Why learn Portuguese?
Though it’s true a second language can help us find jobs, let’s also focus on the other reasons for learning a language. We spend so much of our lives having to serve the interests of an economy that doesn’t care about people or the world. It’s high time we were able to put the interests of each other ahead of those of CEOs and tax havens. Learning a language, in a variety of ways, can help us do this.
Society often funnels us down a career-path. Before we’ve had the chance to discover where our passions reside, we find ourselves scrambling from paycheck to paycheck on low or minimum wages. Worse still, the labour we provide either leaves us starved of inspiration, or in some cases even robs us of time to pursue our interests - all of which has damaging implications for our mental and physical health.
Learning a language can provide some relief, and even an escape, from these pressures. It can’t stop us worrying about bills or rent, but it can help us find other lines of work. Aside from potential career benefits, the process itself is rewarding, and a lot more fun than traditional methods have led us to believe. Far from being an unwelcome burden on our daily routines, learning a language can become an enjoyable distraction from life’s pressures. As well as helping our immediate mental health, it is also thought to aid cognitive function, and could delay the symptoms of dementia.
Learning a language may even help us tackle the problems facing the world. If we can communicate with and learn from each other, we stand a better chance of organising against issues as global as climate breakdown.
With almost 220 million speakers, Portuguese is the sixth most widely spoken mother tongue in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Bengali. When second language speakers are included, it is still the ninth most widely spoken, with an estimated 250 million. Aside from Portugal, it is the official language in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as being a co-official language in Timor-Leste, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. It is also spoken amongst emigrant communities throughout the world - particularly in Canada, England, France, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and Venezuela.
Although speaking a new language does not revolutionise how we see the world, the people and cultures it takes us to will. It’s almost like discovering the world again as a child, just in a different tongue. It refreshes the mind and can fill us with the impetus to experience different cultures and meet new people. This could be as conveniently as watching Brazilian telenovelas or reading a Raquel Ochoa novel in the evening. It could be an experience as spontaneous as chatting with people at a bar in Luanda, or before a football match in Belo Horizonte. It could even be a whole new life in Brazil or Portugal.
After learning any language, the prospect of learning others suddenly feels much more feasible, and with Portuguese being a Latin language, other languages from the same family become especially easier to learn, such as Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Corsican, Italian, and Romanian.
There’s also the indigenous languages of Brazil and other former colonies of Portugal, whose learning resources are often in Portuguese. By learning Portuguese, we’ll therefore be able to learn more about the array of indigenous cultures and languages of Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Cape Verde.
If you're interested in learning Portuguese, there's a How to Learn Languages guide :