There are moments in life that get packaged into “A Tale” rather than just “a story”. You tell it practically the same way each time you share it, and you tend to share it a lot. Each new person you meet, they’re going to hear your Tales as part of the get-to-know-you process. One of the ones that we tell (ok, John tells) frequently is prompted by conversations about the difficulty of learning the Portuguese language.

In the very early days of our arrival, new friends introduced us to a local liquor – Licor Beirão, commonly referred to simply as “Beirão”. Commonly it is served on ice with a squeeze of lemon or, if you want to be all claaaaaassy, with a rub of lemon along the rim. As you may know, John doesn’t really drink much – he’s not a teetotaler, he just normally doesn’t like it. This often intrigues people enough that they want to get him to try all sorts of things, and it almost never goes anywhere. However, it turns out he kinda likes his Beirão! Which is a nice treat because sometimes he feels a little childish having a coke when the adults are having cocktails. There was only one problem with his new drink of choice: he can’t pronounce it to save his life.

If you’re one of our readers already here in Portugal, or if you’ve done a bit of language study in preparation, you may already see what the problem is. Most languages (or groups of closely-related languages, probably) have sounds that are unique to them. It’s obvious when you hear people talk about, for example, speaking Chinese; we’re told that slight differences in closely-related sounds can change a sentence from “please pass the salt” to “your mother makes her best money during Fleet Week.” Or whatever. This is actually true of a lot of languages, though, even if it doesn’t seem as exotic. Heck, they don’t make much use of the letters j, x, or z here, and when they encounter words from languages that use those letters it gets tricky. Maybe you’ve heard of the exotic Azores islands? That’s not how it’s spelled natively; try “Açores”. Anyway, on top of learning the vocabulary of a new language, we’re also having to learn the sometimes very subtle differences in how you intuit the sounds of some words.

In the case of John’s new happy-time juice, it all comes down to that “ão” sound. Most Americans begin by saying it like “ow, I hurt myself,” but that’s not right. We don’t really make this sound in English, but try to imagine making the sound in the back of your throat, combined with most of a glottal stop. (If you really want to take a crack at it, here’s a good video to help you.) Anyway, this isn’t meant to be a language lesson; the point is, the word “Beirão” has that sound in it. So, okay, John sounds like a tourist when he says it, what’s the big deal, right? If only.

Imagine you are a bartender at random-dot-tavern somewhere in America. A person comes in, walks up to the bar, pulls out an English phrasebook, studies it, and then says “may I pleez haf a Boodweezer?” Now, you don’t serve “Boodweezer” but you’re in a bar, you serve drinks, and a person has walked up to you and said this. Between the context clues (location, typical tasks etc…) and their half-assed pronunciation, you know what they want, right? (You may judge their choice if you’d like, that’s not the point of this story.) Well. We would be asked by a server, often in English but either way, if we would like something to drink. John would take a crack at it – “May I have a Beirao?”, or maybe even “quero um Beirao” or “gostaria de Beirao”. But, no matter the sentence he used, the server would like at him like a dog being shown a magic trick. They really really really want to understand you, but they just don’t. Gesturing at a menu, or interpretive dance, or John (increasingly flustered) trying to alternate his pronunciation, and they’d just stare. Again, this is the difference between “Bay-row” (with the “ow”-ouchie sound) vs. “Bey-rão” with the elusive nasal sound. Boodweezer. This happened a dozen times if it happened once. Eventually, they would say “oh! You mean <noise that sounds exactly like what John said, except probably not>!” They would then typically offer a brief tutorial on how to say it properly that did no good whatsoever before toddling off, chuckling, and preparing our drinks.

Lisa finally cracked the code, or at least cracked a work-around. She suggested that he include one more piece of context evidence: say “Licor Beirão” instead of just “Beirão” since that’s its full trademark. Sure enough, doing that seemed to make just enough of a correct sound that it smoothed over most problems. To this day, though, what baffles John is that the noise he was making, while he’d never try to claim was accurate, seemed like it was good enough when factoring in all of the context clues, and yet was practically incomprehensible to native Portuguese speakers. And, naturally, he’s traumatized by it enough that he dreads having to say any word with that sound in it… of which there are hundreds if not thousands. We’re both better at saying it than we used to be, but we’ll probably never not think about the chaos that may be about to unfurl along with a drink order.

There is a narrative that we’ve seen on various immigrant/expat forums in the couple of years since we got serious about moving. The gist of it is that, while Portugal’s national language is Portuguese, English-speaking immigrants can take comfort in the fact that English is taught widely in the schools here and the odds are good that you’ll be able to interact with English speakers, particularly amongst the younger generations. We aren’t going to call anybody a liar for saying this, but at a minimum there is probably some important context missing. For example, the two hottest of hot spots for tourism in Portugal can be roughly described as the greater Lisbon metropolitan region and the Algarve. (Yes, other places get tourists, and the Azores are lovely, but these places get the greatest concentration of foreign visitors as far as we can tell.) These also happen to be the areas of Portugal at the top of many immigrants’ wish lists. This means that many immigrants head for the places that have long had economic incentives for Portuguese who speak other languages fluently, particularly English.

However, not everybody moves to Lisbon or Faro. Once you get outside of those areas, the math gets a little trickier. Consider: most of us (speaking to our fellow Americans for the moment, but you can follow along regardless I expect) had a foreign language requirement in high school if not in college as well. Think back to your time in those classes. Did everybody take it seriously? Did they enjoy it? To the best of your recollection, what percentage of students in your let’s-say-French class were able to hold a free form conversation in French (that is, not just able to study the vocabulary for a particular module that week, but actually able to follow along where ever a conversation might go) during Finals Week of your last year in class? Now, ponder your fellow classmates as the years have gone by. What percentage of those people maintained whatever fluency they had, 3 years out from school? 5 years? 10? Now, why would anyone think that the Portuguese are any different from us?

We try not to build conclusions off of anecdotes, but at the least a few counter-examples to the narrative can be useful. So far in about 3 months, the number of interactions we’ve had with Portuguese people from whom we “needed” something and were able to converse with in English has been…. very low. We had two interactions that were really the same thing, twice: when each of us went to the hospital to arrange doctor’s appointments for the first time, the clerk who helped each of us either spoke English or sat next to someone who helped. That’s great. And the occasional restaurant worker has had English. However, the most common tourist in Braga is from Spain. The need for English here is minimal for the vast majority of Portuguese, so it’s a skill that doesn’t get a lot of use. Many of the restaurants we’ve been to have not had an English-speaker in them. (Nothing quite like a Chinese restaurant owner and an American immigrant struggling together in their newly-adopted tongue to try and get a meal ordered.) Nobody spoke English when we went to get internet & phones activated. Likewise when we needed to get a canister of gas to supply our stove. The very friendly electrician down the street who did some work for us didn’t have so much as a “hello” in their bag. Deli counter workers… butchers… dry cleaners… the list goes on and on.

So, why do we bother to write all this, if we acknowledge at the top that we don’t expect to be catered to? Like we said, we’ve seen this narrative a lot in the various immigrant Facebook groups and message boards we’ve been to. “Oh you’ll be fine, the Portuguese speak very good English.” Yeah, some of them do for sure, but your plan “A” for communicating here absolutely should not be to rely on the bilingual graces of your hosts. You should be grateful when somebody throws you a lifeline, but you should be planning on learning the language, post-haste. Not only is it good manners, but it’s just plain necessary to conduct your life in most parts of Portugal.