Lessons in Lisbon, part 3: Languages

c. Languages

Over breakfast one morning, I listened to one of the hostel staff chatting in Italian to one of the guests. A few minutes later, she was chatting to a coworker in Portuguese and then turned to me and told me, in English, that hairdryers were available at reception if I wanted to make sure my hair was totally dry before going out today.

I asked her how many languages she knew. She asked in return, "How many I know or how many I speak?"

"Both." I responded.

She explained that she knows a lot--Portuguese, English, Italian, French, Spanish, basically all the romance languages and then some. But some are easier than others--for instance she doens't like speaking spanish because she thinks her accent is bad. But she can also read various Germanic languages, and understand some others (although some languages she can only understand written and not heard and others the other way around.)

This question quickly lead to a conversation about accents and dialects and the difference between Portuguese from Portugal and Portuguese from Brazil.

So. Um. I was quite impressed.

She was at least the fourth person I met in Lisbon who spoke more than two languages. The others included my tour guide who had Spanish, English, Portuguese and Czech in his repertoire, a Canadian living in Spain working on learning her third language, and a Dutch man who spoke too many to count.

My dutch friend explained the he learned a mountain of languages in school--English and French among them. But he'd always hated those classes. Always failed those classes. It wasn't until he started traveling and trying to use the languages that he realized 1) how helpful they were and 2) that he could actually speak them, more or less.

More and more I'm realizing how lucky I was to grow up with English as my first language--that's the language they use in all the hostels and in a room full of people from five countries or more, they all talk in English. That makes it easy.

More and more, I'm realizing the importance of learning languages, not just because of the world opening, new perspective giving that everyone hears about, but because I hate finding myself reduced to pointed and holding up fingers, stuck using only one syllable words to get my point across as I found myself in Portugal. I dislike struggling to talk to people, misunderstanding them, asking them to repeat themselves.

So the decision now is what do I start learning next? What do you think? What languages do you know? Wish you knew? Used to know?