How To Get Native Speakers To Speak Portuguese with you
You may know this feeling: You've spent hours on your own, studying vocabulary, learning new phrases, and when you want to practice your language with friends and colleagues... they just keep switching back to English!
"Olá, tudo bem? Como foi seu fim de semana?"
"Hi, yeah, it was great! What about yours?"
"Ahhh, foi... it was good, thanks!"
If you find it frustrating, you are not alone.
Lots of the people you meet will be learning English (because everyone is) and you’re a rarity, a student of portugues.
They don’t want to be rude. Most commonly, people will want to include you in their conversations and make this as easy as possible.
They are prioritising their own learning. They’ve been wanting to practice their English for ages, so you’re just the person they’ve been looking for.
They’re busy. You may have chosen a person who just wants to get things done right now. You are speaking slowly and taking 3 seconds between words. You’re hard to understand. You’re looking up words in the dictionary. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
They think this is a struggle for you and want to make your life easier. Language learning is effort, and if they see you looking up every other word they may just want to save you the work especially if you drop into English now and then.
You can’t win them all even if you had the perfect accent, chances are that you're still over 6 months away from having those fluent, easy, flawless interactions that you're dreaming of. That's okay. Remember that rejection is only for the moment, and only relevant to the current situation.
You may need to be persistent. This issue will not be resolved even when you get to the higher levels in your language, because it is not just a reflection of you. It’s always about the other speaker and where they are at, so prepare to try several times and start looking for the compromise.
You may need to hunt down a person who is the right partner for you. Especially in the early stages of your language learning journey, this will be important.
Seek out a group - when they have a common language of interaction with each other, they are more likely to slip in and out. You can listen, join a meeting, or simply go out for drinks and let them know that you’ll try and stay in their language.
Set up a clear language exchange or ask them for temporary support such as being 100% in their native language for just 20 minutes.
Improve your local flair - this one is great for service and shorter interactions, for travel, and for talking to in-laws. If you are regularly frustrated because you can’t even manage to small talk for 2 minutes before there is a switch, then you’ll get a lot out of improving your language skill so you can fake it til you make it. 2 ways to do this: Pronunciation perfection, and stock phrases (fillers, standard constructions). In other words, learn the short phrases and words to get any conversation started.
Wait until you’re more confident and a little faster. You are going to get there. Until then, the person who keeps switching away from your target language just won’t be the right person to talk to.
Go with it. Think bilingual conversation, not “battle lost”. Make it fluid, and even if they switch into English you can stay in your own target language and send a signal.
As you've seen there are different ways of dealing with situations like these. Remember to employ empathy when you are speaking to any native speaker of your target language. Consider their own perspective and the situation they are in. Often, it goes a long way just to mention that you are a learner and to say "I could use some practice, can we speak your language?".
Adapted from the blog www.fluentlanguage.co.uk