Back in November of 2021 when we shifted our retirement in Portugal from neutral to “full speed ahead” we signed up for Duolingo in order to start our Portuguese language studies. We learned a lot of words, a bit about sentence structure, and some verb conjugation. Duolingo is fun and I still enjoy it daily, but it didn’t prepare me for rapid fire conversations in our local café. Another major drawback with Duolingo is that the Portuguese course is Brazilian and not European and the difference in pronunciation is quite significant.

We intended to attend a formal language course once we arrived. There are many options for language classes: online, in person, weekly, work at your own pace, and pay as you go. The most amazing option we found was a government sponsored language class that is free and available to people with visas or residence permits. Some people pay as much as €10 per language course and finding a free course seemed too good to be true.

In July we walked to the high school and registered for the course. The process was easy and the employees were helpful, but we were warned that demand for the course was high and depending on the number of teachers available, we may not get in and would be put on a waiting list. The next class would start in September. September came and went without a phone call or an email. We were disappointed, but fully appreciated that people with a job or those that had been on a waiting list should be a priority.

We considered other options. Memrise was one. It is an online app that has native speakers pronouncing words and phrases. I dabbled with it a bit and it has a European Portuguese setting that was much more helpful than Duolingo’s Brazilian pronunciation. We started using Linguee as a translation tool on our phones instead of Google Translate due to the Brazilian/European Portuguese problem. Our fluency was improving slowly just by living here, but we really wanted to make language competency a priority.

Our local café owner is the most wonderful woman, she speaks slowly and repeats phrases for us when necessary. She even lets us play games with her 8 year old daughter at the café in order to improve our language skills. We have played Klask, Penguin Pile-Up and Operation: Star Wars. We have brought dry erase markers and dice and played schoolhouse games by writing and pronouncing numbers in Portuguese and English. We appreciate all of the café proprietor’s efforts, but we didn’t want our shortcomings to be her responsibility to correct. She has a busy business and plenty of other customers to assist. Should we sign up for a paid class, keep studying on our own, or try to attend the free language course in 2023?

Andrew received a call on October 4th. Language classes had started last week, but several people dropped out. Could we start tonight? YAAASSS!!! This was so incredibly exciting and unexpected. We had missed a full week of class, but we had been studying so maybe we would be OK? We arrived at school with butterflies and nervous energy just like when we were kids.

Newsflash upon arrival: our course is immersive. Our professor speaks at most 2-3 sentences or isolated words in English. This usually happens only when people look very confused. Our course meets 3 times per week in 2 hour increments. Total course time is 150 hours and you can only miss 10% or 15 hours. Unfortunately the first week we missed, aka 6 hours, counts against us. We have an incredibly diverse class made up of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Irish, British, Korean, Filipino, and Canadian students (you can see why the teacher speaking a bunch of English isn’t going to help everyone equally). We are the only Americanos. We have expats, retirees, and refugees. We have old and young people. Our professor Jorge is AWESOME.

If we pass this course, we will receive an A1/A2 certificate. This is elementary level fluency, but fulfills the language requirement for permanent residency if we are still in love with Portugal at the 5-6 year mark. We can continue our studies with the B1/B2 course which is 175 hours, and this is incredibly appealing since going back to school has been SO much fun.