17/02/2010

Advocate for European and other variants of Portuguese


Portuguese is one language, with a few different variants, spoken by 240 million people on 4 continents. It is the 3rd largest European language, and the 6th globally.

However, these facts still go unnoticed by a large number of people. Namely, publishers, course builders, online materials developers, etc.

Imagine that you are interested in learning SPANISH on your own. You go online and search for Spanish online courses, or Spanish CD or DVD courses. Do you find courses specifically advertised as MEXICAN Spanish, VENEZUELAN Spanish, or SPANISH Spanish? NO! You find Spanish courses, period. Which doesn't mean, of course, that the native speakers in the audio components of those courses weren't born in Mexico, Venezuela or Spain.

Now you search for similar Portuguese courses. What do you find? BRAZILIAN Portuguese courses and, quite rarely, at least in the US, EUROPEAN Portuguese courses. If you didn't know better you might think they are two different languages. This situation is NOT beneficial for Portuguese as a global language.

What can we do about it? Write, send emails, or call all publishers or language resource developers that already offer Brazilian Portuguese courses and ask them if they'll consider including a European Portuguese course in their catalog. Tell them there's a NEED for this type of resource.

I just did that. MANGO LANGUAGES (www.mangolanguages.com) has an interesting online course model. Brazilian Portuguese is one of their languages. They even have an ENGLISH course for speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (of course they don't say explicitly that it is an AMERICAN English course). You can try the first lesson for free and see for yourself if you'd like to buy the whole course. It's also available in some libraries.

I told them that since they already had the Brazilian Portuguese course structure, all they needed was to adapt a few things and include native speakers of European Portuguese.

Here's Mango Languages response to my email:

"Hello Ana Cristina,

I'd like to thank you very much for offering your valuable feedback. Developing different variations and dialects of specified languages such as European Portuguese is most definitely an interest of the Product Development team at Mango Languages. Currently, European Portuguese is not on our list of languages for development, but it is always a possibility if we get enough requests from our users. I will direct the request to our development team. Again, thank you so much for your feedback. You're helping us build a better Mango!"

It's up to YOU now to show them there's DEMAND.

Abraços e passem um bom dia.

1 comentário:

Anónimo disse...

Wouldn't it be better is instead of advocating the inclusion of the word "European" we just focused on the word Portuguese? I live in Berlin, Germany, and have two children attending a bilingual (German-Portuguese) public school. The teachers on the Portuguese side are either from Brazil or Portugal and the students are Germans, Brazilians, Potuguese, children from the PALOP-countries etc. In the 6 school years they study in this elementary school students will have Brazilian or Portuguese teachers and this does not seem to be a problem around here. They have adopted the new Acordo Ortográfico and everybody profits from the whole system. De um pai brasileiro em Berlim.