Novo Mesto was the most unknown
city that I visited in Slovenia. Until now I never met a traveler that visited
there. In fact Ljubljana and Bled Lake sometimes are the only places that
tourists/travelers use to go.
Everything starts
with name of the city. Novo in Portuguese is new and for me was interesting to
see a city with a kind of Portuguese name in Slovenia. Balkan languages are so
different than Romanian ones. But dude, novo also means new in Slovenian. In
fact it's not a Portuguese word, but it still interesting to see that even the
backgrounds of Romanian and Slavic languages are so different, but they can
have similarities sometimes.
Languages are
something really interesting to learn. When you are leaving from your comfort
zone that you speak just your mother language, you can start to see how they
are connected somehow. When I learned my first second language, English, this
was really hard for me. During 23 years of my life I could speak just
Portuguese, once I was born in Brazil. This was a really hard moment for me and
until now it's still a daily challenge. I've speaking English for the past 4
years and as you can see in this text that my vocabulary and my grammar aren't
that good to be compared with a native speaker. If you're a native speaker,
you'll be sure about it. However the connection that I have between my brain
and the written and speaking ways in English is amazing. I can put all of my
feelings and thoughts in these words that you're reading now. You can feel it
deeply, if you're connected with me. This 23 years without having a second
language affected me in the way that it's so much harder for me to speak as
good as someone that start to study the language since the first years of
school.
When I see someone
that speaks English in a level lower than mine, I use to try to give all my
attention and energy to interact with this person. The reason why someone has
good language skills or not, it depends of social factors that most of the
times it depends of the economical situation of the country that he/she was
born, which countries this nation have borders, how is the education in his/her
countries, which social level of the society he/she is inserted and the
opportunities that she/he had in their life
About me. I'm from
Brazil, a country with a fair education system that doesn't give so much importance
for languages. Basically only 3% of our population in Brazil speaks English.
It's a really bad number and it has similarities in other South American
countries, Argentina would be the exception, being the 19th best one in English
Skills in the world, while Brazil is just the 38th.
Brazil is such a
big country and it has huge social differences between regions. To make it
simple for you, there are 5 big regions in Brazil. These areas are so big that
the smallest region, South, is the size of Ukraine and the biggest one, North,
is almost the same size of the Entire European Union (3.8mi km², 4,2mi km²).
I'm from the Northwest region, that's the same size of Mongolia, if my region
was a country it would be the 15th biggest country in the world. This region
that was born is also is the poorest region in Brazil. If we compare the amount
of people in extreme poverty, there are 27 states and from 13 poorest ones, 9
of them are from Northwest and 4 from the North. Well, this region has just 9
states, meaning all of them are poorer than the further south ones. Maranhão,
the poorest one, 26% of the population lives in extreme poverty, similar rate
of South Africa. For who doesn't know extreme poverty people are the one that
earn less than $1.25 dollars per day.
The state that I
was born, Bahia, 17% of the people are living in extreme poverty, almost the
same rate of Colombia. I was born in a poor family, I spent the first years of
my life living in dangerous ghetto from Salvador: Liberdade. From stories that
my mom used to tell me, in the first house that we lived, our neighbor was a
drug dealer that often was fighting with other gangs and cops that sometimes
there were dead bodies laying in the street as result of the drug trafficking war
in Brazil. I don't really remember it well, but we use to live in a small house
with one room connected with a living room, a small kitchen and in the bathroom
toilet was a hole in floor made by concrete without wastewater.
What you don't know
is that I wasn't extreme poor, I was just poor. I had food, place to sleep with
a roof, clean water to drink and have a shower. You can't really imagine how's
the life of a extreme poor people if you never lived it, once you can't feel
how my young life was, I can't imagine how's the life of a extreme poor people
that most of the time they don't have access to the basic needs that I had.
With all these
aspects, being from Brazil, from a poor state/region. Our education tends to be
worse than the Brazilian average and learning a second language would be
something almost impossible, considering where I'm from.
Just to make you
understand it better, from my mom's family, from my current family members to
the older generation that we know, nobody ever was able to speak a second
language until now. In my father family one of his cousin, her husband and her
son are able to speak a basic proficiency in English, because they have a
different social level than us that allowed investing in having private
language classes.
Even not having so
many chances, now I'm here, sharing this part of my life with
my half-baked English skills that 4 years ago I couldn't write a full
sentence.
Lesson: Don't never
judge someone because he's not able to speak a language as good as you, because
you don't know his/her background, you have no clue how they were educated, you
don't know how I was educated. Sorry about my bad English dude, maybe I wasn't
that well educated as you were.
References
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_do_Brasil_por_incid%C3%AAncia_da_pobreza
https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-speak-English-in-Brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_languages
https://lista10.org/diversos/os-10-estados-com-mais-e-menos-pobres-do-brasil/
http://www.lahistoriaconmapas.com/atlas/mapa-portugues/Brasil-regi%C3%B5es-mapa.htm
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Geography/Land-area/Sq.-km
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regi%C3%A3o_Nordeste_do_Brasil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
http://en.mercopress.com/2013/11/13/latin-america-s-english-proficiency-very-low
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