I’ve started learning Portuguese, and after two months of daily lessons, I think it’s safe to say I’ll never even know enough to be vaguely conversational. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll keep trying – but by the time I return to Portugal next spring, I believe I’ll have a greater chance of accidentally saying something in Mandarin than I will of forming an actual Portuguese sentence with my mouth.
As someone who speaks only one more than zero languages, I find polyglots downright magical. Not only do they manage to learn whole new sets of words, grammatical rules, and pronunciations, but they’re also willing to practice and mess up a ton, which includes being misunderstood and (if/when people are jerks) laughed at. I do okay with learning new things, but being the subject of mockery…?
Not my favorite.
I have a dear friend who immigrated to the USA from Colombia in her 20s. She has an excellent command of English, but no matter how well someone learns a language, there will always be little oddities to trip them up. While that sort of thing makes me want to sink through the floor, my friend navigates those moments like a champ.
She called me one day several years back, sounding both confused and concerned. At the time, she was employed performing audits for companies that wanted to be more energy-efficient. She’d just gotten a report back from a crew that had completed their work assignment, based on her assessment.
“Mija,” she said, “what do you call those big coolers in restaurants? Like, those giant refrigerators where they keep all the food?”
“A walk-in refrigerator?” I replied.
“Spell that,” she said. I did. There was a brief pause, and then peals and peals of laughter. When she was finally able to catch her breath, she explained what had happened.
During her audit of the restaurant, the manager showed her the walk-in refrigerator, but what she heard him say was “walking refrigerator,” so that’s what she wrote in her assessment of the restaurant’s needed upgrades. When she received the work crew’s report, it said this:
Completed all identified upgrades. We couldn’t find the walking refrigerator, though. It must have wandered off.
In truth, I’d love to know enough Portuguese to make a 1-letter mistake like my friend’s, but I’m lightyears away from that level of sophistication. I’ve got “Slower, please!” and “I don’t understand” pretty well dialed-in, which should be helpful, but I should probably add a few more key phrases, like: “I’m learning – take pity on me,” “Let’s just try to talk with our hands,” and, “Does anyone around here speak English?”
My husband and I agreed to practice Portuguese during dinner. Our learning is being guided by two different apps, both of which seem to lack practicality when it comes to basic communication, so our dinner conversations (translated into English for your convenience) tend to sound like this:
Me: “The chicken at this restaurant is delicious.” (Particularly apt since we’re both vegetarians)
JR: “How great! Does the chicken like to dance?”
Me: “The chicken is tired, but I dance quickly at the bus stop.”
JR: “That bus over there is blue. It is not green.”
Me: “Okay, thank you! Check, please.”
See how prepared we are? Once we’ve learned “walking refrigerator,” I think we’ll be good to go.
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