I feel like a mentally-challenged toddler...

I've heard it said that learning a new language is among the hardest things a person can do and I'm going to have to agree with that. After being here exactly one week, I can tell you that learning Portuguese is HARD. I sort of (eh, kinda) speak two other languages besides English--French and Arabic--but this is a whole different sort of language acquisition.

For French, I sat in a classroom for five years and learned the grammar and vocabulary and a little bit of culture and by the end could carry on a conversation in the language. I can read much better in French than I can speak French and if you were to sit me down with a French speaker I would undoubtedly freeze up like a deer in a pair of headlights.

Arabic--haha, I can't believe I claim I can speak Arabic; I can tell a taxi where to go, barter a decent white-person deal in a souk and have a very simple, very self-centered conversation. And really only in Egyptian; I took Modern Standard for a semester, but I'm afraid my Egyptian overshadowed anything I learned in that class. Anyway, for Arabic I learned very situational things--what to say to a taxi driver, what to say to a shop owner, how to tell a few things about myself. No one really expected a real conversation from me.

Here, oh geez, everyone expects real conversation! We've gotten past the preliminaries last week and now my new Brazilian friends want to know about my past, my family, my friends, my hopes, my dreams, my faith--it's enough to be really, really overwhelming! And on the one hand, I can tell I'm improving; This was my face in conversation last week:

This week:

Soon, I'll look like this:

But really, I just feel bad for all the Brazilians we hang out with. It can't be fun for any of them that I can only understand the simplest phrases and then only like 10 percent of the time. I keep wanting to tell them that I'm not stupid and I'll learn, but not being able to say that seems to disprove that particular point :).

I definitely envy the others on my team--Scott has been here before so he already speaks some Portuguese and both Liliana and Carl speak Spanish fluently, which gives them a huge leg up on Portuguese. Once again, Mom you were totally right--I should've studied Spanish in high school, not French. But there are some crossovers between French and Portuguese--grammar being the big one. But alas, not very much vocabulary.

But I shall not lose heart!! Anything worth having is worth working for, and by gum I will be able to talk to people! Fingers crossed it will be soon. The five hours a day I'm spending studying Portuguese should help, and enshallah I will pick this up quickly!!!