The Journey of Learning a New Language
I’m not going to lie, learning a language takes effort. It’s not a talent, but a skill that can be acquired, but I am going to let you in on a little secret that’s taken my wife and I nearly 13 years to realize.
To give you a little bit of context, my name is Josh and I’m from the United States. I grew up in Bristol, VA where I knew a total of 3 people in elementary school that didn’t speak English as their first language. My wife, Kalie, is the daughter of an American mother and Cuban father. So how was her Spanish? Pretty non-existent until we moved to Spain.
Spain was the first country that we moved abroad to and both of us had a desire to learn Spanish. Sure, we had Spanish classes in high school, but let’s be honest, it did little to prepare us for living in Madrid. Castilian Spanish is spoken at such a speed, while using sentence structure and vocabulary not taught in public schools in the US, that it made our years studying Spanish useless.
While in Spain, we hardly studied with any regularity. We never ended up taking classes, we always worked in English, and spoke English around each other. We only really spoke Spanish to workers in restaurants and shops, and with our roommates, or in Kalie’s case, her host family.
After two years in the Spanish capital, we moved to a whole different part of the world, South Korea. We found ourselves in Korea’s second city, Busan. With millions of people living there and a decent amount of foreigner’s, Busan was a place we yet again didn’t need the local language to get by. It was helpful to know a bit though.
Our Koreans friends wanted to practice their English with us and our English speaking friends that wanted to learn Korean started to slip away from us and drift into a more Korean bubble, and good on them. Some of these Anglophones were looking for a relationship with a Korean girl (or boy), others were so in love with the language, culture, and history, they wanted to attend a Korean university and therefore they needed their language skills to be much higher. For both, the desire and motivation was huge.
But what about me and Kalie? Well, I personally just wanted to be able to read some street signs to know what things were or especially to know what I wanted to order in a restaurant.
I watched a video about the Korean language that gave some history on it. It was essentially created to be a simple language to learn how to read and write. The video stated that you could learn how to read it in about 45 minutes. As I sat on a bus from work to my home, I was able to teach myself how to read Korea. Now obviously, I’m not talking about reading novels, but I’m talking about knowing the phonetic sounds the Korean characters make. So once you know the word, you can know how to read it on a restaurant menu! Jackpot!
I had little internal desire to know more than the basics of Korean, although I did try to Pimsleur method for a bit. It was somewhat helpful but I found myself never being able to really use it and I didn’t have the drive or desire to force my Korean out into the world.
The next stop on our journey took us to another place with a foreign language, Saudi Arabia. Just looking at Arabic confused me. It looks cool sure, but I never saw myself being able to use it while in Saudi. Every waking hour was spent in English so what was the point for me to learn Arabic apart from knowing when my students were saying something rude or making a good one liner joke? In any case, both were rare occasions.
After that came Singapore and Singapore has 4 official languages. English is one of them so, you see where this is headed and I’lll spare you the details.
Now we’re at present day, we’re living in Portugal. Something has changed. Kalie and I have a deep desire to learn Portuguese. We’re still confronted if not haunted by the same problems as before such as a lot of people speak English here, we spend most of our day speaking English to each other, most of our friends are first language English speakers, etc. However, our mentality has shifted.
Our philosophy is that we should honor the place where we’re living by trying to speak the local language as much as possible at minimum. Since we’re hoping to be here more than a year or two, we would like to become fluent and have our 2 year old daughter know Portuguese as her second language. We don’t want to be those parents where they’re out with their kid, and the kid is translating for them everywhere. We know based on our experiences in other places how language is connected to so many parts of culture and that can impact your experience in a place.
We want to be able to enjoy the wonderful people of Portugal more and the only way we see that to be possible is by knowing the language at a higher level.
Our “why” is so huge and it’s out in front of us so much that when we’re feeling unmotivated or that we’re getting stuck, we remember our “why” and that gives us the push to open the app, read the article in Portuguese instead of translating it, or speaking Portuguese on the street especially when we more or less know how to say what we’re trying to say.
So what have we done to learn and how much progress have we made? Well being true video creators at heart, we’ve made some videos about our language journey, which you can check out here and if you’re trying to learn Portuguese specifically, we will leave you some links of people we’ve used and/or recommend.
Portuguese with Carla (The Journey)
Learn European Portuguese Online (Mia Esmeriz Academy)
*some of these are affiliate links so we might get a commission if you decide to purchase anything, however, it’s at no additional cost to you.
That time we met up with our Portuguese teachers for the first time face to face after 5 months of studying their materials.
That time we tried to “learn” Portuguese in 7 days by using the Nathaniel Drew method.
That time a self taught polyglot (speaker of several languages) gave us the motivation we need to learn a language.
