How I learned Portuguese
People often ask me how I came to be fluent in Portuguese. When they learn that my husband is Brazilian, their first assumption is that I met him in Brazil, and he taught me Portuguese. But the truth is that I met him in Texas and taught him English. How we met 37 years ago is a story for a telenovela, but that will have to wait for another blog post . . .
The first language I studied was French, which I learned to love in high school. I had a wonderful teacher for three years; Mademoiselle Williams was lots of fun and spoke the language well. She had loads of self-effacing stories about her cultural and language errors while living in France, and I adored her. Back in those days foreign languages were required in college, so I took an advanced placement test to meet the requirement before matriculating at the University of Colorado in Boulder to study theater. But when I got to campus I decided I loved French and wanted to take classes. I signed up for a sophomore course but was told I couldn’t take it because I had tested in AP to the 400 (senior) level. So I bravely enrolled in a French literature course.
As it turned out, the professor was a native speaker from Marseilles, and he might as well have been speaking a language from another planet. I got a class drop card (no digital those days!) and presented it to him at the beginning of the next session. He sniffed and told me in French (context and verbal cues were the only reason I understood him) that he was busy, and I could give it to him at the end of the class. I sat and looked out the window and daydreamed instead of paying attention. Wait! I understood him! I scrunched up my forehead and listened. Nope, couldn’t understand him. More daydreaming. Wait! I did understand him! That day I learned that trying hard to understand is counterproductive. I persisted in the course and ended up taking four semesters of very difficult French and doing pretty well.
Fast forward to 1975, four years later, when I landed in Manaus, Brazil with a traveling companion who spoke only English. She completely relied on me for our linguistic, and sometimes literal survival. I picked up on Portuguese quickly and after four months I was able to converse. I ran out of money, so I returned to the US.
Back in the US, I worked in Boulder, Colorado for a few years, then moved to Miami. I made acquaintance with Brazilians and met with them to converse from time to time. In 1979 I went back to school at University of Florida to study pre-med, with a plan of going to physician assistant (PA) school. Since my first college major had been in the arts, I was faced with an intimidating schedule of science courses. I needed to take 15 credits each term to qualify for financial aid, but what courses to take that were easy, to offset the heavy science load?
Voilà! University of Florida has one of the two highest ranked departments teaching spoken Brazilian Portuguese (the other was Michigan) and I took every course they offered while I was at Florida, all the way to senior level Brazilian literature. My teacher was the inimitable Alfred Hower, a highly respected professor of Portuguese and Spanish who had an endless knowledge of the most arcane aspects of the language. He was editor of Crônicas Brasileiras, a compendium of the uniquely Brazilian literary form like op-ed pieces but more literary. He used the book to help learners read, speak and write brasileiro falado (spoken Brazilian Portuguese) as it is used in real life. He was a stickler for every detail, a man who wore a suit and tie to class on the hottest days in Gainesville, and a real mensch. He died in 1992, and I shall forever owe him a debt of gratitude for everything he taught me. I advanced to and completed every Portuguese course offered at Florida, including the highest-level courses in Brazilian literature.
Then I was off to the Physician Assistant (PA) Program at Duke University, and though my love for Portuguese never waned, I didn’t have many chances to speak the language. After graduation I took my first job as a PA at a migrant and community health center in Colorado. Since I didn’t actually speak Spanish, I’m a bit ashamed to admit I overstated my skills (I knew I would pick it up quickly), and was in fact fluent enough, at least in the medical setting, in a few weeks. I used Spanish in my clinical practice throughout my career, and half of my patient panel in family medicine were Spanish-speaking only.
I left the post at the community health center when I was offered a position as a PA for Westinghouse Corporation at their nuclear plant construction site in Rio state, Brazil, providing primary care and overseeing specialist referrals for their American employees and their families. The day-to-day work interacting with colleagues and everyday people took my Portuguese fluency to a higher level. So did watching telenovelas (soap operas that aired at night) and the nightly news on TV.
Two years later I returned to the US and took a job in Austin, Texas. One night I went to a party and a very good-looking young man sidled up to me and said in Portuguese: “Hi, want to teach me English?” I sniffed and told him he needed to get a new line, ‘cuz that one wasn’t working for me. Long story short, we were married three months later.
We spoke only Portuguese until he came home one day after working stoop labor planting trees across the southern US and told me he refused to speak Portuguese anymore. Only English, he said. To this day we mainly speak English, with a lot of code switching. After many years living in the US we now live in Portugal, and I have increased my number of fluent languages to five: English, Spanish, French (well, give me a couple of weeks and it will be true again), European Portuguese and brasileiro falado.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I was suddenly struck by a deeply buried memory, that I think explains some of my love of and connection to Brazilian Portuguese. I was thirteen years old when the bossa nova album by Stan Getz and João Gilberto was released. My dad was an avid jazz sax player and Stan Getz fan, and he bought the album as soon as it came out. I grew up listening to jazz on a state-of-the-art monaural “hi-fi,” but my dad had just purchased a new stereo system. I listened to Getz/Gilberto over and over for hours, lying on the floor next to the turntable with my dad’s fancy new headphones. Brasileiro falado entered my consciousness and my blood at that time, lying dormant until I was 24 years old and stepped off the plane in Manaus. At that moment all those language neurons started firing and I fell in love with Portuguese and Brazil—all over again.