Once upon a time . . . I learned another language

Let’s be truthful, twice upon a time I’ve done this; moved somewhere where I had to learn to speak a language other than my own.  The first time, I was an exchange student living in Brasil – I learned to speak Portuguese.  The second, my husband and I took a secondment to Canada, living in a very Francophone area.


That first time, I was 17.  The younger you are, the easier it is to learn a language, and crucially, the easier it is to copy the sounds of that language.  The younger you are, the less likely you are to have a “foreign” accent when you speak.


Before I went on exchange, I was given a series of language cassettes – my cousin collected them from the Brasilian Embassy in Canberra for me.  Given that I was studying for my final exams, I didn’t really put much effort into the language-learning.  I didn’t think much about the logistics of learning the language I’d need to speak; I figured it would sort itself out.


And so it came to pass that on a hot and stormy January night, I arrived at Guarulhos airport.  I could say, “Good day”, “My name is . . .” and the phone number of my first host family in Portuguese.  My first host family had three daughters, and my host father and the eldest daughter spoke English.  The eldest daughter left on exchange herself the week after I arrived and the only conversation that my host father and I ever had in English was the one in which he said, “I will not speak English unless it’s urgent.  You must learn Portuguese.”


I never took formal Portuguese classes.  I never had a Portuguese teacher whose purpose was to teach me the language.  I learned by a technique that is usually referred to as “immersion”, and which sucks for three-to-six-months, depending on your aptitude.  During this time, one of my host sisters lent me her Portuguese grammar book, and I wrote out my own copies of how to conjugate regular verbs, as well as the long list of all of the irregular verbs.  I still have all of those handwritten notes folded up in a dictionary downstairs.


Portuguese, like all Latin-based languages, has clear grammatical rules. In the case of Portuguese, there are six personal pronoun conjugations (think: I, he, she, you, they, we) over multiple tenses (present, past, conditional, future) in both simple (“I danced”) and composite (“I have danced”) forms.  Happily, Brasilians only use four of the six personal pronouns in general conversation, so that cut down what I needed to memorise for everyday use.  There are three groups of regular verbs, and then the large number of irregular verbs.  As far as I can tell, in any language “irregular verb” is the term for “all the good verbs”.  In Portuguese, this means to be (there are two), to have (also two), to go, to see, to come, to be able to, the list goes on.  


Now, most of this made sense to me, but I could not for the life of me work out the two most frequently used verbs – ser and estar.  My dictionary told me that they were both forms of “to be”, but I couldn’t work out what that actually meant in an English sentence.  In Australia, we don’t learn grammar in anywhere near the technical way that Brasilians do, so it took me a while to work out that “to be” was the verb that gives us I am/you are/they are . . . once I worked that out, however, things moved along.  Keep in mind that the only way to learn these building blocks of a language is by repetition, practice and rote learning.  Eventually, it just sticks in your head and you know when it sounds wrong, but it takes time to get to this point.


There’s also pronunciation (can you roll your r?), region-specific words and accents, and not being able to understand a conversation when people are speaking at regular speed.  Oh, and once you can understand them, you still can’t get a response together in a timely manner to join in.  You’re left either not understanding or not being able to join in even when you understand, both of which are very isolating.


The advantage to the manner in which I learned Portuguese was what I needed the language for.  I didn’t need it to run my life – I was living with a host family and they managed the day-to-day stuff.  I didn’t have to make phone calls; I didn’t have to organise things.  What I had to do was go to school and meet people.  I’d already graduated high school in Australia, so I didn’t need to do anything in class – I was allowed to skip exams and tests if I wanted to – I didn’t need to pass the classes.  


Even so, it took three long, lonely months until I understood what people were saying most of the time.  It coincided almost exactly with my 18^th birthday, realising that I knew what people were saying pretty much all of the time.  That was an exciting feeling.  From then on, all I did was have a lot of fun.  I went traveling with friends, I went to parties, I visited places I’d heard about.  There was all the regular “family” type stuff going on too – I was hosted by three separate families over the year that I lived in the town.  


By the end of the year, I was damn good at the language.  My accent was close enough that people assumed that I was Brasilian.  I’d learned the local accent well and used the correct regional words, so people usually correctly guess the region that I lived in.  They would also often comment about a particular difference in my pronunciation of a couple of words that indicated that I may have lived somewhere else in my younger years – this corresponded to the accent of my first host family, who were from a different state and had a different accent.

When I spoke Portuguese, I thought in Portuguese.  I dreamt in Portuguese. For at least a year after I came home, I would struggle to remember certain English words – the Portuguese one would be the first one to my mind.  I could swap between the two languages effortlessly – thinking in English while speaking English; thinking in Portuguese while speaking Portuguese.  My accent and my language skills remained good enough that for many years when I met a Brasilian, they’d always ask where I grew up.  When I said, “Australia,” they’d want to know where my parents grew up.  The notion that an Australian could speak Brasilian Portuguese as well as I did always surprised people.  Even now, all these years later, there are still Portuguese words that come to mind before the English ones – I commonly call my children “meu amor” (my love), I’m still likely to say “Deixa” instead of “Leave it be”.  I can still read in Portuguese, can understand a Brasilian movie or TV show when I see one.


There seems to be a part of my brain that works in Portuguese, that stores all the information that I learned, that only needs a day or two to bring the language back to the forefront of my mind.  I went to Brasil many years after my exchange, while working in Canada.  For the first few hours, I kept throwing French words into Portuguese sentences.  By the end of the first day, I was thinking in Portuguese again, discussing technical details with laboratory staff and making notes, all in Portuguese.  It’s all still there, it seems; it just needs a reason to reactivate.


When it came to my second round at learning another language . . . well, I was older this time, 30 instead of 17.  My reason for learning the language was far more serious – I needed to be able to manage my life, to do my job, in another language.  I had to organise the logistics of adulthood – a bank account, a social insurance number, health insurance, driver’s licence, home and car insurance.  I had to run my laboratory, argue technical points with older, established technicians, learn to understand the differences in how a unionised workforce functions, as opposed to the non-unionised one I’d previously worked in.  All in a language I’d never really spoken well until I arrived.


My husband and I were in the same boat – we’d both learned some French over the years, but nothing beyond a couple of hours a week in a class given by a French teacher (and by French, I mean someone from France.  Which is very, very different from Quebeçois).  Neither of us were anywhere near ready to function like adults in French, and we were certainly not capable of doing our jobs in French the day that we arrived.  This was why we both did an intensive French course at first.


The course itself was very structured and was the same one that was attended by government officials.  There was a pre-course spoken examination to determine your current level of French, and your personal course was designed based on this.  You lived with a local family for the duration of your course, to ensure that you spoke French after hours.  You had your own personal teacher, who worked through the programme designed for you. There were twice-weekly visits to local facilities and attractions where only French was spoken.


Personally, I found this better than the “immersion” I’d had in Brasil.  Given that I was older, this structure probably helped my brain.  It also fast-tracked my learning, because I spent my first few weeks getting used to the language, to the accent, to the way that people spoke.  My previous experience meant that I knew the most crucial question to ask, which is, “How do I say ‘Please repeat that’ and ‘Please slow down’?”


In learning French, I had two significant advantages over my husband – firstly, I’d learned another language before and had a definite aptitude for languages; secondly, the language I’d learned previously was a Latin-based relative of French.  Even before I started learning French, I could “read” a French document and understand (basically) what it meant, as many French words are similar to their Portuguese equivalent.  This skill, it must be said, did not apply to spoken French, because of the very different pronunciation rules.  In (Brasilian) Portuguese, every letter except H is pronounced in a word.  In French, a consonant (or many consonants) at the end of a word are not pronounced at all.  As an example, the words “parle” and “parlent” are both pronounced the same, ignoring the “nt” on the end of the second word.  Of course, like any good language, there is an exception to this – when the word that follows starts with a vowel (a liaison).  So, when you say “How are you?” as “Comment allez vous?” it is pronounce “Com-muh ta-LEE voo”, pronouncing the ‘t’ on comment while ignoring the ‘s’ on vous, but when you ask it in the re-arranged form “Comment vous allez?” you would say “Com-muh voo sa-LEE?”, ignoring the ‘t’ on comment but pronouncing the ‘s’ in vous. 


My previous experience with a Latin-based language also meant that “gender” in language didn’t bother me.  In Portuguese (and French, and Spanish, and Italian), objects can be feminine or masculine (and sometimes neutral, depending on the language).  The possessive (my/your/his/her) is attached to the gender of the object, not the gender of the owner.  In English, you will say “her house” if the object belongs to a woman, “his house” if it belongs to a man.  In French it is always “sa maison” (the feminine possessive), irrespective of the gender of the owner, because “house” is a feminine word.  In a similar vein, you would say “my house” and “my oven” in English, but in French this would be “ma maison” (house is feminine) but “mon four” (oven is masculine).  My husband struggled with the illogical nature of the gender of words.  “Why is it,” he always asked, “that ‘fishing’ is a feminine word, but ‘perfume’ is masculine?  It makes no sense.”


Again, it took a lonely, isolating three months before French fell into place for me.  Three months doesn’t sound like a long time, until you’ve spent three months not quite understanding what’s going on around you.  As always, the telephone took longer, but over two-and-a-half years of my three year secondment was comfortable from the language point of view.  I continued to do language courses for about half of my time in Quebec.  My work also required me to speak (and write) both English and Portuguese.  Entertainingly, my ability to speak French and Portuguese are almost mutually exclusive – once I start thinking in one Latin-based language, the other suffers – if I’m speaking predominantly French, when I speak Portuguese I will frequently throw French words into Portuguese sentences, and vice versa.  Having said this, there seems to be a portion of my brain, separate from the Portuguese spot, which functions entirely in French.  Once it gets activated, I go back to thinking in French, speaking fluently and with confidence.


I don’t get many chances to speak either of these languages anymore.  I tried speaking Portuguese to my eldest when she was a baby . . . but it turns out that speaking a language that isn’t your own to a baby or small child is actually quite challenging.  I do throw the occasional Portuguese or French phrase into conversation, and while my children know what the phrases mean, they don’t actively identify them as a different language.  It’s just one of those odd things that Mummy does.


I do, however, remain very pleased that I got the opportunity to learn other languages properly.  When your first language is English, you can get a little complacent.  In most places, you can find someone who speaks English, so lots of people travel the world without ever having learned anything more than the very, very basics in another language.  Because I speak two Latin-based languages, I find that I can read (and often understand slowly spoken) Spanish and Italian, and I can generally make a good guess at Latin.  I’ve also learned the very basics in a non-Latin language (Mandarin), and understanding how to learn a language helped immensely with that.  And having worked and lived in a place where I wasn’t speaking my native language has also helped me appreciate just how challenging it is to live your day-to-day life outside of the “normal” constraints of language.  How sometimes misunderstanding (or even mishearing) a single word or qualifier can mean that you totally misunderstand the entire conversation.


And just so you know, the two hardest situations to be in when speaking in another language are very different things.  Number one is a medical situation – a doctor, a nurse, a dentist.  The second one?  Well, that would be the hairdresser.