I was practising Portuguese daily for 10 months and was beginning to struggle with my motivation. I could not understand it when I went on holiday to Portugal and natives were speaking to me, and I could not string a sentence together without spending an eternity trying to conjugate verbs in my head.
So I let my subscription to PP lapse and accepted that this idea of learning Portuguese was just not going to happen.
Fast forward 9 months, where on a holiday to Madeira two weeks ago I had a sudden motivational bost! I was out walking around a small village in the far North Western corner of the island and stopped at this little village shop cum bar. A single room, not much bigger than my lounge, but there were a few shelves with essential foods for sale, and a bar with a chair and two stools and a coffee machine. I clearly remembered previous unsuccessful attempts at using my long forgotten Portuguese, but on an island with every path trodden repeatedly by millions of tourists, I had stumbled across what must be one of the very few remaining ones where the 70+ year old landlady did not appear to speak a single word of English. The entire conversation was brief and went like this:
Me: Bom dia, um café, s’il vous plait… errr, uhmm… por favor (not sure why French words suddently pushed themselves into my brain!)
She: Grande ou pequeno?
Me: Grande, por favor
She: Leite?
Me: Sim, por favor
she proceeded to make me uma chinesa (that words had eventually entered my brain at this time)
She: Aqui tem
Me: Obrigado… tem agua com gaz?
She: Sim… looking through the fridge and finding a bottle of flavoured water… com limão?..
Me: Muito obgrigado. I brought my coffee and water over to the table and asked her quanto custa?
She: um Euro vinte
I did’t believe I could have understood her correct, so gave her a fiver and was very pleasantly surprised when she gave me 3 euros 80 cents back.
It was brief, but it was the most meaningful conversation in Portuguese I’ve had. On previous holidays, everybody responded in English when I tried speaking Portuguese, or if they did response in Portuguese it was too fast for me to understand. But this old lady went out of her way to put her customer at ease by speaking slowly, clearly and with simple words.
That gave me the motivational boost to renew my subscription to PP and start from scratch again, hoping and believing that on our already-booked holiday to Madeira next year, I will be able to actively use this fascinating language.