Break the ‘speak Portuguese’ spell!  – Portugal Resident

And before I begin kicking those self- and socially-limiting crutches away from the linguistically absent, please know I include myself in this finger-pointing. And as ever, when anyone points a finger, three are pointing back. So whilst I point and wag, I whole-heartedly and red-facedly include myself in the scrutiny that follows. 

Starting my take-down, which is intended as constructive and inspirational criticism, is perhaps the number one classic among senior expats: “I’m too old to learn a new language.”

Sounding very plausible and semi-scientific, making it such a reliable go-to durable, this chestnut is about to get a roasting. “Children do absorb languages differently to adults” is maybe what you’re thinking if you’re prone to this get-out, and nobody can really dispute research in this area. But differently isn’t impossibly, and the studies on adult language acquisition are far kinder than the oft-uttered myth suggests.

Adults learn grammar faster than children, because we already understand what grammar is. But what we lack isn’t capacity, it’s practice – specifically, the willingness to sound foolish in public, which children have less of a problem with. Those of us identifying as grown-ups have spent decades training looking bad out of ourselves and the awkward truth is that it’s not our age holding us back, it’s an overblown attachment to our dignity, which is an eminently fixable problem. Get over yourself, maybe?

“Everyone here speaks English anyway” is another, and much less forgivable opt-out. It is generally true actually, yet entirely beside the point. Nobody’s learning Portuguese because there’s no other option. You’re learning it because of what happens the moment you don’t lazily default to English. I’ve seen and experienced it over and over again, and it’s what keeps me going in my quest: the person in the café, bakery or market’s whole posture changes the second you attempt a brace of words in their language, instead of assuming they’ll accommodate you in yours.

That shift – from tolerated customer to welcomed neighbour – doesn’t happen through convenience. It happens through effort. The English safety net is real. But it’s also the very thing keeping you a permanent tourist in your own town.

Age and English-readiness dispensed with, we now move on to “I don’t have time”. Nobody has time – do they? – to do the things that are a bit more demanding than our dozy defaults. Time isn’t something you find lying around; it’s something you take from somewhere else, on purpose. The people making real progress with their Portuguese aren’t the ones with spare hours – they’re the ones who’ve decided that five minutes of actual spoken Portuguese in a real shop matters more than five minutes of vegging and scrolling. This isn’t a time problem. It’s a priority problem, dressed up as a clock.

Moving into more sympathetic territory now, we have that empathy-inducing claim: “I’ll sound like an idiot.” And, yes, you might. It may and probably will feel awful in the first instance, and in those first few confrontations, but then it will be over. You’ll still be standing there, and the world will not have ended. I say this with real affection and love. Every single person who’s made progress has, at some point, said something Portuguese-shaped but utterly wrong to a local stranger. And every one of them survived it. The fear of sounding stupid is doing more damage to your Portuguese than actually sounding stupid ever could.

Closely connected to the twin-headed terrors of public speaking and difficult conversations is, “The grammar’s impossible, I have tried and I gave up”. This I can sympathise with greatly, but I cannot allow it in my court as evidence. The thing nobody tells you before you sign up for a course is that grammar and speaking are not the same skill.

You can be excellent at one while being unable to do the other at all. I’ve met people who can conjugate the subjunctive perfectly and freeze completely at a bakery counter, and people who barely know a verb table but chat happily with their neighbours every single day. If a course made you feel like a failure, the course failed you, not the other way round. Grammar is the map. Speaking is the journey. You can study the map forever and never leave the house.

This leads us to my most heart-wrenching of the cop-outs, which is “I tried, and someone didn’t understand me, so I just stopped”. This is the quiet, painful one that I probably take more seriously than the others. One bad exchange – a blank look, a switch to English, a flicker of impatience – and the story we tell ourselves is, “I can’t do this,” rather than “that didn’t go well.”

But one misunderstood sentence isn’t a verdict on your ability. It’s just one momentary failure to communicate, which can also easily happen in our native tongues and closest relationships. The mistake here is treating this outcome as the final data point instead of a random one. The people who keep going aren’t the ones who never get misunderstood. They’re the ones who don’t let the one bad moment write the whole story.

So, what’s your excuse? Because that’s genuinely the whole exercise and value here today. Not my excuse (and I have them) and not your neighbour’s (who will have theirs too), but yours. What’s that one now sub-conscious sentence you personally reach for, like a reflex, right before you decide not to try speaking Portuguese? Once you can name it, you can be free of it and break the self-hypnotised spell that keeps you self-censored and silent.

Let’s understand and laugh at the negative voices in our head, which are our voice, accepted, unchallenged, and basically robbing us of steady progress, a little pride and much more Portuguese-ness.

Mine, if you’re wondering, used to be some version of “I’ll do it properly once I’ve got more time.” Nine years later, I was still waiting for that spare time to arrive. So, a couple of weeks ago, I caught myself and stopped waiting. Instead, I stopped making excuses and started, where I was, and with what I had. 

Carl Munson is currently embarked on a 90-day challenge to speak conversational Portuguese. Join him, and a growing number of others doing the same at swatportuguese.com

Read Carl Munson’s previous article: Show up, wing it, adapt, talk … and shop?