One thing I regret is that I never learned Portuguese. I think it’s the most beautiful language in the world. Just the way it sounds mesmerizes me.
I envy people who learn languages easily. I’m not one of them, though. For me, learning to speak Spanish so fast and so well required such an effort that my brain still hurts when I think about it. I don’t see the point of learning the basics of a language. If I can’t get to the point of complete fluency, then why bother?
Learning a new language requires that you open up a space within your mind, within your personality for this new identity that will speak it, feel it, and breathe it. Sadly, at this point there is no space in me for Portuguese.
Clarissa's Blog 
Typical East European who speaks 5 or 6 languages but envies people who learn languages so “easily.” Seriously, though, you could probably learn some Portuguese without too much extra effort.
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“Hispanoparlante que aprende português, esquece o espanhol e nunca fala português direito.” I was warned of this and did not heed the warning / did not care, but it is true, so if perfection matters … think twice unless one of these languages is the language you speak at home or in your country of residence.
Portuguese is “easy for Spanish speakers” and I am good at languages. Nonetheless, after 2 years of study wherein I was a star (and it was my fifth Romance language, and I have Latin), I went to Brazil and had major language learning headaches. This is perhaps because I was in graduate courses and also had major bureaucratic and legal things to deal with, all in Portuguese, but still it was not easy.
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I’m afraid of the language confusion, too! Even here in Quebec, I keep saying “gracias” to people.
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Wow, you don’t learn languages easily? Considering the fluency with which you already speak so many langages…wow. I’m impressed.
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Thank you, Melissa and Jonathan! There are, however, people who have a real capacity for languages. For me, it’s always effort and plodding. Like my German teacher used to say about me and my sister: “Molly has a real capacity for languages, while Clarissa… Is hard-working.” 🙂
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It always bothers me when people say I am good at learning languages. It is all about hard work, and I have met very few people with a special talent to learn languages.
Now: the Portuguese language. When I was an undergraduate student majoring in Spanish my professors kept me for learning Portuguese for the reason Z mentioned above, and there is some truth in that. But I was encouraged to learn Portuguese in Graduate School and it was the most, if not the only, valuable intellectual experience Graduate School brought me.
Portuguese is beautiful because, among many other reasons, it uses the future subjunctive all the time, and you can split a verb in conditional or future indicative inserting a direct complement pronoun between the stem and the ending. For example, while in Spanish we place this pronoun before the verb (lo tendré, I will have it) in Portuguese we can say (o terei, terei-o, and tê-lo-ei). Now imagine the poetry in Portuguese…
Talking about the beautiful literature in Portuguese. I had to read 80 novels and essays from Brazil and Portugal for my Graduate Schhol qual. exam (the students in the years before mine and after mine only had to read between 15 and 20 novels and essays, by the way), and this also was a wonderful intellectual experience. I think that you would love Brazilian naturalism and realism. O Ateneu, by Raul Pompéia, is like La ciudad y los perros, but good. O cortiço, by Aluísio Azevedo, depicts the urbanization phonomenon like no one. Adolfo Caminha’s Bom Crioulo is a homosexual and interracial love triangle, something absolutely unique in nineteenth-century literature if I am not mistaken.
And of course: Machado de Assis and the best writer ever, Graciliano Ramos.
I can talk about Portuguese and literature in Portuguese forever.
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I’m so ignorant about literature in Portuguese that it’s scary. Maybe I should take your reading list and just follow it. I keep resolving to do this every single year but then always do something else.
My ignorance is daunting.
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For you, learning Portugueuse would be the easiest language to learn. I’m so bas in English because I’m lazy.
The separatist leader of Québec, Pauline Marois, is unable (sic) to learn English. Holy crap!
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I think your English is very impressive.
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Hey, thank you for this reply. I didn’t see that until now!
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De rien. 😄
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Merci! 😃😃
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But, beginning this fall, I’ll try to become bilingual in speaking and writing. This is already the case in listening and reading, since I scored 955 out of 990 in the TOEIC test in June.
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Congratulations! That’s huge. Good for you, man.
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I don’t think it’s so huge, but it’s a little surprising for me. 😃
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I have been contemplating starting a new language/reviving an old one dropped along the way. But then I think of all the things you said and am not so sure, even though I know far fewer additional languages than you (1-2 depending on how you count).
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