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JÂNIO QUADROS was president of Brazil for just seven months in 1961. An eccentric, he suddenly resigned, hinting at “terrible forces”. He was known for other memorable, if sometimes bizarre, quotes. In a debate, an opponent said Jânio’s words were going in one of his ears and out of the other. Jânio retorted, “A lie! Sound doesn’t travel through a vacuum!” And asked once why he drank liquor, he said, “I drink it because it’s liquid. If it were solid, I’d eat it.”

All this is delightfully weird enough, but the way he said the last one in Portuguese is even weirder. Bebo-o porque é liquido. Se fosse sólido, comê-lo-ia. This is an ornate, traditional European Portuguese of the kind that nobody in Brazil uses spontaneously. Most people would instead say something like Bebo porque é liquido. Se fosse sólido, comeria. Traditional Portuguese has complex rules for direct and indirect objects, even allowing them to come between a verb stem and the conjugational ending, as in comê-lo-ia, something like "eat-it-I-would". But in spoken Brazilian, objects are usually just put before the verb, or left out if they are clear from context.

I began learning Portuguese from an old secondhand book that taught forms like comê-lo-ia, which I dutifully studied, grumbling “who on Earth says this?” If only someone had answered “nobody”. When I finally talked to Brazilians, their Portuguese resembled my textbook in roughly the way that a Picasso resembles its subject. Sadly, many traditional textbooks still teach Portuguese this way—including to native speakers in Brazil.

All languages change, but as they do, some language groups are more willing to update the formal grammar books than others. If the books don’t change, but the spoken language does—the typical case—the two forms gradually drift apart.

This is a shame for many native speakers, who arrive at school to learn that the way everyone speaks is “wrong”, and an ossified written form is “right”. Blackboard drills meant to shame pupils out of supposedly bad habits foment anxiety, and give grammar a bad name. This case was made clearly in Lingua Portuguesa, a magazine I was delighted to find at an ordinary Rio kiosk during last week’s holiday. (Try to imagine an American or British newsagent carrying the thougthful likes of Babel or a printed Schwa Fire next to the lads’ mags and gossip rags.)

Instead of a rigid right-wrong approach, with the written form always being taught as right, it would be better to teach the idea of register: that certain forms are used in casual speech, other forms in formal speech, others still in writing. Lingua Portuguesa also had an interview with Valéria Paz de Almeida, a linguist consultant to a news broadcaster, who lamented that newscasters feel the need to speak in an artificial register that resembles writing. They come to her with worried questions about rare and tricky grammatical forms. She in turn tries to get them to speak as they do with the cameras switched off: fluently and articulately, but naturally. She finds this make the journalists looser and happier, and the audience never complains.

What about foreign learners? It is distressing to show up in Paris and hear a mysterious mumble that sounds like j'sépa, over and over again, only later to discover that this is what your French teacher told you to say as je ne sais pas, “I don’t know.” Those silent s’s are a perfect example of the spoken language changing while the written remains the same. And a good textbook would explain that the negative particle ne is usually dropped in colloquial speech. But most books don’t trust learners to be able to master multiple registers. Mastering register is, to be sure, tricky. But it is not well solved by teaching only a register that will leave the learner bewildered by the first live contact with a human being.

Most textbooks are not good at conveying this stuff. But two series stand out. Routledge’s “Modern Grammar: A Practical Guide”, with books on nine languages, is good for reference; Cambridge University Press’s approachable series, “Using [Spanish, German, etc]”, is better for a read-through. Both offer detailed, detached descriptions of the difference between speaking and writing, formal and informal, regional differences and the like.

Teaching genuine spoken language is a tricky task requiring subtlety. It is also done surprisingly rarely, because too often teaching actual speech is conflated with dignifying slang or mistakes. A good book like the ones above will simply note how (mostly educated) speakers actually use their native language. This kind of real-world knowledge gives the foreigner’s attempts a certain je ne sais quoi, and helps assure that that first conversation doesn’t die in a vacuum of incomprehension.

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