On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 04:17:14PM -0500, MedCat7 at aol.com wrote: > A good friend of mine is Brazillian (Portuguesse speaking) and he had > to learn English quick. He learne some in Brazil, but it wasn't good > enough. He learnd wicked quick (to the point of him now saying "wicked" > and "dude"). It was helpful that I remembered a lot of Spanish since > a lot of words are simmilar. His dad speaks a crap load of langueges, > so it helped, too. Warning, laymans anecdote approaching. . . There were about 700 kids in my high school (San Marcos, CA, 1970). About 30-40% were first or second generation immigrants from Mexico, nearly all the rest upper middle class WASP. The majority of 'other' were 3rd-generation Russians whose grandparents had fled Russia very early in the 20th century. Those kids were pretty much Americanized, their parents partially so, and their grandparents not at all. The kids spoke a few words of bad russian at best. They had a bunch of relatives who'd headed for Brazil rather than the US. Things weren't real good in Brazil at that point, and the San Marcos Russian families managed to get the Brazilian Russians into the US. The Brazilian Russian kids of course spoke Portuguese. Nor did they speak English, and their Russian was bad enough to be useless. The Mexicans couldn't understand the Portuguese at all. But us Anglo kids who spoke OK Spanish could struggle thru the Portuguese and ferret out the meanings. My guess is that our ears were tuned to deal with badly pronounced Spanish and Russian accents, so the differences between Portuguese and Spanish didn't throw us off as badly as it did the native Spanish speakers. Plus we'd been learning Castillian Spanish rather than Tiajuana street Spanish. This led to the occasional bizarre multi-way translations as the Russo/Brazilian kids spoke Portuguese to the anglos and the Russo/Anglos, who then translated into Spanish for the Mexicans. Periodicly one of the Russo/Anglos would then translate it into Russian for his grandparents. With intense help like that, the Russo/Brazilian kids picked up English *really fast*. And for a while, they had the most amazing accents you'd ever heard. -- "Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do." Steve Brust, Message <5.1.0.14.0.20030402171954.02c5bd00 at localhost>