Learning Portuguese

Portuguese is a difficult language to learn

Practically everyone we know who has moved to Portugal has said this.  Some natives have even told us the same thing.  Usually they laugh about it.  We have been learning Portuguese in bits and pieces since before we moved, but we’re still at the bottom of the learning curve.  An average three year old who was born here knows more Portuguese than we do.

Recently, though, we have approached our studies with new energy.  We have increasingly felt that our inability to carry on a casual conversation with a neighbor makes us appear rude or lacking initiative.  And there are so many things we are curious about, but we can’t ask questions … or understand the answers.    

So we are motivated to learn!

What makes it so difficult?

There are several reasons we find Portuguese difficult.

First, it is a sibilant language, where nearly every s is sounds like sh.  We have to retrain our tongues (and our brains) to speak this way.

Second, leading and trailing e’s are often dropped, as are many whole syllables. 

Here’s an example of both items from basic conversation:

Third, the vowel sounds are different than in English.  We have a very simplistic understanding, like this:

(There are actually four forms for every vowel in Portuguese – open, closed, reduced, and nasal – with different pronunciations. Some words have different meanings based on the form of the verb.  The Learning Portuguese website has a detailed description, if you want to go down a real rabbit hole.)

Finally, while Portuguese shares some words with English, Spanish, and other European languages, the pronunciation is almost always different.

When we listen to someone speaking Portuguese, we can occasionally pick out a word or two.  And while the pace of life here mostly seems slower than in the US, people talk fast.  But we listen slow, so understanding spoken Portuguese is tough.  

Reading Portuguese is easier for us,since we can take time to look up words that we don’t know or can’t figure out in context.  Mike recently spent an hour watching CNN coverage of flooding in Lisbon and learned several new words from the headlines.  

You can get by with just English…for awhile

Many Portuguese citizens, especially younger people, are fluent English speakers.  It’s taught in the public schools, and we’ve heard that by 7th grade, most classes are taught in English.  

Living first in Porto and then in Parede, we haven’t had to be proficient in the language to get by.  When we interact with local people – usually in stores and restaurants – they often switch to English, even if we don’t ask.  Something about the way we look apparently says “We’re not from ‘round here”.  Several Portuguese natives have told us that they do this to help foreigners feel comfortable.  We suspect that they probably also do it in order to get the transactions done more efficiently, without having to listen to us butcher their native tongue.

But not knowing the language makes life more difficult.

We’ve been here long enough to realize that we can’t continue to depend on the kindness of strangers.  It just doesn’t feel right that we depend on the language skills of others instead of making the effort ourselves.  We can’t have casual conversations with our neighbors.  When a clerk in a store asks a question, our response is too often a blank stare. 

And while many many of our in-person interactions are successful despite our lack of fluency, not knowing the language creates friction in our lives.  Simple tasks that should take just a few minutes often consume an hour while we translate text and puzzle out the meaning.  Making a phone call to a business that uses a recorded menu of options is nearly impossible.

We’re learning…slowly

It’s not like we’ve done nothing.  During the 18 months we’ve been in Portugal, we have used a variety of methods to try to learn basic Portuguese.  We’ve used Pimsleur audio lessons*, the Memrise interactive site*, and we’ve watched several dozen YouTube videos.  One of our favorites is about, what else, food! 

Mary has made several hundred flash cards with common words and phrases.  Each of these has helped, but none of them have gotten us to where we want to be.  

So now we’re enrolled in a class at the secondary school in Cascais. It meets on Monday nights from 8:45 – 10:15 pm.  That’s a bit later than we’d like, but these classes fill up quickly and you have to take the opportunity when it’s offered.  Our friend Nancy had a similar experience.

There are 10 of us in the class.  It’s an international cohort.  Our classmates come from South Africa, Nepal, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sweden, and the US.  They are a fun group, and the classroom often echoes with laughter as we take turns mangling the language. 

A few weeks ago we received our textbooks for the class and we’ve been working through the lessons at home almost every day. 

One of the most beneficial activities has been learning verbs.  That has helped us recognize more words on signs, like temos (“We have …”), as in this sign at our local padaria (bakery):

So now we know better than to ask for one on Terça-feira (Tuesday).

It takes some courage 

No one wants to appear foolish, and trying out your new language skills in public is an intimidating task.  We have a handful of phrases that we’re confident about, but they don’t get us very far.  Going beyond a simple greeting usually requires some advance preparation.  

Mike will use our translation app (Lingvanex* – $80 / year – worth it!) to construct the sentences he’ll need, then he will practice saying the phrases out loud until he sounds roughly like the voice in the translator.  When he thinks he’s got it, he’ll take a deep breath and give it a shot.  

He used that technique when he went to our local post office to buy stamps, conversing with the clerk entirely in Portuguese.  That is, except for one word – “twelve” – that slipped out when the clerk didn’t understand his request for “doce selos” (twelve stamps).  There’s something about his accent…

Our end goal is pretty simple

Our expectations are generally low.  We don’t expect to be fluent speakers, but we do want to be able to carry on a basic conversation with people we meet.  We want to be able to read the local papers or a magazine without having to translate every other word.  

Then there’s the language test. In order to become permanent residents in Portugal, you have to pass a middle-school level exam to demonstrate some command of the language.  But that’s a couple years away.

 Mike hopes to go a bit deeper and learn some of the idioms that reflect Portuguese tradition, culture, and humor.  He’s wondering what the local equivalent would be for one of his favorite old saws in English:

When he finds out, you’ll be the first to know.

Until next time / Até a próxima vez

Mary and Mike

The Cook and The Writer

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