Games people play

There are few things more entertaining on a Sunday morning than labeling all the objects around me with their Portuguese names. As usual, an adequate soundtrack is required and the best songs for improving pronunciation and enriching vocabulary are those really, really cheesy songs that nobody admits listening to because they are way too embarrassing. (Yet everybody knows them and whenever there's enough alcohol involved, especially during a family reunion or a wedding, everybody ends up singing them really loud and really badly).

I tend to think of these songs as highly efficient language-learning tools and they did wonders for me while learning Polish. Back in those days when it was still surprising that people can pronounce so many consonants without choking, I was more than happy to learn songs about pride, courage, the homeland, wine and/or vodka, melancholy and sufferance - major historic events seemed to have the same heartbreaking effect as unaccomplished love.

Having moved on, I can now fully understand why nobody openly admits they enjoy these songs, although from time to time I'll listen to them just for the sake of those wonderful first days when a grammatically correct sentence was more of an achievement that an academic essay and every conversation was a personal victory. I am however looking forward to attending a Polish wedding (it's one of this year's highlights, Polish weddings are said to be really spectacular and thanks to my friend Kuba this event will have more than just anthropological potential, as I will not be a mere observer, I'll be maid of honor).

With Portuguese songs, the story is quite different. They speak about falling in love in the blink of an eye, dancing, pounding hearts, lust, playing games and burning fires. As I still don't have first hand experience with Portugal, it's tough to say whether these songs are as accurate as Polish songs in summing up the country's culture and the spirit of its people, but I'm not that far away from that experience, either. By the end of May I'll have a pretty clear picture. And if my intuition is right, this culture will be a lot easier to understand.