I didn't know anybody. I didn't have a friend. I didn't have any family members. I didn't have anybody. So what I did the next day was I was kind of crazy sat there. Actually, I didn't do it that day. At that night I pulled out a coin, then I decided heads or tails. I said it if I flip heads, I am going to get on the plane tomorrow and I am going to fly back to United States. If I flip tails then I am going to go down to a travel agency that I saw that was near the hotel and I am going to buy a ticket into the deepest part of Brazil. So there is no way I can get back out.
Okay, that's why I am saying don't do this at home. It is really crazy. Anyway the way I flipped was go by the ticket. So the next morning went and bought a ticket into an area called Aracaju in the State of Sergipe. Now overtime I'll teach how to pronounce Portuguese. It's got some interesting funkiness to it. That's a lot of fun.
But what I did was I flew into Sergipe landed in Aracaju in the capital and stayed in this nice exquisite resort and kind of hung out. But what I found out was that the rate I was staying in the resort was something like $50 a night which is like five star everything, because we had such a strong dollar at the time.
Well, when two weeks were over I decided to go and check in to a hotel to a downtown. It was kind of more then middle class hotel that Brazilian would stand at. That cost me about $12 hours a night. So what I decided to is I stayed there over a period of about three months and I studied Portuguese. Now what's interesting is on the way up the Aracaju I met the ex-wife of the Governor of state of Bahia, which is the largest state in Brazil and she invited me down to her house.
I went down there for a couple weeks and she actually started teaching me the formal Portuguese grammar. So I was going through kind of a split process. In one side I was learning the grammar and on the other side I was actually learning how to speak the words. Now one day I had an experience that was really epiphany. It really opened up -- it kind of gave me an idea, a secret that I have never heard anybody talk about.
I was watching a Brazilian couple actually teach a baby how to speak Portuguese and they were basically they would feed this spoon with the baby and they would say the word spoon and then the baby would say right. Yeah, babies can't talk right when they are New Year borns.
And then they would say no, spoon, the baby would say spoo, and then they would try again and the baby would say soo. So I can see that the baby was gradually starting to connect the sound, well, in this case I am going to use English, spoon with the object spoon.
Now here's the trick about Portuguese. The language center of the brain is in the Perisylvian area of the left hemisphere of the cortex. Now there is other two areas in that area one is Broca's area and the other is Wernicke's area. Broca's area deals with grammar. Wernicke's area deals with the actual content the meaning of a word. What I am going to teach you to do in the mind is to actually directly access Wernicke's area. Go on to the next video now we're going to actually do this.
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