Going back to beginner Portuguese before a trip to Portugal has reminded me of an uncomfortable truth about language learning: recognising something when you see or hear it is very different from being able to recall it when you need it.
I’m off on a trip to Portugal soon, so I’ve been busy reviving my very basic Portuguese.
I first started learning this beautiful language back in 2010 and have returned to it several times since. My spoken Portuguese has never got beyond basic, but I’ve studied all the major grammar structures. Over the years, I’ve encountered much of the common everyday vocabulary.
Add in advanced French and some Italian, both close relatives of Portuguese, plus all those Portuguese words that resemble English words, and a lot of the language feels familiar.
Perhaps rather too familiar.
I’ve gone back to a course I’ve used before and I’m trying to work through as many of its 12 lessons as I can before I leave.
At times, it’s been a really frustrating experience.
I knew these words. Or did I?
Lesson 6, for example, opened with a short dialogue about getting up in the morning. I listened to the audio and understood it without difficulty. I could read the transcript too. So far, so reassuring.
Then the voice on the recording started asking me questions based on the dialogue.
“Onde se lava?” Where do you wash yourself?
“Onde se veste?” Where do you get dressed?
And I went blank.
I couldn’t remember a casa de banho, the bathroom. Nor could I come up with o meu quarto, my bedroom.
This is very basic vocabulary. Worse, I’d literally just heard the words.
After I’d checked the answers, I had a vague suspicion that both words had appeared earlier in the course as well. Back I went to Lesson 4 and, to add insult to injury, there they were in a dialogue about booking a hotel room:
Um quarto simples com casa de banho…
So, here were two common words that I’d already encountered. I recognised them immediately when I heard or read them. Yet when I needed them myself, I simply couldn’t remember.
Recognition isn’t recall
Cognitive psychologists talk about an “illusion of competence”. When material looks familiar, it’s very easy to overestimate how well we actually know it.
But when you have to retrieve something from memory, your bluff is often called.
Such “retrieval practice” can be uncomfortable. Trying to recall information without looking at the answer, particularly when you can then check whether you were right, can also make later recall more successful.
A little later, the course caught me out again. I had to rewrite a short dialogue from the present tense to the simple past.
I’d already covered the past back in Lesson 3. I thought I knew perfectly well how it worked.
Except that, when I actually had to produce the forms, I was shaky on some of the endings.
This is one of the useful things about having to do something with the material yourself.
You may understand when listening or reading, but when you have to write or speak, gaps in your active command are mercilessly exposed.
You double back and check the answers before having another go. In my case, with a fair amount of irritation that I couldn’t even answer a couple of pesky beginner-level questions about getting up in the morning.
Putting yourself on the spot like this can be irritating, and you may even feel you’re getting worse as you do it.
Of course, making practice difficult in this way doesn’t automatically make it useful. But if your study sessions always feel smooth and comfortable, it’s worth asking whether you’re really putting your knowledge to the test.
Put your knowledge on the spot
So, if everything in your target language has been feeling reassuringly familiar lately, ask yourself whether you’ve been too passive.
After listening to a dialogue, try answering the questions without looking back. Retell from memory a bit of what you’ve read or heard. Take a grammar pattern you “know” and actually use it by writing two or three sentences.
You may discover rather more holes than you expected.
Annoying, certainly.
But finding a hole gives you a chance to fill it.
| Beginning to learn Portuguese? Experience the power of StoryLearning with “Portuguese Uncovered”: click here for info. |
Related posts
Ten reasons why you should learn Portuguese before Spanish
Two simple methods to “embrace effort” in reading and listening
Leave a Reply