Portuguese? Sim! Easy? Não!

If you want to learn French or German, Italian or Japanese, you’ll have an exhausting array of choices. (I put learning Spanish, at least in the U.S., in a category of its own. It’s so prevalent it’s hard to avoid picking up at least a little.) You can choose among immersion style conversation (Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone), intuitive computer game style workouts (Auralog), and shelves and shelves of workbooks, listen in your car, and book/cd combinations. But venture off the path beaten in the aisles of your local Megabooks or library, and you will truly be in another world—following a narrow path with little signage.

I’m on a quest to learn Portuguese, and not the Brazilian kind. I have an idea for a novel set in medieval Portugal and I know from long-ago travel in Portugal that finding translated resource material, even the glossy coffee table books sold at cathedrals, is a quest not for the faint-hearted. All of my favorite language programs are either produced in Brazilian Portuguese or not at all. Think you can find everything you could possibly want by googling it? Take a spin with European or Continental Portuguese. I did run through the 10 lessons of Continental Pimsleur in ten days, and now I can introduce myself, but I don’t think that’s going to be very relevant to reading scholarly works on the 14th century. I’m working through the only other program I’ve so far been able to find, Portuguese in 3 Months (Hugo), but it’s not going to give me anywhere near enough expertise.

Among other ideas I’ve explored are finding a group on Meetup.org (only a Brazilian one in my area); local university courses (all in the area assume that you already speak Spanish), and Live Mocha (not bad, but I need to move faster with heavier grammar). Apparently there’s no market for teaching Portuguese.

It saddens me that learning can be so market driven. Portugal has no strategic political importance like Arabic or Chinese; no cool factor like Japanese (anyone remember when THAT was considered a strategic language); no perceived daily utility like Spanish, and no place in glamorous travel or graduate studies, like French, Italian or German. Still, isn’t it worth learning something for the joy of it, to pursue an interest not shared by everyone, to travel in another culture through the window of their language?

The positive effect of this quest is that I am ever more determined to speak it, and I’m filled with daydreaming about how surprised natives will be if I actually manage to communicate when there. It’s really a beautiful language, filled with soft and wispy sounds, like the beautiful and heartbreaking sounds of the national music of fado. I just with it wasn’t going to be such a solitary pleasure.