English lessons

Saw the Ballet Folklorico last night (fantastic, more later on that) and went afterwards to go see a capoeira show that was supposed to happen in the street nearby. In typical Brazilian style, the show never seemed to quite happen. I spent an hour waiting on the street near all the capoeira guys for some ill-defined organizational moment that would (in theory) allow the capoeira show to start. The capoeira guy closest to me, a nice guy named Jonatas who I'd just met, was the only fellow wearing a black shirt - everyone else was in white - and his capoeira buddies started ragging on him for not having a white shirt. "Didn't you bring a white shirt?" they asked. "No, nobody told me!" he answered (in Portuguese), continuing half-heartedly, "Eu nao sabia! Se eu soubesse....eu teria..." He trailed off there, but I was fascinated by this sentence construction, which happens to be a set of phrases that I constantly need: "I didn't know! If I had known... I would have..."

I started muttering it under my breath: "Eu nao sabia.. se eu soubesse... eu teria..." Jonatas heard my muttering and laughed, and it turned out he is a keen student of English who recognized exactly the sort of grammatical house-of-mirrors I'd just wandered into. Turns out he's been slogging his way through a huge English textbook ("THIS thick" he said, holding up his fingers an inch apart), entirely on his own, just so he can communicate better with tourists - i.e. potential capoeira students and people in need of tour guides, his main source of income. He'd gotten surprisingly far, considering he's totally self-taught. (Put my self-taught Portuguese to shame, in fact.) And he'd reached the "could/would/should" chapters. And he was very eager to know: How would you translate "Se eu soubesse, eu teria..." into Portuguese?

So I spent a while trying to explain the following English sentence:
If I HAD KNOWN, I WOULD HAVE BROUGHT my white shirt.

Three minutes later, I was realizing this was much more complicated than I'd ever realized. What's the difference between "If I knew" and "If I had known"? What's the difference between "I should have brought", "I could have brought", and "I would have brought"? Why isn't it "bringed" instead of "brought"? Why isn't it "knowed", for that matter? How come English has all the separate little words in front of the verb? (Could, should, would, had...) Why doesn't the verb change?

The moment that "should" entered the picture, he interrupted me with a new question:
" 'You should not', what does that mean exactly? I have seen that. Is that like "'Você não iria', you would not?"

No, I said, it's, it's an instruction. Or it's advice. For example (I said):
You SHOULD NOT go there. It's dangerous. It's not allowed. It's dark.

Ah! he said. Like this in Portuguese?
Você NÃO DEVERIA ir lá. É perigoso. É proibido. É oscuro.

Exactly!

But before we could get any farther on that, he interrupted me again with "You are easy to understand. You are American, right? English people are harder to understand than American people." I didn't understand at first, but then he added "Especially people from Liverpool! And people from Newcastle. People from the north of England, in general. And also people from Scotland. And also people from Ireland," and I realized he definitely had a point. (Turned out he'd lived recently with a roommate from Liverpool, and apparently has been linguistically scarred for life by the experience). He's also been given conflicting pronunciation advice by American tourists vs British tourists. "You Americans, you say the R more, right? Wa-terrrrrr. But the English say: Wa-tuh. And you say your A's differently. Like in banana. Tomato. And your O's are different too. And another thing I have learned is that the English do not say "What's up?" "

I had not quite been aware of that last tidbit, but he explained with a little story:

" I learned "What's up" from an American, who told me it it is a friendly way to say hello, and one day I was in Pelourinho greeting people and I said 'what's up?' to a very tall man, and he looked at me like this [...here he did a very good impression of a snooty upper-class Brit staring down his nose at somebody],... he looked at me like this, and he said "*I* am from ENGLAND. You should say 'HOW DO YOU DO'."

Can't you just picture it! It made me want to go running up to every Brit I see and greet them with a brassy New York "Heeeeeyy man, WHASSUP?!!" and a big ol' high five. The snooty ones who want me to say How-do-you-do, I'll leave them alone. But the ones who laugh, or who high-five me back, they're getting invited out for a cerveza with me and my new Brazilian friend, and we'll all practice saying "You shouldn't say 'what's up' to a Brit, it's dangerous" in Portuguese.