From Fluency to Feeling
How learning the Portuguese language opened my mind
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Before meeting my wife, I’d never learned another language.
Of course, I’d tried. My Duolingo profile held around ten different languages I’d attempted for a few days or weeks in a row, but without any long-term success.
But all that changed when I met my now-wife and moved to Brazil.
Over the next few months, I was exposed to Portuguese daily. Due to the intensity of my exposure, it only took me around 9 months to achieve a level of conversational fluency in the language and just a few more months after that to reach a C1 level of proficiency on the CEFR language-learning scale.
After all this time, I can truly say that learning the Portuguese language has fundamentally changed how I think. It opened my eyes to see the world in a different way.
You may imagine that I mean something like: “I learned about another culture and broadened my intellectual horizons.” But while this is also true, I mean something on a far deeper level.
Becoming bilingual — and in particular in Portuguese — radically shifted how I actually think about the world around me, and made me a more empathetic, considerate, and mindful person.
Before we begin, I should mention that many of the linguistic aspects I will mention in this article are not entirely unique to Portuguese, and do appear in other languages like Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and so on.
However, due to my personal experience with Portuguese, I will focus on these elements exclusively from my perspective rather than attempting to give a comprehensive view which includes other languages.
So how, then, did learning Portuguese alter my perception of the world?
Who does the action?
For those of us who speak English, it would seem unnatural to utter a sentence without including the subject, except in the case of a command or a direct question.
For example, I can say “Stop right there!”
I do not need to include a subject, because, within the context, it will be clear to whom I am speaking.
However, imagine if I said something like this: “I like my friend. Is really nice.”
It would seem unnatural.
Verb conjugations in English are generally not person-specific, and therefore we must always include the subject of the sentence in order to clearly indicate who is doing the action, or to whom the sentence is referring.
In Portuguese, however, this is not the case.
Verbs are conjugated very specifically according to mood, tense, subject, and so on.
So for example, in English we say “I do” and “you do,” whereas these would be two separate conjugations of the verb “to do” in Portuguese.
Initially, this made Portuguese verb conjugations quite difficult for me. Imagine learning something like 50–60 distinct forms for each verb that you use, as opposed to the typical 4–5 conjugations found in English.
However, as I began mastering the use of verbs in Portuguese, I began to realize that it fundamentally changes how I think about action in a sentence.
Why?
Because you can often speak without using the subject.
For example, if someone spills a glass of juice, I will genuinely feel slightly different speaking about it in Portuguese as opposed to English.
In English, I must say “You spilled the juice on the floor,” whereas in Portuguese I have the option of speaking without using the word “you,” thereby eliminating the need to mentally place a strong sense of blame on the person to whom I am speaking.
While Portuguese still allows one to indicate blame in the same way as English, the linguistic flexibility required me to be a bit more mindful of how I use the subject when referring to someone performing an action.
This mindful approach to subject usage profoundly changed how I ascribe blame to others, but also how I give and receive permission to and from others as well.
Portuguese has a beautiful two-word verb which translates roughly into English like “it can be.” When a Portuguese speaker uses this phrase, they are generally telling you “It’s up to you, there’s no problem with it to me.”
If I ask my wife if I can try a bite of the meal she ordered, English demands that she respond to me with a strong “yes” or “no” answer. Portuguese, however, allows her to respond with “it can be.”
This creates a highly contextual response where I can determine what she means based on her facial expression, tone of voice, and so on without her outright telling me in a way which could appear rude.
As an American, I initially found these verbs to be difficult to understand. When someone would tell me “it can be,” I often had to directly ask if they meant “yes” or “no,” because my ability to read the context of the situation was severely lacking.
After becoming fluent, however, I found that my ability to pay attention to the person’s facial expression, tone of voice, body language, and so on would often provide me with a subtle answer to the question I was asking, if I was mindful enough.
While it may seem trivial, it truly changed how I think about verbs and action in everyday contexts.
However, there’s another very critical aspect of Portuguese which may seem even more strange to English speakers, and which profoundly affected my perception of the world.
To be, or not to be
English has only one form of the verb “to be.”
But wait, we change it all the time, right?
“I am,” “You are,” “She is,” and so on. It’s always changing depending on who speaks. But only the form of the verb changes, not the inherent meaning.
Portuguese, however, has two distinct forms of the verb “to be.”
One version of this verb refers to things which are more or less intrinsic, solid, and unchanging, while the other version refers to things which can change.
So for example, we would use the same verb for “I am European” and “I am happy,” whereas these would be two different forms of the verb in Portuguese, because the first one is considered permanent and unchanging, while the latter would be considered temporary and subject to change.
This, in particular, forced me to reconstruct how I perceive states of being. Portuguese uses these two different verbs in all tenses, and thus one must even extend this concept to the past and future.
It may seem simple, but it isn’t.
Imagine that you want to say “When I was a child, I liked cartoons.”
I am no longer a child, so do I use the permanent verb or the temporary one?
These were the sorts of questions which eventually led me to view “being” in a completely new way, through the lens of the Portuguese language.
Despite the fact that your childhood passes, it’s still considered to be permanent, because it is an intrinsic state of being at the time.
Again, it may seem subtle, but when you use these verbs on a daily basis they rewire your thinking to make you extremely mindful of whether something is intrinsic and permanent or temporary and changing.
Conclusion
Ultimately, learning a language reshaped my thinking about the world in subtle yet noticeable ways.
Despite the fact that I’ll always remain a native speaker of English , Portuguese has slowly become my favorite language to use in day-to-day speech. It forces me to be mindful of my use of words, and more empathetic in the way I choose to speak to others.
However, while Portuguese specifically reshaped my perceptions, I believe that learning any other language can open your eyes to a new way of seeing the world.
Whether it’s German, Japanese, Arabic, French, or Portuguese, pick up a language and master it.
It will give you the ability to see through the eyes of those who speak the language, and you will never see the world the same again.
