Multilingual San Francisco: Susanna takes on Spanish, Italian & Russian; Benny interviews Brazilians in Portuguese [video]

Title explains it all!

I met up with Susanna, who has guest posted for this blog on the topic of “Language is music” and who has her own site about language learning, and she had a great idea to make a multilingual video together to show how any city in the states has plenty of people to speak many languages with, doing it in San Francisco in particular.

So we found natives and spoke to them in Spanish, Italian, Russian and Portuguese, and put what we had together into this video!

We didn’t arrange anything in advance – we just went to the districts or events where we would likely find natives and tried to strike up conversation with them. There are many other ways to find natives without leaving your home city.

My Portuguese part is the entire second half of the video, based around the Brazilian Independence day festival that we just happened to find in Golden Gate park. I made sure to put on my yellow shirt to join in on all the fun! Fernanda, who works for the San Francisco Brazilian community center answered my first questions.

While we had no problem at all finding people to speak with quickly in the languages we picked, the one catch was that all the Russians we talked to refused to be filmed, so Susanna explains that when she’s talking in Russian. But we did talk to a lot of them otherwise happy to talk to us!

Susanna did a great job, and you can hear that her accent is very convincing in each of the languages. She has her own Youtube channel with lots of videos about and in other languages, including plenty of TV appearances!

Any thoughts on the multilingual afternoon in San Francisco? Let us know in the comments!

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This article was written by Benny Lewis

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