Learning Portuguese in Brazil!

For me, the mere thought of condensing two whole months of my experiences in Brazil this summer into just a few pages of writing was extremely daunting! So, I first decided that in this post, I’m going to focus on telling you guys about the significance and importance that language had during my two months abroad.

Thinking back to my mindset before the trip, I really can’t pinpoint what my expectations or anxieties or hopes were, and I think that’s largely because I didn’t have that many expectations about the trip. I was excited, but I just didn’t want to plan. The thing is, I realize now that I didn’t expect that whatever I experienced in Brazil would overwhelmingly surprise me - and I was wrong!

I’m actually really surprised by the extent of the passion that I developed for the Portuguese language while I was in Brazil, and by the extent to which I’ve also been inspired to perfect and develop my Spanish after becoming close friends with a lot of EPs from Spanish-speaking countries. I didn’t think that my experience would center so much around the foreign language aspect of the trip. At the language school that I worked at, called “CCAA,” I was the only native English speaker that many of the students had ever gotten the chance to speak with in their lives, and my internship was an opportunity for these students to finally practice their English in a “real” context. I worked with students of all ages, and many of them – both younger and older – were actually scared of me at the start! To them, speaking with me in front of their regular teachers was like a final exam. I did my best to calm their concerns, often offering them up some of my own broken Portuguese as an amusing comparison.

At the language school with students and teachers

Quite suddenly though, my Portuguese started getting a lot better as I spent more time at CCAA, becoming friends with the teachers and administrators and learning more of the language from them, as well as from my host family, and some daunting solo trips on the bus system at night (think: no names for the bus stops, and nothing but my lacking vocabulary, a map of the city, and the friendliness of the other passengers to guide me to my destination).

At first, when the teachers at the language school proudly told me that they were intent on teaching me the pronunciation native to their region, I was worried that my Portuguese accent would be too limited and that I wouldn’t be able to adapt to a more “standard” Brazilian Portuguese if I wanted to. The teachers told me they would make me a true “mineiro” Brazilian (the city Belo Horizonte is in the state Minas Gerais), and I didn’t believe them! But they were right; now, I defend the strong “mineiro,” sing-songy accent as passionately as they did! One of my best friends is from Recife, Brazil – a city much further north than where I lived – and his Portuguese accent just doesn’t sound right to me!

Before I knew it, I went from being completely lost in Portuguese, to being able to interact with people on the street, on the buses, cashiers, and the students at the language school. When I first started at the school, I couldn’t follow the conversations between the students in Portuguese, but by the end of my internship, I was often pretending with the younger kids that I knew significantly less Portuguese than I really did so that they wouldn’t stop trying to communicate with me in English.

Learning to speak and understand at such a rapid rate was jarring sometimes because it took some time to trust that my pronunciation was being understood. To me, what I was saying sounded like gibberish at times, and it was incredible when my thoughts and ideas were actually understood, despite my strong accent. I couldn’t interact with my host parents on my first day at all, and by the end of my stay, we could share stories and discuss things and laugh at jokes together in Portuguese.

The extreme difficulty of the language gap that existed for me at the beginning of my time in Brazil only made bridging that gap all the more rewarding. Sure, in the first few days, I used Google Translate to speak accurately and freely with my host parents when I really needed to, but attempting to communicate on my own, through limited and basic Portuguese, was infinitely more satisfying. I felt so honored that they would speak Portuguese with me at a normal speaking rate, trust that I would understand them, and always granted me all their focus to understand me.

Being immersed in the Portuguese environment and experiencing my entire time in Brazil through this filter really motivated me to improve upon the languages that I already know, too. I met so many interns from Spanish speaking countries, and at first, I was extremely shy about speaking Spanish with them. But everyone was so supportive of my attempts, and very invested in helping me improve my Spanish while I helped them improve their English. Sometimes, after some Brazilian caipirinhas (a liquor called cachaça mixed with limes and sugar), my accent would radically improve and my new friends and I would joke about how I could suddenly understand even the heaviest Colombian accents amongst the other interns. Funny as it may seem, even (or especially) those silly experiences really encouraged me about the potential I have to become fluent in Spanish someday!

With other AIESEC interns!

Experiencing the personal connections and channels of communication that are opened by language has encouraged me to improve my Russian as well. Both of my parents immigrated to the United States before I was born, and although I can speak Russian pretty freely with my family, I cannot read or write or articulate my thoughts nearly as well as in English. Learning Portuguese really made me realize how much I could be wasting if I never bring my Russian to the same level as my English – I have all the tools and foundation to do it! And so, I decided I would plan to take heritage Russian classes at Yale now.

Ultimately, we’ll always have dictionaries and translators, and with the technological advances of the present day, bridging language gaps is becoming easier and easier without actually learning new languages – and opening these swift channels of communication around the world is great. But being in Brazil, I really came to understand that there’s still no substitute for being able to speak to another human being directly with your own words, face to face; struggling with language this summer was an extremely pivotal experience for me!