For the Love of Language

“O que?”

I had again been asked something in Portuguese, a language that at the time I did not speak with any fluency. I sat in the corner of a cramped living room in Brazil, while the other adults in the room continued their conversation. I felt completely lost as words and phrases flowed around me, just out of reach. The odd collection of sounds registered in my brain, which desperately tried to make sense of it all.

I had been in Brazil for maybe 3 or 4 months at that point, as part of my time as a Mormon missionary. Two of those months had been spent in São Paulo at a training center, where we’d learned what was expected of us as missionaries and as much Portuguese as could reasonably be stuffed into so short a time. Then we were sent out to Goiânia, and from there to the small farming town of Rio Verde (pronounced Hio Verge for english speakers)

Before I had begun my mission, I had taken three years of Spanish in middle and high school, then four years of German in high school and college. The Spanish had barely stuck, but the German had gone well enough. I had hoped I could be sent to a German-speaking country to use that skill and continue honing it, but that’s not how mission assignments go. I knew that Portuguese was sort of like Spanish, so I hoped it would come back and be better than ever.

It did not.

I regularly fell into German grammar structures, or making assumptions about Portuguese based on false cognates. I heard people in São Paulo respond to questions like, “Já ouviu falar?” (have you heard about it) with “Já,” and my German-primed brain said, “Aha! It’s a borrow word from German!”, when in reality questions are just frequently answered with a word other than “yes” or “no”, and they were literally just saying “already” as a valid response.

Trying to hold a conversation was completely futile in those early weeks outside of the training center. Whenever I went to say something, I struggled to find the correct words, searching for so long that the person I was talking to could usually guess or infer what I wanted to say before I could remember it, and would helpfully supply me the word. This rhythm of me starting a sentence I couldn’t finish got to me so much one day that I broke down crying, frustrated at my progress.

Looking back, I was holding myself up to a near-impossible standard. I had been in the country for less than six months, of course I couldn’t speak fluently!

Today, I love learning languages, and trying to piece together context based on what snippets I can read or pick out of a conversation. I speak Brazilian Portuguese fluently, and I’ve slowly worked to build up my skills in Spanish, French, and more recently getting back into German. Some of that has been using apps like Duolingo (or more recently Babbel), but also online resources like Coffee Break Languages or the Easy German podcast. My wife and I spent a bit of time learning Scottish Gaelic too, and we found a great site for diving in and learning more about the language and culture.

Identifying languages and meaning opens up whole new aspects of life, windows into other cultures and customs, and just how some languages and cultures are closer together than we realize.

The fact that the phrase “nossa” in Brazilian Portuguese, used in the same way as “oh my god” or “wow”, literally translates to “our”, as in “our lady” (“nossa senhora,” derived from catholicism).

The way we talk about time. In English, we say, “What time is it?”, in Portuguese it’s, “Que horas são?” (what hours are they), and in German it’s, “Wie viel Uhr ist es?” (how many hours is it). All communicating the same thing, but in different ways.

The words that don’t quite translate. Portuguese has “saudade,” a sense of longing and missing someone or something stronger than just saying “I miss you.” Or German wanderlust, which English just took wholesale and ran with, a need to get out into the world and see what’s there.

But language is more than just clever turns of phrase or grammar rules. It’s the glue that holds groups of people together. Learning a language does more than open a window, it’s a doorway into that space, a way to step foot, even for a moment, into someone else’s experience. It’s these shared words and concepts that build communities, and when recorded can shed light on the human experience of people far away or long ago. My wife recently wrote an excellent review of Tom Hiddleston’s new miniseries on Pompeii, in which he brings to life the people who lived and died during the eruption at Vesuvius in a way I had never experienced before.

Sitting in that small living room all those years ago, I realized that the sounds flying around me weren’t just nonsense any more. They were words, sentences, struggles of a single mother trying to raise her son. Despite the gravity of the conversation that was dawning on me, I smiled wide, my brain making sense of everything going on around me. Someone noticed me, and asked what was happening. I responded simply, “Eu entendo.”

I understand.