Three months in Lisbon

I spent three months in Lisbon and came back speaking Portuguese. People ask about that part, and the answer is boring: I spoke it constantly, badly, to anyone who would let me, and after a few weeks it stopped being an act of translation.

The part worth writing about is why I was willing to sound stupid for that long.

What a language actually buys you

You can get through Lisbon in English. Most people will accommodate you, and if that is all you want, it works.

But there is a ceiling on the conversations you get, and it is lower than you think. In English, people are polite. They give you the version of themselves that fits into a second language and a short exchange. Perfectly pleasant, entirely surface.

The first time someone slipped into normal-speed Portuguese with me, without adjusting, something changed. I understood maybe seventy percent. But I was no longer being handled. I was in the conversation.

That is what the three months of sounding like an idiot bought. Not fluency. Access.

The person is the interesting part

I moved a lot growing up, and the one habit that gave me is that I get to the actual person quickly. Not because I am charming, but because I am relentlessly curious about how people ended up where they are, and most people are not asked.

Lisbon in 2025 was full of good material for that. It is a city in the middle of being changed by everyone arriving in it, which means everybody has a story about why they came and what they think about what it is becoming. The Brazilian guy running the place I ate at twice a week. The woman whose family had been in the same neighborhood for four generations and who had complicated feelings about people like me. Other foreigners, some of whom were running from something and some of whom had genuinely built a life.

I asked all of them. I ask everyone. It is the closest thing I have to a hobby.

Why I keep doing this

Here is the thing I have never been able to explain properly.

I feel most alive in a room where I do not know anyone and nobody knows me. Not because I like the attention, I do not, but because everyone in that room is a person I know nothing about, and every one of them has spent decades assembling a way of seeing things that I have no access to unless I ask.

Most people will tell you. That is the part that surprised me when I was younger and does not anymore. If you ask an actual question, not the polite kind, and then shut up and listen, people will tell you almost anything. What they wanted at twenty. What they think they got wrong. Why they left.

You cannot get that from reading. There is no substitute for someone describing their own life to you while you sit there and pay attention.

The connection to everything else

I have always taught, in one form or another. I started tutoring at fifteen and it never stopped, and I could not have told you at the time why I liked it so much.

I think it is the same instinct. Teaching and asking questions are both about the gap between what someone knows and what they do not, and moving across it in one direction or the other. When I teach, I am building a bridge from my side. When I ask a stranger about their life, they are building one from theirs.

The three months in Lisbon were mostly the second kind. That is why they were the best three months I have had.

And the language

If you want the practical version: I did not study much. I read menus and signs, put everything in Portuguese, and forced every transaction into it, however slowly. I made a rule that I would not switch to English first even when it was obviously easier, which meant a lot of long pauses and some genuinely painful phone calls.

Three months. It is not a talent thing. It is a willingness-to-be-bad-in-public thing, and that is more available than people assume.