Stuttering in A Foreign Tongue

About a week into my teaching internship in Southern Brazil, I found that the thing I missed most was not my hometown, usual schedule, or even my dear friends and family, but rather the ability to communicate effortlessly with those around me. I had been searching as late as one month beforehand for something, anything to do over the summer, and was finally given an opportunity to work at a small school in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which was looking for native English speakers to work in the classroom alongside their teachers. The sheer enthusiasm and willingness to hire me that the school administrator showed, after months of silence from other prospective internships, was enough to convince me. I decided to bank on the promise that proficiency in Portuguese would not be immediately needed for my work and purchased my plane tickets, knowing their cost would eclipse any pay I’d be receiving during my 45-day stay in Brazil. 

Spanish and Portuguese are linguistically similar, such that speakers of either language, especially Portuguese speakers, can often understand when the other is speaking slowly. As a Spanish minor in college, I hoped to use any knowledge I already had as a springboard for learning Portuguese, a challenge that proved as difficult as learning a new language always is. I was staying with a host family whose son attended the school, and communicated necessary things to my host dad, who thankfully spoke some Spanish as well. The wife and son of the family spoke neither Spanish nor English, and thus I began learning Portuguese immediately “by immersion” and necessity. Suddenly, I was no longer funny, quick, or ever able to tell which parts of Spanish would be shared between the languages and which would not. I said things that made sense only to me, and found myself stuttering, genuinely unable to speak, even when I knew exactly what I wanted to say and felt that the grammar was correct. The school was no problem, as I was meant to work in English for the sake of the teachers and students. But everywhere else, I was experiencing an entirely new dilemma: the inability to understand or make myself understood whenever conversation moved beyond topics that I was comfortable with. 

I attended church services, meetings, and a family reunion, trying at every moment to translate what I was hearing. I studied in my own time and practiced each day at low-stakes dinnertime with my host family who taught me fun words like paralelepípedo, which means something like “stone street,” I think. When school was out, I decided to travel north and visit some cousins who live in the state of São Paulo, a process which required the use of the bus system and BlaBlaCar, something like a cheap and long-distance version of Uber. I found myself on a 7-hour car ride with total strangers, none of whom spoke my native language, and all of whom wanted to chat, as the name of the ride-sharing service would imply. I spoke slowly through my relentless Portuguese stutter, and learned more through that one car ride than I could easily quantify. My new friends asked what school was like here, why I came to Brazil, and even my opinion on American politics: “Mas quem você prefere agora, Trump ou Harris?” 

Towards the very end of my stay in Brazil, I felt my comprehension and speaking slowly improving, and now spoke what people around me called Portuol (português + espanhol / Portuguese + Spanish) even when I tried reverting to Spanish. My host family took me to a famous beach city, and I took a long walk away from it to the mountains nearby. Someone asked me for directions, and I bought a churro. On the way back, close to my host family’s apartment, someone asked me for the time and noticed that I was an American when I tried to answer, with difficulty and in 12-hour format. He offered to buy me a soda, and we talked for at least half an hour at a table by the beach. He told me things I didn’t understand and then mentioned that he worked at a pharmacy in the city and had eventually come to enjoy it. He encouraged my stuttering Portuguese and listened with interest to my story from an hour earlier: how I’d found a staircase up the nearby mountain. When it was time to go, he shook my hand and said “mão fria, coração quente” (cold hand, warm heart). I realized I’d made a friend, who I’d never see again, that didn’t speak a word of English. 

Living without easy communication in a foreign country began with unrelenting difficulty, and slowly led me to a type of empathy and connection that would have been impossible otherwise. There is something deeply humanizing about struggling through a new language with others who speak it natively, slowing finding it to be just as expressive as your own, indeed in novel and interesting ways. After a month and half, my shallow grasp over the depth of the Portuguese language, with all its culture and expression, was only more apparent. I had come to Brazil expecting culture shock, but instead glimpsed behind the language barrier that shared humanity which can be found wherever you go.