Previous literature has focused very intensively on the issues related to learning Portuguese as a Foreign Language by speakers of Chinese as L1 (see, among many others: Oliveira & Rato 2019; Oliveira 2020; Zhou 2021; …).
Contrastingly, though, few research on the inverse relation has been conducted so far: what are the main challenges that a native speaker of Portuguese faces when s/he is acquiring Chinese?
This will be the central question of my talk, for which I will take into consideration: (1) my background as a researcher of Linguistics with some previous experience in supervising research on L1 and L2 acquisition; (2) my condition as a native speaker of Portuguese; and (3) my personal account as a recent, adult learner of Chinese (at the Confucius Institute of the University of Porto, Portugal).

The specific issues that will be discussed in this talk are as follows.

1 – Observing how a speaker of a language with a rich morphological system, like Portuguese, learns a non-inflectional grammar (like Chinese) may lead us to a very well know question of Linguistic Theory (see, e.g.: Joseph & Newmeyer 2012): are all grammars indeed equally complex? Freeing ourselves from the Inflectional Languages-centered point of view, we should observe that languages like Chinese, not having formal properties like inflection or strong agreement constraints, obey to other complex rules that can be problematic for speakers of unrelated languages: strict word-order, the system of measure words, tonal phonology, the contextual meaning of words and phrases and the compositional structure of “complex associative words” (Mai et al. 2019) have no direct equivalents in Portuguese and in Indo-European languages in general. Thus, this kind of rules and structures can be potentially challenging for the learners of Chinese who have those languages as their mother tongues. We are not assuming the naïve understanding of “old” theories of second language learning (such as Lado’s (1957) Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis); however, we have to admit that language learning tasks always involve the comparison of different inputs from different languages the learner is familiar with, as admitted, in the field of phonological development theories, by all the versions of “Interlanguage Grammar Development” following Selinker’s (1972) initial proposals.
Therefore, we shall have a look on the difficulties/challenges that could possibly arise from the contact of a native speaker of a language such as Portuguese with linguistic properties of Chinese such as strict word order, tonal phonology, measure words, contextual meaning and word compositionality when learning the language.


2 – The second question of my talk will be the building, processing and having access to the theoretical representation of words. As it is highlighted by many previous studies, lexical representations are primarily based on phonetic input. In the case of adult learners of foreign languages, lexical representations are often mediated by the knowledge of written forms. This aspect is particularly significant in this presentation, since some previous research of mine has insisted on the relationship between phonological representations and orthography (Veloso 2007; 2008; 2019; 2020; 2022). 
In the case of Chinese, in fact, access to lexical representation recruits the association of a phonetic form with a semantic representation, a grammatical specification and two written forms: phonetically-alphabetically motivated Pinyin and non-alphabetical, phonetically unrelated Hanzi. As for the latter, we should bear in mind research results showing that idiographic characters do play an important role in language processing among literate native speakers of Chinese, for instance as far as homophone disambiguation concerned (Li et al. (Eds., 2002), especially Miller (2002) and Nagy et al. (2002)). Building and accessing lexical representations of words on the basis of such a complex bound of processing cues (combining speech perception and articulation, auditory and visual processing, cognitive and linguistic mechanisms of processing and storing different-level information) demand a cognitive-linguistic effort that will also be discussed in this presentation.


As indicated before, the reflections that will be presented and discussed here will be analyzed on the basis of theoretical and empirical results of previous research in tandem with the author’s own experience as an adult learner of Chinese as a Foreign Language who also is inevitably biased by his particular condition of being a linguist, too. Therefore, this presentation is not to be seen as a “typically academic” talk. From a more theoretical perspective, the main objective of the reflections to be offered has basically to do with how this kind of reflection can lead us to a better reassessment of some established views of Theoretical Linguistics. In the case of this presentation such views correspond fundamentally to the language complexity issue, by the one hand, and, by the other hand, to the importance of written forms for building, processing and storing lexical/phonological representations. As far as the latter aspect is particularly concerned, we shall bear in mind that, according to the most basic tenets of Linguistic Theory, mostly within the “Western tradition”, writing is conceived of as a non-intrinsically linguistic object.  This has been the view on this subject since the “founding fathers” of modern European Linguistics (Saussure 1916; Jespersen 1924). Contrastingly, as highlighted by Coulmas(2003), Daniels (2010) and others, the Eastern grammatical tradition (as it is the case of Chinese Grammar) has ever since considered writing as a central part of grammar and the written forms as linguistic objects per se.
In our view, looking at the way Portuguese learners of Chinese incorporate the written representations in their lexical knowledge of Chinese can also bring a better understanding of this specific topic.

References

Coulmas, F. 2003. Writing Systems. An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daniels, P. 2010. Writing in the World and Linguistics. Papers of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 36: 61-90.
Jespersen, O. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin. 
Joseph, J. E.; Newmeyer, F. J. 2012. “All Languages Are Equally Complex”: The rise and fall of a consensus. Historiographia Linguistica. 39(2-3): 341-368.
Lado, R. 1957. Linguistics across Cultures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 
Li, W.; Gaffney, J. S. ; Packard, J. L. (Eds., 2022). Chinese Children’s Reading Acquisition. Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues. Boston: Kluwer.
Mai, R.; Morais, C.; Pereira, U. 2019. Gramática de Língua Chinesa para Falantes de Português. Aveiro: Instituto Confúcio, Universidade de Aveiro.
Miller, K. F. 2002. Children’s Early Understanding of Writing and Language: The Impact of Characters and Alphabetic Orthographies. In: W. Li et al. (Eds). Chinese Children’s Reading Acquisition. Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues. Boston: Kluwer, 17-29.
Nagy, W. E. et al. 2002. The Role of Morphological Awareness in Learning to Read Chinese. In: W. Li et al. (Eds). Chinese Children’s Reading Acquisition. Theoretical and Pedagogical Issues. Boston: Kluwer, 59-86.
Oliveira, D. 2020. Auditory selective attention and performance in high variability phonetic training: The perception of Portuguese stops by Chinese L2 learners. PhD dissertation. Universidade do Minho.
Oliveira, D., & Rato, A. (2019). Assimilação percetiva das oclusivas orais do português europeu L2 por falantes nativos de cantonês. Diacrítica. 32: 133–156. 
Saussure, F. 1916. Cours de Linguistique Générale. Paris: Payot  [1980].
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Veloso, J. 2007. Da Influência do Conhecimento Ortográfico sobre o Conhecimento Fonológico. Estudo Longitudinal de um Grupo de Crianças Falantes Nativas do Português Europeu. München: Lincom Europa.
Veloso, J. 2008. Aprender a escrever pode alterar o conhecimento fonológico? A silabificação das sequências /SC/ mediais do português europeu e o conhecimento das regras de translineação gráfica. In: O. Sousa, A. Cardoso (Eds.). Desenvolver Competências em Língua Portuguesa. Lisboa: CIEE/ESE-IPL, 201-228.
Veloso, J. 2019. Phonology and Writing: Can we look at written productions to “see the unseeable” in phonology?. Loquens. 6(1): 1-12.
Veloso, J. 2020. Conhecimento ortográfico e representações fonológicas em português. In: S. Netto Salomão (Ed.). Temas da Língua Portuguesa: do Pluricentrismo à Didática. Roma: Nuova Cultura, 91-103
Veloso, J. 2022. Fonologia e Ortografia do Português Europeu. In: C. F. P. Nadalim, R. A. Alves. I. Leite (Eds.). Ensino da Leitura e da Escrita Baseado em Evidências. Porto: Fundação Belmiro de Azevedo, 65-81.
Zhou, C. 2021. L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and // by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling". Language Acquisition. 29(1): 105-10.

João Veloso is a Professor of Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Macau (China) (currently on leave from the University of Porto, Portugal). His main fields of interest have dealt with the phonological organization of languages, phonological variation, phonological acquisition and the nature of linguistic objects in different grammatical traditions. Other interests of his teaching and research are found in language typology, language theory, writing systems and the History of Phonology.