Name: Dada Ranendramanda

Age: 42

Scholarship: graduated – social worker

Home country: Malaysia

Time of Portuguese learning: 2 months

Narrative collected by Fernanda Sousa Carvalho -November 4th,2004



 

Boa tarde! Eu sou Dada Ranendramanda. Eu sou da Malásia. And I was planed to come to engineering, in Malaysia [...], and then I joined a social spiritual organization, and since 1989 I’ve been working with this organization, and through this organization I came to Brazil. So, I’m a social worker. And I teach yoga and meditation and I also give lectures on biopsychology, yoga philosophy and health. For ... to teach the people in Brazil better I decided to learn Portuguese. So without Portuguese here it is difficult to teach people and people don’t understand English much. So this persuaded me to learn Portuguese. So I started learning this of all one and a half month ago. I came to Brazil in March this year. And I feel the class is not sufficient because it is only fifty  minutes, and we can only learn the basic things. But the main part is how to communicate with people, how to form sentences, specially with the so much of difficulties with the prepositions, those ... feminino, masculino, for everything. So this is different from English, this is even more difficult. So I feel that I should do more exercises and training on communication to improve the Portuguese language. And we have done this and also that speaking the language outside because normally people don’t speak what they  write. Writing is separate words but speaking is normally joining the few words, together. So that part ... we have to pay more attention to this and  how to pick up the pronouns. This much ... I think also ... this can be improving more if we sometimes go out for theatre and learn directly in the field, like going to the beach, and what people are speaking in the beach, or going to some other places. So when we have friendly communication and when the students themselves are friendly to each other people learn better, ‘cause I know we don’t have communication between the students. We are strangers, we just come and sit, “hi”, “hello”, and this is it. So we don’t end on like friends. So how to improve? And outside life is very busy life, muito ocupado, I’ve to prepare my lectures and I need somebody to translate. So to learn ... just to speak Portuguese I  haven’t the needed  time, so it’s difficult for me to learn by myself . So I need to join always, being in touch with Portuguese speaking people, specially brasileiros ... brasileiras e brasileiros.