Taking Portuguese Classes
Last week Marty and I started taking Portuguese lessons with the Português Língua de Acolhimento, or PLA. These are free government language classes for immigrants. So far, so good, but it is a little intense. Three hours twice a week, and my smartphone-addled brain is not used to concentrating on one thing for that long anymore. Still, I’m enjoying it, and it’s really a critical piece to us building a home and a life here.
Portuguese Immersion
I feel like I’m back in high school. That’s because I am literally back in a high school, that’s where the classes I’m taking are held. When did high school students get so young, anyway? Or is that just Portugal? I asked Marty to hold my class handouts while I paid for coffee, that led to a joke about him carrying my books, and I had this weird almost-nostalgia feeling. Marty and I met in University so we never shared a high school experience, and neither of us were what you’d call the popular kids (he was President of the Chess Club). So it was a complicated feeling of “I’d like to have known you in high school but maybe it’s better that we didn’t.”
The class is immersion style, which means that the professor teaches in Portuguese, and we hang on for dear life. I am SO glad we’ve spent the last six months working with a tutor to pick up some basics. It really has to be immersion, because the first languages in the class are many: so far I’ve counted English, Spanish, French, Ukrainian, and Urdu. The Ukrainian lady offered me some tissues because I was sniffling (allergies, now a fall thing for me), and that led to me downloading a Ukrainian pack on Google Translate. I’m making connections!
Oh, Google Translate, where would I be without you? The professor himself pulls it up on screen to give instructions to the class, switching to each language as required. I’ve turned on Live Translate several times to follow his commentary, which worked well during the orientation class but not so much since. That’s okay, I find myself concentrating harder when he’s talking and I can get the gist of it, because he’s very good at enunciating and speaking distinctly, unlike my usual experience of Portuguese.
It’s kind of funny … the professor himself admitted that the Portuguese tend to skip syllables if they aren’t important to the understanding of a word. It’s frustrating to new speakers like myself, and one classmate unflatteringly referred to Portuguese as gibberish. It is most emphatically NOT, and I would challenge him to look at the complexities of English before being such a jerk. Portuguese is spoken fast, and they swallow some syllables, yes. But I’ve heard English speakers do worse. So I plan to make good use of “Por favor, fale devagar.” Or “Please speak slowly.” I’ve gotten SO much kindness and encouragement here when I try to speak to locals.
We spent an entire class on vowels, which I still really suck at. There’s four different ways to sound an “a” and two of them sound identical to me. So I appreciate it when he gets the entire class to read words together and gives correction as we go. This is so incredibly good for my brain, as tiring as it is to begin, and I look forward to the gain in neuroplasticity.
Learning the Language Matters
I think constantly about what this class would be like in the United States or Canada. I remember with discomfort the constant demands of nativists that new arrivals should learn the language: Stop speaking your original language that makes me uncomfortable. And then on the flip side, someone like that moves here and calls the host language gibberish. I have never been comfortable ordering people in Canada or the U.S. to learn English, because there are many reasons why that could be really hard. I don’t think people who know only one language know how hard it can be. But here, I feel that for me it’s an important step to belonging. To building home. Not about erasing my history, I’m in no danger of that. My personal choice is that learning Portuguese is a key part to building community and creating the conditions for “home.”
In 2017 I became an American citizen. At the time, I did it because the government had started challenging and refusing entry to green card holders and we could not afford to be excluded from our house and jobs. So I was a bit cynical about doing it, but went ahead. But then came the citizenship ceremony on July 4th. Yes, I was sworn in as a new citizen on the Fourth of July. Apparently the judge and all the legal clerks involved volunteer to work unpaid on this day because they believe in it. In his address, the judge said that there were 500 people taking the oath today from over 60 countries. His speech was full of optimism and immigrants bringing the best of themselves to America … and as I looked around the packed auditorium I felt decidedly un-cynical. I met the gaze of several others being sworn in, and we all smiled at each other, whispering congratulations. Community-building got a huge head start that day, as these people meant the beautiful words about the American Dream, the legal staff and the new citizens alike. Hope was not dead.
Now that I am a new arrival once again, I think back to that ceremony. I hope the people who became new citizens found their home. I did not, which is why I’m in Braga, starting over. And for the first time I’m learning a new language as part of that. I embrace this challenge as key to my growth and fully having the opportunity to call Portugal home. And I join a long line of immigrants who continue to face this challenge as well.
