Portugal: it looks like Spanish and sounds like nothing I knew

I speak Spanish, so I assumed Portugal would be a soft landing. Reading menus, street signs and headlines, it was. I understood nearly everything.

Then somebody spoke to me and the language folded up. Portuguese swallows its vowels, pushes the stress somewhere unexpected and comes out with a shushing sound Spanish simply does not have.

For the first days I did the worst possible thing, which is answer in Spanish and hope. People are extremely gracious about this, and it still does not work.

So I dropped back to five words and used them properly. Good morning. Thank you. Please. A coffee. Cool. That is a whole day of interactions if you say them at the right moments.

The one that surprised my students most is "obrigada" — you thank people in the gender of the speaker, so I say obrigada and a man says obrigado. There is no equivalent decision to make in English.

Portugal is the clearest argument I know for teaching listening from day one. Recognising a word on paper and catching it at speed are two different skills, and only one of them gets you a coffee.