How to choose your next language: What's your why?

things (not?) to consider before embarking on your next linguistic adventure

After the stress of the last few weeks, I’ve been having recurrent visions of myself walking along the beach while listening to “A Girl from Ipanema.”

I did my best to ignore those but they kept coming back.

(You get where this is going, right?)

This is not the only reason I'm learning Brazilian Portuguese.

Although were it the only reason it would have been ok too. A reader asked me last week how I choose which language to study next. I said something like: “Listen to your heart 🧘🏾‍♀️.”

What I really meant was “Listen to the song that’s been stuck in your head for days on end.”

But I do happen to have other equally good reasons to learn it.

What are my whys?

My first Why

Two years ago I had to hang a picture in the kids’ room and I hammered a nail into the wall perhaps a bit too late in the evening, so my neighbors banged back on the wall from the other side, which in the universal language of neighbors-banging-on-walls means “Are you fucking kidding me?? I’m trying to sleep here!!”

This is the only time I’ve communicated with these neighbors, as even though we live in the same building, we use different entrances so we never cross paths….

I live in a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese-speaking neighborhood and these neighbors speak Portuguese. Every spring during the eight days of Passover and every fall during the seven days of Sukkot they sit on their balcony talking in Portuguese, discussing I’m pretty sure, my behavior that night two years ago, and other aspects of my personality.

I’m tired of not understanding anything.

My second Why

We had a couple of really hot days over Passover (think 45 degrees Celsius) which reminded me that summer is coming soon and this weather will be our normal. Summer is when I shelter at home every day between 6 am and 8 pm because I don’t enjoy walking in an oven.

I shelter at home most other times of the year, too, but summer is when I have no choice but to shelter at home. For that reason, every spring I’m briefly reminded that there is a place called ‘outdoors’ and that I should try to spend as much time there as possible before we head into the no-choice season.

All this is to say that even though I’m supposed to be learning Palestinian Arabic, I can’t do it right now because the website that teaches it requires me to sit down and learn, making me miss the last days of walkable weather.

I needed a language I could learn by walking and listening. Language Transfer, which has become my favorite way to learn, doesn’t have a Portuguese course, but I placed high hopes on Pimsleur, another app that offers audio courses and that I heard good things about.

My third Why

While sheltering at home during the latest heatwave, I was browsing Glottolog and drooling over the dizzying variety of indigenous languages spoken in Brazil. Most of them are so small and severely endangered that the only available grammars were published in 1977 in Portuguese. If I ever want to learn any of these (and I will) I have to know Portuguese fairly well.

A learning journey is full of surprises

Not all audio courses are created equal

I got myself a 7-day free trial of Pimsleur but I abandoned it after a couple of hours. It felt dull and artificial and made me miss Duolingo, which is not a good sign.

It turns out that I didn’t want just any audio course. In Language Transfer, you’re listening to a live dialogue between a teacher and a student. It makes you feel like you’re being spoken to, and it makes you more engaged because we naturally want to impress our teachers.

In Pimsleur, you’re listening to pre-recorded dialogues between John Smith, an American tourist in Brazil, and a nameless Senhora who is not very hungry and just wants to buy a bottle of uma água mineral.

I want to emphasize that this was my totally subjective experience. Pimsleur seems to be a solid resource that could work for someone else (plus, they have an impressive list of courses, including native American languages). It just didn’t work for me.

My Spanish made a comeback

The day I started learning Portuguese, my Spanish, which I thought I’d mostly forgotten, made a comeback. That evening, in our dog park, someone was speaking on the phone in Spanish and I understood everything. Those neurons are awake and excited and they think I’m talking to them but I’m not (or am I?)

Usually, I keep the different languages in separate boxes in the language cupboard in my brain and take them out only one at a time, but here I can’t do that because the pieces look so similar I have to keep them all in front of me to make sure I’m not speaking what people refer to as Portunhol.

Someone less anal might say what’s wrong with Portunhol? You’ll still be understood even if you mix Portuguese and Spanish! Too late for that. I’m now on a mission to find that switch in my brain that would allow me to not mix up very similar languages. I couldn’t find it when I was learning Rusyn. Maybe I will now.

In any case, it seems right now that if I want to learn Portuguese I also have to give some attention to Spanish (and French who also woke up and wants to join the fun 🤦‍♀️) and mediate between the three of them like three toddlers fighting over the same set of playground equipment.

My first conversation (sort of)

My dream of walking along the beach and listening to Portuguese didn’t come true.

On the first back-to-school day after the Passover holiday, I went to Tel Aviv, fully intending to take a day off and do nothing but listen to “A Girl from Ipanema”, as planned, and Pimsleur.

But I quickly got frustrated with Pimsleur and headed to the Carmel Market to buy some tomatoes so the trip wouldn’t be completely wasted.

While there, I slowed down by a food stand that displayed a familiar flag. A blue circle inside a yellow rhombus on a green background. I knew it was a flag I’d encountered just recently… Kenya??

(I suck at flags.)

The owner, who saw me slow down, called me over and I heard a Portuguese accent. He said they sell the best Brazilian street food in Tel Aviv and did I want to try some? I wasn’t hungry for a meal but he let me try some anyway.

Você e Brasileiro? ‘Are you Brazilian?’ I asked. He said yes, he’s been living here for 20 years and people still hear his accent from a mile away, and then he switched to Portuguese and said some more things. I wanted to say something in response but I didn’t understand anything and anyway, I’d pretty much exhausted my Portuguese vocabulary. Luckily, a hungry customer came in and saved me from the awkward moment.

I walked out of there with the high of having just spoken Portuguese (you might not consider it a conversation but the dopamine rush was real) and headed straight to the nearest coffee shop to sit down and actually learn the language so we could have an even longer conversation next time.