First time speaking

This is a big day for my learning Portuguese! Today, I spoke Portuguese to real people and was able to converse! Even though, it did not start so easily.

Let me explain step by step.

Last Friday, my polyglot friends advised me that there are online meetings organised by Language Exchange Switzerland (as I found out later, together with Language Exchange Ireland). Today, I did not plan to attend, as I have my singing lesson till 19, the same time, when the language meeting starts, but you have to arrive 15 minutes earlier. At least, this is what is said on their FB page. However, my teacher canceled the last minute, so I decided to take advantage of this and joined. Spoiler: in fact, there is no need to arrive earlier, the organizers manage to add you to the group, even if you are just on time.

The idea of this exchange is that you join, write to the chat, what language do you speak and what language do you want to practice. Based on this, the organizers divide participants into smaller groups. Every 5 minutes, the language inside the group should be changed. I got the group of 7 people. There was only me and one man, who were learning Portuguese. The rest of the people were originally from Brasil.

The first question to me made me stuck. “De onde você é?” – what can be terrifying? I have been answering to this question like 1000 times on the Tandem chats, but here I could not text it, I had to say it with my voice. With some difficulties, I have managed it. I though that I will not speak till the end of the meeting. Fortunately for me, people started to go out of the meeting. Some needed to go to work, some disappeared without any notice. I think, there were some technical issues because at some point, I could only noise instead of other people talking. When there were 4 of us left and only me learning Portuguese, I could finally use some time to practice during the Portuguese parts 🙂 Till the end of the meeting, I felt more confident. Although, I was missing so many words and sometimes correct grammar, I managed to say a few sentences and I am proud of it 🙂

Now, I have even more inspiration to continue learning!