Being a Spanish major, I obviously have to take lots of Spanish classes. And you probably think that this blog post is going to be about my experiences in those Spanish classes. WRONG!!!!!!! This post will be about my enrollment in my Portuguese class. Yep, you read that right.
Classes started last Monday and it was seriously like a punch in the face or gut or a kick in the knees, whichever is more painful to you. I was immediately given piles of homework all due basically the next day. I know I'm whining about school, but when you've done nothing all summer but work in the beautiful mountains of Colorado all the time NOT thinking about school, it is a major readjustment. And let's be honest, last semester was not the most productive.
Anyways. This semester I am enrolled in 2 Political Science classes, one Spanish class, and....one Portuguese class!!
This happened because I dropped a certain Spanish class last semester which happened to be the prerequisite to every other Spanish class I need for my major. Fail. So I was only enrolled in one class for the semester and I figured I would probably need to fix this. So I decided to try Political Science out. So far so good. Then I needed one extra class to put me at Full Time Student status. So what did I choose? Yep, I chose Portuguese!! PORT 110 soon showed up on my schedule. Why may you ask? Well, I had a few friends who took it and said it was very similar to Spanish so it was easier to learn and it was and interesting class. So I went with it.
About 1 week before classes started I received an email saying a new section of Portuguese was opening up. It was labeled PORT 300 and was just 110/120 shoved together in one class AND it would count as an elective credit for my major! I thought this sounded like a good idea so on the first day of class I went to my original Portuguese section and then learned that the other class met right afterwards. So I went to that as well.
Long story short, I am now in a fast-paced Portuguese class. O, my, gosh. I will be doing 40 workbook pages a week for the whole semester. I will try desperately to not mix up my Spanish and I will hopefully make it out of this class alive.
The other day we were learning how to tell time in Portuguese and we had to write responses on the board. I wrote my time on the board. It was simple: 4:30. Easy right? ha.
Come to find out instead of writing out '4:30' I had actually written out 'a bedroom and a half.' A few spelling errors and I had completely messed up the meaning. Whoops.
There a 8 Portuguese speaking countries in the world. Did you know that there are more Portuguese speaking countries in South America than Spanish speaking ones? I didn't. Kind of a cool fact. More people also speak Portuguese than French. I think.
There are few countries that speak Portuguese in Africa, one in Indonesia, Brazil, a few small island countries, and of course, Portugal.
We are also required to have a Portuguese/English dictionary for class. No problem right? Wrong. I had to special order mine through a bookstore in town. The only plus about that? The lady who helped me asked me if I was traveling to Portugal. The way she asked it was in a way that put me out of college and in the world as a real person. I thought about making up some elaborate story about how I was traveling Europe and Portugal was the only country in which I didn't know the language but I figured I would just sound dumb so I quickly confessed I was just a student at UNCA that had gotten suckered into taking Portuguese. She still thought it was a nice story.
Moral of the story: don't take classes labeled 'Portuguese 300.'
But I will make it through. And I will know part of a third language which is pretty cool. And if I end up studying abroad in Spain (really leaning toward it) I will be able to understand things if I hop over to Portugal. Plus, it should make for some great stories this semester.
No comments:
Post a Comment