Comment by brabel
5 years ago
On my travels, I have met several people who, after living in Brazil for only a few months, learned to speak Portuguese fluently. This always impressed me hugely, because English speakers normally have a really hard time learning a language that has "gendered" nouns and inflected articles/adjectives/pronouns, for example... but many of them seem to do just fine! But I met enough of them to now think Portuguese must be quite easy to learn (or maybe, due to the fact that they MUST learn Portuguese when living in Brazil, given most people only speak Portuguese there).
Being surrounded by talkative people helps a lot, and then you get to learn the actual constructs, not the theoretical grammar. Not being facetious, I think that's the main thing behind "it's harder to lear a new language as an adult". I think it's less due to ability and more to do with the contexts and opportunities to practice.
(Though yes, by how they learn you notice what they get easily and what confuses them)
I also think Americans have more of a passive awareness of Spanish than even Americans themselves realize (a whole generation watched Dora the Explorer, for example). A lot of that will translate well learning Portuguese
Where were the people you met from? In my city there's a lot of japanese people, they helped create a thriving steel industry here many decades ago. Many of them learned some portuguese, they could communicate but not fluently. Gendered words in particular seemed to be particularly difficult. The russian I met on the other hand spoke it fluently, maybe even better than native speakers.
Hard to remember them all :) but two were Australians who spent a few months backpacking in Brazil... one was a German girl who just blew my mind how well she could speak Portuguese. Another was a Swedish man who just casually started helping a group of Brazilians, in Portuguese, to order something in a restaurant... I think there were many other cases over the years but it's not like a keep track of them all, so I can't give more examples that I remember for sure... but enough, as I said, to convince me that it's not very rare.