Learn Portuguese with Celisa Canto

When people ask me how and when I started teaching Portuguese, I have to go back to my Conservatory time - the 70's. It all started as a hobby when I was 15. At that time I was studying piano and percussion for orchestra, and in 1970 I had two foreign teachers, Peterson (percussionist) from the USA and Astor (timpanist) from Argentina. Both of them were having difficulties in communicating with their students. Fortunately, I could speak some English, so they started to “use” me as their mediator and I loved it because the more I managed to interpret for them, the more I gained in self-confidence. The conductor of the orchestra paid Peterson a Portuguese Course in the most famous language school in São Paulo at that time. After 3 months he concluded that he had learned much more during our percussion classes at the Conservatory than in his formal course. So he came to me with a very interesting and challenging business proposition: “Celisa, what about if you teach me Portuguese and I give you extra drum classes?”
Together with Astor I started our unconventional Portuguese couse. Since then I have never stopped studying languages, and this gave me the opportunity to continue teaching my own language to many wonderful people from all round the world. Some of these students did not speak any of the languages I speak. This was my motivation to successfully develop my own teaching method which allows me to teach Portuguese even when there is not any common language between my student and myself. In 1995 I travelled to Denmark where I lived for 5 years. There I naturally had the opportunity to teach Danes, along with many other different nationalities (Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Rumanian, Ukrainian, Chinese, African, Greek and so on) and my method was put to test. Our Portuguese course was in modules of 3 months each and the results were unbelievably exceptional. I must admit that all the academic studies I had gave me neither the knowledge I needed nor the inspiration to teach my students. For this reason, I voluntarily confined myself to a language lab at Copenhagen University for two years while conducting some research in the cross-linguistic field of articulatory phonetics. Besides Portuguese, I speak English, Español, Dansk and capisco un poco di Italiano et Français – which also helps me with my students. In 2000 I came to Brazil to visit my family and when I was visiting my beloved son – Ícaro, in Florianópois, he showed me that I did not have to travel back to Denmark, but I should stay here. I got a bit scared because I had a very good job in DK and I really loved it. On top of it, there were very few foreigners down here. People would get surprised with my “teaching Portuguese as a foreign language” because they did not know the meaning of it, and in Lagoa da Conceição there was no one teaching the subject at the time. Little by little Florianopolis started to be on the media and some of my former students from the 70′s to the 90′s discovered Florianopolis and came to me. It has been 14 years since then and I have taught more than 500 students here from all corners of the world. At the end of each course, most of my lovely students tell me that they didn´t get only a mere Portuguese course, but they became part of my society. As time goes by I can see that actually my life is my students’ lives, and through them, I manage to travel around the world, I learn a lot about their cultures, people’s differences and above all I understand them. I love my work passionately and feel most fortunate for this. I´m extremely grateful to my music teachers.