It’s hard to believe, but I have been teaching at the University of Texas for nearly 20 years. When I arrived in 1989 there was no World Wide Web and no Internet. In fact, cutting edge back then was saving my dissertation on a 5.25-inch floppy disk, pretty radical in those days! I remember getting my first UT email address in 1989, but I had to go up to a little room in the attic of Batts Hall to log on to the mysterious world where I could actually write a little message to a few colleagues at other universities. If not the first, my guess is that I was one of the first in our department to have an email address.

Twenty years later I find myself posting this site: Brazilpod, a collection of materials, links, projects, podcasts, and blogs of things that I have been using to teach Portuguese. I would say Brazilpod exists for the teaching of “my students” but nowadays the whole concept of who “my” students are and “where” they are is pretty jumbled up. Truth told, these materials are designed to be used by anyone anywhere. I remember the first time I saw that someone from Togo, Africa had logged on to my site. Amazing.

So if you want to learn how to speak Portuguese, feel free to browse through these materials. Use what you like, don’t worry about the parts that you don’t. There is plenty here, all provided via open access and without password restrictions. And if we happen to meet up some day, hopefully we can pull up a chair and sit in the shade for a bit. I’m a little partial to suco de abacaxi, but feel free to order whatever you would like.