Learning Another Language at 27 Changed How I Thought

I had grown up in Medellin speaking only Spanish, as most people in my world did, and had functioned perfectly well within that linguistic boundary for my entire life. The decision to learn Portuguese at 27 was initially motivated by practicality - my company was expanding into Brazil and basic proficiency would be useful.

I signed up for classes with modest expectations and no particular sense that I was doing anything more significant than acquiring a professional skill. What happened over the following two years was something I had not expected and still find difficult to fully articulate.

Within the first six months I started noticing that Portuguese had words for things that Spanish described differently or did not describe in the same way at all.

There is a texture to how Brazilians express longing and affection that does not translate directly and that forced me, when I encountered it, to sit with an emotional concept from a slightly different angle than I was used to.

I found that my sense of humour shifted slightly when I was operating in Portuguese - not because I was performing a different personality but because the language made certain kinds of wordplay and indirection available that Spanish did not.

Learning the language was also the most sustained experience I had had of being a genuine beginner at something as an adult. I had been competent at most things I attempted in my late twenties.

Being visibly, repeatedly, uncomplicatedly wrong in the way you are when you are learning a language - mispronouncing things, using the wrong tense, being gently corrected by a shopkeeper in Sao Paulo during my first work trip - was humbling in a way that I had not needed to be for some time.

That humility was useful in ways that extended well beyond the language. I became slightly more patient with myself in other learning contexts. I became more interested in the process of acquiring something than in the performance of already having it.

At 32, I speak Portuguese well enough to conduct business in it and imperfectly enough that native speakers are consistently generous with me, which is its own kind of education. The language gave me Brazil, which has given me collaborators and friendships I would not otherwise have.

But it also gave me a second way of organising the world inside my own head. I did not know that was something you could acquire after childhood. It is.