Reading in two languages

When I moved to Lisbon, my Portuguese consisted of obrigada, bica and a phrase from an app about a boy who eats apples. I could order coffee. I could not ask where the bin collection was, which led to a very confusing first month.

Lessons helped, and so did a great deal of embarrassment. But the thing that actually made the language stick was reading, and I started, as you should, at the bottom.

Starting with picture books

The children’s section of the library in Graça was my classroom for most of my first year. I would take out three books at a time, read them at the kitchen table with a dictionary and a pencil, and return them a week later, slightly sticky with orange peel.

The first book I finished without help was A Menina do Mar by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, a story about a boy who befriends a tiny girl who lives in the sea. It is written for nine-year-olds. I read it the way other people climb mountains, and when I closed it I made myself a celebratory toast with butter and sugar.

After that came O Principezinho — The Little Prince in Portuguese — which I chose because I knew the story so well that I could guess the words I didn’t know. That trick is the best advice I can give anyone learning a language through books: start with something you already love in your own tongue.

Dona Fernanda’s red pencil

Dona Fernanda lives on the third floor, is eighty-one, and was a primary school teacher for most of her working life. When she discovered I was reading children’s books, she took it as a personal responsibility.

Every Thursday I bring her something I’ve written: a short summary of what I’ve read, two or three paragraphs in my best Portuguese. She reads it at her kitchen table with her glasses on the end of her nose and a red pencil in her hand, and gives it back covered in corrections and a small number of ticks. I live for the ticks.

She is merciless about the subjunctive and endlessly forgiving about everything else. She also gives me biscuits, which helps.

“You speak like a book,” she told me once. I took it as a compliment. I’m now fairly sure it wasn’t.

Saramago, side by side

This year I tried something ambitious: José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira in Portuguese, with Giovanni Pontiero’s English translation, Blindness, open beside it on the table.

Saramago is not a gentle teacher. His sentences run for half a page, he barely uses full stops, and dialogue is separated by commas and capital letters rather than quotation marks. In English this is a style. In a second language it is a fog.

So I read a page in Portuguese, then the same page in English, then the Portuguese again. It took me nearly four months. Some nights I managed two pages; some nights I managed one sentence and went to bed. But somewhere in the middle, I noticed I was reaching for the English less and less, and I started to hear Saramago’s rhythm — that long, breathless, circling voice — in my own head.

Blindness made it onto my list of twelve books that stayed with me this year, partly for the story and partly because I’d earned it.

I can read a newspaper, argue with Senhor Abel about the price of cherries and follow most of a film without subtitles. I still read children’s books, though, because they’re short, kind and unafraid of a good sentence. The stairwell swap shelf now has a small Portuguese section, and I’m proud to say most of it is mine.