The Words I’m Packing
Every traveller packs two bags. One goes in the overhead bin, the other goes in your head, and it’s full of words. Mine is currently overstuffed, badly organized, and contains at least one Italian word that wasn’t invited.
Last week, I wrote that every lesson in my Buenos Aires plans depends on noticing, and that a lot of what’s worth noticing is said out loud. This week’s letter is about that second bag: the Spanish I’m trying to sharpen, the Portuguese I’m learning from scratch, and why even a handful of words changes what a traveller is able to see.
The first bag, I’ve mostly got under control. I know how many socks a two-week trip needs, roughly. The second bag has no weight limit, no airline staff to stop me at the gate, and no clear sense of what’s essential. Do I need the word “receipt”? Almost certainly. Do I need the Portuguese for “I’m only here for the pastry”? Spiritually, yes.
In keeping with tradition, I’ve written it up as a small research report. The subject is me. The sample size is one. The results are pending, and the methodology is mostly a small green owl.
Subject Background
Before any study, a responsible researcher discloses the subject’s history, so here is mine.
My second language is French, which I learned in school in Canada. School is also where I learned something more useful than any single language: how to learn one at all. Conjugation tables. Gendered nouns, assigned with no explanation to objects that have never expressed a preference. The deep humility of a dictation exercise, in which a teacher reads a paragraph aloud, and you discover, line by line, how many silent letters French has been hiding from you. Formal language classes teach you the scaffolding, and the scaffolding turns out to be portable. Once you’ve built it for one language, you can hang a second one on it, and then a third.
Since then, I’ve picked up some very basic Italian, acquired in preparation for a trip to Rome a couple of years ago and deployed mainly in the presence of coffee and pastries. I’ve also been passively absorbing Spanish for the last few years, purely out of interest and because it’s the most similar to French, the way some people absorb football scores. It arrived quietly, without much effort on my part. This autumn, I’ve moved it to the foreground. And I’m learning Portuguese, which is entirely new.
The primary research instrument is Duolingo. I’m aware that a small green owl is not a peer-reviewed methodology. I’m also aware that it has been more consistent in my life this year than most things, and I respect that. It has taught me to say that the bear drinks milk, that my horse is in the kitchen, and occasionally, things I might actually need. I’ve learned to take the strange sentences in stride. The same way we did with those unrealistic math problems in school, where Jimmy had 75 watermelons for some reason. A language app, like a new city, is mostly preparing you for situations you can’t predict.
Case Study Zero: The French Classroom Incident
Every good study needs a founding incident, the moment the researcher first realized the phenomenon was real. Mine happened long before planning for South America, in a French classroom, where I learned the hard way that a word can look exactly like one you know, or have a literal definition you learned in a textbook, and still it can betray you in front of everyone.
For me, this was when I had an oral exercise in my grade 11 French class, where I tried to tell a story about a cute moment between my high school boyfriend and me. The story consisted of a punchline where he gave me a kiss, which I said as “Il m’a donné un bisou.” Still to this day, I believe that bisou does most commonly mean “kiss,” but on that day my teacher explained to me that the way I used it had a very different meaning. Anyone who has learned a second language has likely experienced the phenomenon where you find out that there exists a cultural connotation for a word or phrase that you will never find in a textbook. For bisou, according to this teacher, which she explained to me in front of the whole class, was that I had said that the end of my story was me and my boyfriend doing something far more explicit, which I would never say in front of my school teacher. To add insult to injury, one of my brothers was in this class, and of course started laughing at me as I blushed crimson in my embarrassment.
This singular instance of embarrassment and misunderstanding on a public scale still lives with me today. Every time I am using a different language, it is that moment that makes me second-guess whether the phrase I have used countless times over is actually what I think it is, or if I will accidentally tell the person in front of me their dog looks stupid.
In the literature, this is what is known as a formative experience. In my notes, it’s filed under “never again,” which, as you’re about to see, is optimistic at best.
The Interference Problem
Learning Spanish and Portuguese at the same time, on top of maintaining my French, and separating it all from my dusting of Italian, produces a phenomenon linguists call language transfer. Your brain reaches for a word in one language and helpfully hands you its cousin from another. I call it the drawer problem: all four languages live in the same drawer, the language drawer, and when I reach in for a sock, I come out with whatever’s on top. Ask me for “thank you” in Portuguese, and there’s a real chance you’ll get “merci,” delivered with total confidence and a Spanish accent.
The good news is that the family resemblance is enormous. All four grew from Latin, so a French speaker can often read a Spanish menu or a Portuguese sign with a quiet, smug confidence. Biblioteca, universidad, chocolate: the vocabulary often meets you halfway. For a language learner, this is like arriving at a party and discovering you already know half the guests, based on reputation alone.
The bad news is that the resemblance is exactly what makes them treacherous. Linguists call words that look alike but mean different things “false friends,” and the Romance languages are full of them. They’re the guests you think you know, until they start telling stories you don’t remember.
In Spanish, embarazada doesn’t mean embarrassed. It means pregnant, which has caused a different memorable errored conversation, and which I have rehearsed avoiding with the focus of a bomb technician. In Spanish, constipado doesn’t mean what an English speaker fears. It means you have a cold. In Portuguese, esquisito doesn’t mean exquisite. It means weird, which is a very different compliment to pay a chef.
My favourite false friend is one that all four of my languages share. Libraría in Spanish, livraria in Portuguese, librairie in French, and libraria in Italian all mean bookshop, not library. Hey, at least the meaning is on brand. Given that Buenos Aires is often said to have more bookshops per person than anywhere on earth, I consider this the single most useful word in the entire study. At least these false friends are consistent. They lie to you in four languages, in exactly the same way, which is almost a kind of honesty.
The Paris Precedent
If the French classroom taught me that words can betray you, Paris taught me why the risk is worth it.
When I was fourteen, I went to Paris with my mom and grandmother. It was my first plane, my first time in Europe and the first time my school French had to do something real. Up to then, French had lived in textbooks, worksheets and the safe, controlled conditions of a classroom, where the worst that could happen was usually a red pen. At an aquarium ticket window, it left the laboratory. I did the whole transaction in French, start to finish, without being spoken back to in English.
It was a tiny exchange. Tickets, prices, a thank-you, and a direction sending us on our way. Nobody wrote a paper about it. But I remember the feeling exactly: the moment the city stopped being a backdrop and started talking back. I didn’t become fluent at that window. I became a participant, and that’s a different thing entirely. A fluent speaker understands everything. A participant understands just enough to be let in.
Every trip I’ve taken since has been, in some way, an attempt to get back to that window. It’s also, I suspect, part of how I ended up studying anthropology, a discipline built on the radical idea that you can’t really understand people from behind the glass.
Field Lesson: Words Don’t Just Mean Things. They Do Things.
Anthropologists distinguish between two ways of describing a culture. An etic description is the outsider’s view, built from the observer’s own categories. An emic description tries to capture the insider’s view, the categories people actually live by. What I love about those two terms is where they come from. A linguist named Kenneth Pike coined them in the 1950s, borrowing from the phonetic and phonemic terms. The whole idea of seeing a culture from the inside began with the study of sounds. Language isn’t just one doorway into the insider’s view. Historically, it’s the original one.
There was once a bolder theory, associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, that the language you speak shapes the way you think. Its strong version has been largely abandoned by linguists, so I won’t be claiming that Duolingo is rewiring my brain. My hypothesis is more modest: a few words of Spanish might get me a better table.
But there’s a subtler version of the idea that I do believe. Knowing a word isn’t the same as knowing what it does. Two weeks ago I wrote about mate, the shared tea in Argentina, and the rule that saying gracias when the gourd comes back to you means you’re finished. That’s a perfect example. The word is easy. Every beginner knows gracias. But in that circle, it isn’t really thanks; it’s a polite closing of the door. The dictionary gives you the twitch. Only the room gives you the wink.
Exhibit: The Spanish of Buenos Aires
My Spanish homework has turned up a few more of these. In Buenos Aires, people use ‘vos’ instead of ‘tú’ with its own verb endings, so the Spanish I’ve been practising will arrive sounding slightly as if I learned it from a textbook (correct). Many porteños also pronounce the ‘ll’ and ‘y’ sounds closer to ‘sh,’ so calle, street, comes out more like “cashe,” and ‘yo’ comes out more like “sho.” My textbook Spanish has been informed and is coping as well as can be expected.
It’s also often said that Buenos Aires Spanish has an Italian lilt to it, thanks to generations of immigrants from Italy. That means my small store of Rome pastry ordering vocabulary may finally earn its place in the drawer for this trip. I’m choosing to see this as evidence that nothing a traveller learns is ever wasted, only stored.
Exhibit: The Portuguese of Brazil
Portuguese has its own surprises. “Thank you” changes depending on who’s saying it: men say ‘obrigado,’ and women say ‘obrigada,’ because the word literally means obliged, which is gendered. Every thank-you is a tiny statement about the speaker, which feels like a very anthropological way to run a language.
And then there’s ‘saudade,’ the Portuguese word every travel writer is legally required to mention. It describes a longing for something or someone absent, a homesickness that can be for a person, a place, or a time. It’s a cliché to say it has no translation. It’s also true. I’ll let you know whether I catch it in Rio, though I suspect the more likely diagnosis is a delayed case on the flight home.
The Companion Seat, Translated
There’s a practical reason all of this matters more to me than it might to most travellers, and it comes back to the seat I wrote about in my first letter of this series.
On tournament days, Jackson is inside a hall, thinking in terms of best-of-threes. I’m outside it, in a city where I don’t speak the language fluently, with no one to translate for me and no one to hide behind. When we travel together, two people can muddle through a menu between them, and feel less obvious doing it. On my solo days, I’m the whole delegation. If I want lunch, I order it. If I’m lost, I ask. If the museum’s ticket window wants to have a conversation, I’m the one having it.
That sounds daunting, and occasionally it is. But it’s also exactly the condition that made the Paris ticket window possible. A traveller with a companion to lean on can stay politely behind the glass all trip. A traveller on her own is forced, gently, into participating. So for me, the words I’m packing aren’t decoration. They’re the difference between watching Buenos Aires and São Paulo from the edge of the room and being let in, even a little.
In research terms, the companion’s solo days are the fieldwork. Everything else is the literature review.
A Method: The Word Collection
So here’s what I’m doing, and what I’d suggest to anyone travelling with a new language in their pocket. I’m keeping a word collection.
Every time I hear or use a new word for real, not in an app but out in the world, I’ll write it down with four things: where I was, who said it (or who I said it to), what I thought it meant, and what it actually did.
That last column is the important one. A vocabulary list records the twitch: the word and its dictionary meaning. A word collection records the wink: the word, the moment, and what it did between two people. Did it get me a table? Make someone laugh? Close the door on a round of mate I actually wanted? By the end of the trip, the list becomes something better than vocabulary. It becomes a map of every conversation I actually had.
A few practical notes from the field:
Write it the same day. Words fade faster than you’d think, and the context fades first. The word survives, but who said it and why disappears by morning.
Write the mistakes down too. The words you get wrong are often the best stories, as Case Study Zero demonstrates.
Start before you leave. A short list of words you’re packing gives you something to tick off the first time you use each word or phrase for real, which is a surprisingly satisfying form of research.
Don’t aim for complete. Ten words with good stories beat a hundred without them.
A word collection won’t make you fluent. It’s a record of the moments a place talked back to you, which is the best kind of souvenir.
Prompts to start with:
What was the first word you used for rea, and who heard you say it?
Write down a word you misheard, and what you thought it meant?
Which word surprised you by doing something different than expected?
Is there a word you’d like to bring home, one that names something your own language doesn’t?
Which word made someone smile?
Take it with you:
I’ve turned the word collection into a printable or digital journal set, The Word Collection, with pages for the words you’re packing, a full collection log, first words in each new place, false friends and untranslatable words. You can find it in the shop.
If you keep your journal digitally, you can also save your list digitally as an entry in Letters To Somewhere and pin each word to the place you first heard it, to really record detailed research. That’s exactly what I’ll be doing, so by the end of the trip, the map will show not just where I went, but where each conversation happened.
Before the Next Letter
Final findings will be published after fieldwork. For now, my preliminary conclusions are as follows. The drawer is full. The owl is relentless. Somewhere between French class and an aquarium window, I learned that being wrong out loud is the price of being let in, and I’m prepared to pay it again. And I’m going to say gracias at precisely the wrong moment at least once.
Next week, the series crosses the border. São Paulo is the city where my Portuguese meets its first real audience, and where I’ll be spending my solo days while Jackson plays. It’s an enormous, restless city that most travellers rush through, and I’m planning to do the opposite.
If you’d like these letters to find you, join the Slow Travel Society. It’s one honest letter a month, written like actual correspondence, and in November it will come to you from the road. Methodology: walking. Findings: forthcoming, in at least two languages.
