Dear fellow immigrants, expats, itinerant entrepreneurs, global nomads of all kinds.
Over the holidays I attended a dinner party, and I met a handful of the many newcomers to Lisbon. One otherwise nice, lovely man told me about his plans to buy a house and settle in Lisbon, and he said to me, guilelessly, “I have no interest in the Portuguese people, really none whatsoever. I don’t need to get to know them, so I don’t need to learn the language.” I’ll always admire forthrightness and honesty. But please, let’s not be like that guy. Let’s learn to speak Portuguese, shall we?
Let us gently distrust the people who insist that it’s not necessary to learn Portuguese, whether they are locals or foreigners. We’ll respectfully ignore anyone who tells us not to bother, because we can get by with English (or French, or Spanish, or even German and Dutch in some parts of the country). These people may not be entirely wrong, but they’re not entirely right.
Choosing not to learn Portuguese is choosing to live here as long-term tourists, always skimming over the surface.
It’s possible to get by, for sure. We can live in English (or whatever), choosing to direct our ample resources toward other priorities, like our active social life or frequent vacations. We can learn just enough Portuguese words so that we can order food in restaurants (on the rare occasions when the waitstaff don’t speak English), and give basic instructions to our maids or nannies or Uber drivers. What more do we really need? When we long for friends, we can always just turn to the community made up solely of other expats – it’s so easy, these days! – and this way, none of us have to go to the often-embarrassing trouble of learning. We can bond together in our volitional ignorance that isolates us from the native community. This is an option, too, and many long-term resident foreigners choose it. But choosing not to learn Portuguese is choosing to live here as long-term tourists, always skimming over the surface – and I think we can do better than that. I know we can be better than that.
So, let’s drop all of our excuses. Let’s make language-learning a priority, because otherwise it’ll never happen. Let’s dedicate resources to it – most of us have plenty of resources, don’t we? – so we have time and attention and money to direct toward meeting this challenge, because it matters.
We’ll learn Portuguese because our dedication to learning the language goes far beyond practical advantages. It’s a sign of respect for the people and culture of our adoptive home. Learning the language shows that we’re not just here for the low cost of living or the weather or the beaches or the parties or the convenient proximity to some other place: we learn the local language in the hope that we might someday feel like locals.
We’ll learn Portuguese because it’s a sign of respect for the people and culture of our adoptive home. We learn the local language in the hope that we might someday feel like locals.
We’ll learn to speak Portuguese because, as long as we expect the Portuguese to interact with us in English only, our interactions will remain within a limited range of topics and a limited level of complexity. As long as we show up with an expectation that the locals will meet us in English, the conversation will get several degrees less interesting. There are two excellent reasons for this. First, it’s a question of fluency: although many Portuguese people do speak English, most of them do not speak it as well as they think they do. Their English is proficient, to be sure, and allows them to engage with us superficially, but not much more than that – and their English is generally not sophisticated enough to allow them to express the full complexity of their thoughts, or to understand us if we attempt to express the full complexity of ours. The second reason is more subtle, and perhaps even more important: it’s a question of trust. There are many Portuguese people who are fully fluent in English, but they will choose not to open fully to us, as long as we remain blasé about their mother tongue. Many of them experience our disinterest as a lack of respect for their culture, and on these grounds, they will choose not to let us in. Can we blame them? Moving to a new place and expecting the locals to speak our foreign language is a rather spectacular show of hubris. I’ve found that our wholehearted effort to learn Portuguese is received as a gesture of respect, in response to which the locals get more interested in us as individuals: we set ourselves apart from the crowd this way, long before our Portuguese is actually functional. Our earnest effort itself carries great weight, for good reason.
We’ll do it because, in time, we’ll experience the joy of finally being able to participate in that epic flow of conversation as it meanders throughout the infamous, interminable Lusitanian lunches that turn into dinners (that turn into club nights, that turn into fuzzy sunrises…): sometimes intimate and intense, sometimes light and easy. We’ll begin to discover that the Portuguese sense of humor is very linguistic in its nature, and we can surf their waves of riotous laughter over subversive wordplay, dirty puns, and games with regional and class accents. We’ll finally appreciate the meticulous Portuguese style of storytelling: we’ll follow their long narratives preceded by historical exposition, dotted with details, shot through with witty asides, and undergirded by a sustaining thrust of destiny and morality. We’ll be able to jump into the whitewater rapids of debate about current events and politics and ideology and society and culture. We’ll be able to chat amicably with our neighbors, and with the staff of the pastelaria on the street corner, and with the old folks who lean down to pet our dogs – all of those tiny effervescent exchanges that don’t really mean much one by one, but add up to have great significance for our quality of life in this city. We’ll do it because only this way we can imagine that we’ll finally, someday, belong here.
We’ll do it because only this way we can imagine that we’ll finally, someday, belong here.
Moreover, we’ll do it because it is an exercise in humility. Many of us are accomplished and successful people in our home countries, accustomed to enjoying various forms of dominance or status or privilege, and very much unaccustomed to feeling stupid or needing much help from others who know more than we do. Learning a new language is an experience of fundamental vulnerability, which many of us have not had since childhood. For a while, in Portuguese, we’ll no longer be the one who knows; we’ll no longer be the expert or the leader or the boss. It demands that we let go of our sense of entitlement to power, and relinquish our expectation that we’ll always be in charge. We’ll have to let go of our sense of superiority, and of our intellectual identities. We won’t be able to express ourselves properly, and we’ll be really boring, for a while. We’ll have to surrender to the uncomfortable feelings of foolishness. We’ll risk the humiliation of making mistakes and sounding stupid. We’ll soldier through all of this, because it’s a perfect practice of neuroplasticity – it’s the essence of “beginner’s mind” – it’s a wonderful paradox that something that feels so bad for our ego might be very, very good for our character.
Let’s learn the language, shall we? Let’s be better neighbors, better customers, better bosses, better citizens, better friends, better members of our community, and – with some luck, after some time – maybe even slightly better versions of ourselves.
