The Guardian – Jonross Swaby
“The late Nelson Mandela once said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” But what if they can’t understand you when you do? Many people who have learned a language outside of a country that speaks it will sympathise. You could be trouncing native speakers at Swedish scrabble, your French grammaire could be parfaite, and watching Colombian telenovelas could be a breeze – but open your mouth to say something to a native and you’re met with a bunch of “qué?”s and “quoi?”s. This happened to me the first time I went to visit relatives in Brazil. A desire to discover the culture of my Cuban-born grandparents drove me to start taking Spanish classes after I left school. Many years of self-study, language exchanges, and six months of living in southern Spain made me fluent, and so I picked up Portuguese vocabulary and grammar pretty easily. A few years before my trip to Brazil, having worked my way through a self-study book and audio-visual software similar to Rosetta Stone, I began writing emails to my aunty in Belo Horizonte, a south-eastern city about 270 miles inland from Rio de Janeiro. However, reading and writing are very different skills to speaking and listening.”(more)