So Lattes asked me, "Have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?"
That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from t he United States,
but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!
When I got to the center, we had to decide when I would give my lectures--in the morning, or afternoon.
Lattes said, "The students prefer the afternoon."
"So let's have them in the afternoon."
"But the beach is nice in the afternoon, so why don't you give the lectures in the morning, so you can enjoy the beach in the afternoon."
"But you said the students prefer to have them in the afternoon."
"Don't worry about that. Do what's most convenient for
you
! Enjoy the beach in the afternoon."
So I learned how to look at life in a way that's different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren't in the same hurry that I was.
And second, if it's better for you, never mind! So I gave the lectures in the morning and enjoyed the beach in the afternoon. And had I learned that
lesson earlier, I would have learned Portuguese in the first place, instead of Spanish.
I thought at first that I would give my lectures in English, but I noticed something: When the students were explaining something to me in
Portuguese, I couldn't understand it very well, even though I knew a certain amount of Portuguese. It was not exactly clear to me whether they had
said "increase," or "decrease," or "not increase," or "not decrease," or "decrease slowly." But when they struggled with English, they'd say "ahp" or
"doon," and I knew which way it was, even though the pronunciation was lousy and the grammar was all screwed up. So I realized that if I was going
to talk to them and try to teach them, it would be better for me to talk in Portuguese, poor as it was. It would be easier for them to understand.
During that first time in Brazil, which lasted six weeks, I was invited to give a talk at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences about some work in
quantum electrodynamics that I had just done. I thought I would give the talk in Portuguese, and two students at the center said they would help me
with it. I began by writing out my talk in absolutely lousy Portuguese. I wrote it myself, because if they had written it, there would be too many
words I didn't know and couldn't pronounce correctly. So I wrote it, and they fixed up all the grammar, fixed up the words and made it nice, but it
was still at the level that I could read easily and know more or less what I was saying. They practiced with me to get the pronunciations absolutely
right: the "de" should be in between "deh" and "day"--it had to be just so.
I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk --in English. Was he trying to be
polite, or what? I couldn't understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: