cornflakes sandwich¹, my eight-year-old turned to me and said, with a straight face: "Mimi ni Maya.”

Which means, “My name is Maya”, in Swahili.

That was a very effective delay-bedtime strategy because now I was interested. Because the one thing I never do is speak Swahili to my children. Because there is a limit to everything, even my multilingual parenting efforts.

Then her brother shared that when they spent a weekend with their father, back in April, Maya missed me and watched an MFYF video of me speaking in Swahili on her dad’s phone that whole weekend.

(And I thought that post went viral with the thousands of views it was getting.🙄...)

Which is to say that now I feel the added pressure to not make a fool of myself in the language I’m practicing making a fool of myself in because what if she’ll be watching this one too (HI MAYA 😃 👋 !!!).

If my child learns to say things incorrectly in 12 different languages, I will feel like I have failed at parenting.

Also, this is an opportunity to remind everyone that the point of this exercise is not (so much) to show off as for me to push myself to open my mouth and say things out loud even if I don’t say them perfectly. And for everyone else to do the same.

My experience learning Portuguese has been very different from learning those other languages. I knew Spanish 20 years ago, and now it has come back — for better or for worse, because on the one hand, the grammar is very similar but on the other hand there are a lot of little differences, especially in spoken language.

There was a lot of getting used to the sound of the language, learning to pronounce things the Portuguese way, and doing my best not to speak “Portunhol."

Two essential differences between Spanish and Portuguese that everyone needs to know:

1. The word legal means ‘legal’ in Spanish (and every other Romance language except Portuguese), but it means ‘cool’ in Brazilian Portuguese (one of my favorite words.)

2. The word embaraçada (or embarazada in Spanish, pronounced the same way) means 'embarrassed’ in one of them but ‘pregnant’ in the other. The problem is I don’t remember which one is which (it doesn’t help to look it up because I forget it 15 seconds later) so I’m just going to have to try to go through life without ever saying this word in either of these languages.

I’m a little bit terrified of turning into a YouTube poly-glop, but anyway. Here is me telling you the things I just told you, only now in Portuguese. There is a lot of background noise from one of my children’s YouTube videos, and then the noise of that child crossing the room in a bridge-walk, but I decided to just leave it like this. Not sure if it makes me more or less of a YouTube poly-glop. In any case, it gives you a glimpse into my language-learning and working life environment. ²

Friends with Words is the main thing I do this year. By making a one-time or monthly donation you are letting me know that my work is valuable and are encouraging me to keep doing it (I’ll keep doing it anyway but it’s super encouraging to get support from people, not to mention it helps me buy cornflakes for my daughter’s PB&C sandwich when we’re out of jelly.)

1. We were out of jelly 🙄

2. I’ve noticed that I run out of things to say towards the end 🙄. Oh well.