The Language Of Brazil
Picture this
You are in Rio de Janeiro. You’re walking down Ipanema on a cool night. It’s a windy 72 degrees and the moon is bright.
You want to get a drink, so you look for a nice place to sit.
Then, you see a woman. She looks exactly like your dream girl. Perfect height, perfect skin tone, perfect face.
You look at her and she looks at you. She keeps her gaze locked on you. This is it. All those months of dreaming about meeting a Brazilian woman and sweeping her off her feet is actually becoming reality.
At each step, you think about what to say. You are thinking in English.
“Wait, how do I say hello in Portuguese again?” you ask yourself.
You get nervous. You don’t know how to approach her. That’s when I come in.
“E ai, tudo bem com voce?”
You look at me with envy. You can’t believe you just blew it. It was the perfect opportunity to meet your dream girl and you didn’t even get to swing your bat, let alone strike out.
If only you took the time to learn the language of Brazil.
The Facts
The official language of Brazil is Portuguese. Some people think Brazilians speak Spanish or that they can understand it.
No.
Your Spanish won’t be enough when you visit Brazil, so learn Portuguese.
Also, Brazilians rarely speak another language. If Spanish won’t be enough, then you should assume English definitely won’t suffice.
Brazil is like America. People don’t need to know another language to have a decent life. Brazilians have their own media, food, sports industry, fashion industry, domestic economy, etc.
A Brazilian can never speak a lick of English and have a fulfilling life.
You will have to crack open those books and learn Brazilian Portuguese.
Common Excuses
Here are some common excuses from guys who go to Brazil and don’t learn Portuguese.
“I just don’t have the time” – Let’s be honest here. You have enough time to practice Portuguese everyday. You’d just rather post on Facebook or watch TV.
“The Portuguese learning materials are too expensive” – There are tons of free resources on the Internet for Brazilian Portuguese acquisition. If you want to learn the language of Brazil, you won’t use the lack of money to buy textbooks as an excuse. Don’t buy Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur. Check out my article about learning Portuguese here.
“There aren’t any Brazilians in my city to practice with” – You are reading this right now online. There are tons of Brazilians online and you can speak to them.
“I’m just not good with learning new languages”– Lame excuse. You won’t be good at something new. Were you good at reading the first time you started? No. You practiced. That’s all it takes.
My Motivation
In order to really find motivation to speak Portuguese, you have to figure out why you want to learn it. Are you interested in working in Brazil?
Would learning Portuguese help you learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Capoeira from Brazilian masters?
Are you interested in dating the women on a serious level?
I took four semesters of Brazilian Portuguese in college and even I didn’t understand exactly why I wanted to learn it in the beginning. We were required to take a foreign language and I had a cousin who spoke fluent Portuguese, so I said why not?
Before Portuguese, I took Spanish and Japanese. Those courses didn’t go so well.
After speaking with my cousin and doing some research on my own, I decided to take Portuguese. But I still didn’t have a real reason.
Not until I got my passport.
Getting a passport is when I took Portuguese seriously. I went from hardly paying attention in class to being the top student.
I was the #1 student in my Portuguese course. I went from struggling in Spanish and Japanese to being bored in Portuguese class because I knew all the answers.
Getting a passport and realizing that going to Brazil was actually possible motivated me to take the language of Brazil seriously.
I didn’t learn another language until I found a reason to learn it.
I was 21 years old and I discovered a passport was really a key to knowledge.
Your Unique Reason To Learn Portuguese
You have to stop making excuses to why you won’t learn Portuguese. The truth is if you aren’t learning it, it’s because you don’t want to.
You know exactly why you want to go to Terra do Brasil and you know exactly what you need to do to get it. And I bet it involves learning the language of Brazil.
Find your motivation; get passionate about it. You have to become borderline obsessive to learn a language. Stick to it and you will be speaking Portuguese in no time.
Don’t give up.