Why Portuguese?

I apologize in advance for the lengthy post! I'm still getting used to this whole "blogging" thing.

A question I get a lot is why I chose to study Portuguese. Really I just learned Portuguese so I could go hang out on the beach in Brazil and party at the World Cup next summer. JUST KIDDING! Well, sorta... I would be lying if the allure of sun, sand, soccer wasn't a tiny factor in my decision to pursue the language ;)

In all seriousness, there are many reasons I decided to pursue Portuguese but I will briefly mention a few here. As many of you know, I grew up speaking French. I then learned Spanish in middle school and, continuing Spanish through high school, it was always one of my favorite classes. Feeling like I had more or less become fluent in Spanish, I felt ready to learn a new language. I took two years of Chinese in high school and although I very much enjoyed those classes, I decided that I wanted to return to the comfort of a romance language in order to get fluent faster. Around the same time, I rediscovered an old CD my mom used to listen to of a Cape Verdean singer named Cesaria Evora. I could not understand a word she was singing but I loved the music so much so I did some research and found out she was singing in Cape Verdean creole, a mixture of Portuguese and African languages.

 

The song that started it all...Cesaria Evora singing "Sodade"

 

The more I researched about Portuguese the more I wanted to learn it. I found out that along with being the official language of Cape Verde, thanks to Portugal's explorers and once thriving colonies, it is spoken in 7 more countries spread out across the globe. So, I thought it would be a useful language to know (more useful than say... Italian, which I also considered learning). Also, the language was similar enough to Spanish that I could get the idea of a text when it was written, but different enough spoken to make learning it a (fun) challenge for myself.

So, I started learning Portuguese five years ago, when I attended a language immersion camp, Mar e Floresta, in 2008 during the summer before my senior year of high school. Much to my disappointment I could not find any Portuguese classes around where I lived in high school, so I typed "Portuguese camp" into google one day and literally the first website was a link to Mar e Floresta's page. The camp, tucked away in the unlikely setting of the woods of Northern Minnesota, was meant to simulate traveling abroad and was an amazing experience. I was exposed to native speakers and music from Brazil as well as culturally authentic food from different countries of the Portuguese-speaking world, all of which confirmed my desire to learn Portuguese and to one day travel to the countries that speak it.

 

Here I am (bottom left) as a counselor at carnaval night at Mar e Floresta in 2010!

I later returned to Mar e Floresta as a counselor and  took Portuguese classes throughout college (which I loved because the class sizes were tiny despite being at huge public universities). However, I did not go to a Portuguese-speaking country until last summer, when I studied abroad in Portugal (which was amazing and a totally underrated destination in Europe by the way).

 A fun night in Ponta Delgada (Azores), Portugal last summer after Portugal won a soccer game for the Euro Cup before losing to Spain in the next round.

 

 My ultimate goal was always to go to Brazil! And, after five years of learning Portuguese, I think it's about time :)