Disclaimer: I wrote the first draft of this post on December 19th 2022 while in Chile. I wrote the final draft after spending two weeks in Brazil.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Background and previous research
• Motivation
• Procedure
• Conclusion

Introduction

This week, I’m going to Brazil to spend Christmas with two friends from university. I’ve decided that, after they leave, I’m going to try to stay in the country until the end of February. Why? Because I want to learn Portuguese.

This wasn’t the original plan. The original plan was to go to Chile for three months to immerse myself in Spanish and experience life in a language that I’d spent a few years studying. I felt confident I could reach a new level of Spanish fluency after three months since I had study and preparation under my belt before arriving. But Portuguese? I don’t know anything about Portuguese. The extent of my study has been using Duolingo and some Anki flashcards for the past two months. It feels a little incredibly naive of me to expect to be able to learn Portuguese during a two month stay in Brazil with close to no preparation. Beyond that, I have no idea when I’ll ever use Portuguese again, since right now I have no plans to spend an extended period of time in either Brazil or Portugal or any other country where it’s mainly spoken. I’m worried that I’m confusing the mission. Wouldn’t two months struggling to learn Portuguese be better spent continuing to improve my Spanish? I just started feeling confident and fluent in Spanish, and now I’m going to Brazil? Uruguay is right there, after all, and a flight to Buenos Aires is under $100. Maybe I’m making a mistake.

Well, I’m gonna do it anyway. Because I want to. And because, at this point in my life, I’ve got a superpower and a super privilege: I can afford to make these kinds of mistakes. I have no debt, I have no looming responsibilities, and I have enough money to do it. A friend of mine, who is a few years older than me, told me that one of the best things I can do at my age is to try a whole lot of things. Right now, I can afford to make mistakes, and mistakes are how I’ll learn. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to try to learn Portuguese, with zero preparation, no definite plans to come back to Brazil, and with possibly less than two months in the country. It’s going to be an experiment. And therefore,

If I’m going to think of this as an experiment, then I want to make an effort to document it. Hence this blog post. Even if this experiment turns out to be a colossal embarrassing failure, if I write it down, I’ll at least have some concrete data to learn from. I’ll have produced something of value. Or at least, this is what I’m telling myself to make myself feel better. So let’s get into the specifics.

Background and previous research

Despite the aforementioned hullabaloo about not having any preparation in Portuguese, I don’t actually think I’m starting from zero. I once read (or at least I think I did, can’t find the quote right now) that the hardest language to learn is the first one that isn’t your native language. I like this, because it suggests no language is more or less difficult than another one, and also that learning gets easier over time. I’m going to make the bold claim that having seriously studied a second language is preparation for learning a third. After spending three months trying to learn Spanish in Chile, I have an idea of what I’ll be in for: Asking a question and not understanding the answer, only understanding 10% of a conversation, not even knowing how to ask the question, feeling embarrassed, etc. I know that these things are (hopefully) a normal part of learning a foreign language. I know not to get discouraged by them, and that with time and dedication, it will get better. On top of that, I’ve already got some practice wrapping my head around grammatical concepts that might be unfamiliar to a native English speaker, like verb moods, verb tenses, grammatical gender, etc. Maybe the second time I run into these concepts, they won’t take as much time to sink in.

Aside from giving me an idea of what to expect when starting out learning Portuguese, I think having proficiency in specifically Spanish also means I’m not starting from zero. People, including those I met in Chile, told me that Spanish and Portuguese are very similar. I was told to just try saying something in Spanish if I couldn’t say it in Portuguese, a.k.a. I could try speaking portunhol. While the two languages are different, it seems that there is a lot of overlap, both in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammer. Yo soy Sam becomes Eu sou Sam and Tengo hormigas en la boca becomes tenho formigas na boca. It seems credible that the languages would be similar in many ways given that they are both romance languages, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to claim that I’m not starting from zero in Portuguese.

Motivation

Why do I even want to do this? I’ve got four main reasons:

1. Brazil sounds super cool. All I know about Brazil comes from listening to Samba and Bossa Nova and what my friends have told me, but I like what I’ve heard. Supposedly, the people, music, beaches, and parties are all amazing, and there’s some danger of going to Brazil and never wanting to leave. Knowing the language of a place makes it easier to get around and connect, so knowing some Portuguese would be worth it to be able to explore Brazil. It would also be cool to be able to come back to Brazil some day or to make a trip to Portugal.
2. Learning another language is generally a good thing. It teaches you a new way to think and lets you connect to a culture and other people that you might otherwise know nothing about. This was my experience in Chile and it would be great to replicate it in Brazil.
3. I think it will impress my friends. I know this is not a good motivation but I feel I have to expose that this thought is lingering at the back of my mind. It would just be so delicious to say that I set out to Chile for three months to improve my Spanish and then “accidentally” learned Portuguese.
4. I kind of just want to see what will happen if I try.

These are the reasons. There are more, but these are the ones I feel good writing down.

Procedure

The plan is to immerse myself in the language by finding one or two voluntariados through either Wordpackers or Workaway and trying to speak Portuguese whenever I have the chance. This is more or less what I did in Chile, and in retrospect, it worked well. Doing two voluntariados allowed me to make friends who only spoke Spanish, challenged me to use the language in new situations, and also gave me a view of what daily life is like in Chile. I’m hoping that I can replicate this in Brazil. As of now, I have spoken to a language school in Farroupilha that is willing to take me on as an English teaching assistant. They’re going to set me up with a host family, which to me seemed like an excellent way to get the language immersion and day-in-the-life experience I had in Chile. The biggest caveat is that if I’m teaching English for five hours each day, I’m worried that I won’t develop my language abilities as well as if I were doing a voluntariado that was entirely in Portuguese. That said, I’ll supposedly only be doing five hours of English instruction per day. That leaves at least 10 other waking hours in the day that I can use for Portuguese language immersion, and on top of that I’ll be living with a Portuguese host family. Other challenges will arise, but this is the overall plan for Portuguese language immersion.

With the plan in mind, are three things I’ll do to document this experiment:

1. Each day, I will record a one minute video of me speaking Portuguese. I’ll try to talk about what I did that day, but I’m giving myself permission to talk about anything that comes to mind, as long as it’s in Portuguese. At the end of my time in Brazil, I should have a collection of videos showing my progress in the language that I can review.
2. Each day, I will write three sentences in Portuguese explaining what I did that day or something new that I learned. I sort of did this in Chile, and I found that it was a good way to improve my vocabulary in a targeted way, since it would require me to look up words I didn’t know. This will both help me with my vocabulary and help me document my experience.
3. Each week, I will create a blog post with a summary of my progress during that week. I don’t want to specify too much what the “summary” has to be, but I’m imagining it could include the videos and sentences from the above two points and maybe some reflections about my experience trying to learn the language.

My hope is that these will be easy enough to do that I can stick with them during my time in Brazil, but that they will also be useful when I want to look back on my experience.

Conclusion

It’s possible that this is a mistake, but I feel that it probably isn’t. Even if I come away from this without being able to speak any Portuguese, I think that by making the effort I’m bound to form connections with the people I meet and deepen my experience there. As for the fear that I could be spending this time speaking Spanish, I’m confident my journey with Spanish is far from over. This year, I’m planning on applying to (and being accepted to) NALCAP. It’s a program offered by the Spanish government where fluent English speakers from North America are placed in classrooms across Spain as English teaching assistants. The placements are for about 8 months, so even if I’m missing out on two more months of Spanish language immersion now, the plan is to have 8 months of immersion starting next September. In fact, this makes the outcome of this experiment with Portuguese more valuable: if I can get a language immersion experience while teaching English in Brazil, that will make me confident I can replicate that result while teaching English in Spain, or elsewhere.

So in conclusion: I’m going to try to learn Portuguese. It’s going to be an experiment, and I’m going to document it. It could go wrong, but not horribly, and I don’t think it will. Stay tuned for results.