When people find out my wife is Brazilian and that neither of us spoke the other's language when we met, they usually say something like “aw, that's so romantic.”
It was not romantic. It was work.
I want to write down what it was actually like, because “we fell in love through a translation app” sounds like a movie and the reality was closer to being slightly deaf in both directions for two years.
The whole story of how we got here is in How We Met. This one is just the language.
Where we started
November 2019. She was running a livestream, I was watching, and we started talking.
She spoke no English. I spoke no Portuguese. Not “a little,” not “enough to get by.” Zero, in both directions.
So every single thing that passed between us for the first several months went through Google Translate. Every joke, every question, every boring logistical detail about what time it was where. There was no such thing as a casual remark. Everything had to be typed, translated, sent, translated back, and interpreted.
She was learning English and getting better fast. I was not learning Portuguese at anything like the same rate, which is a pattern that has held up for seven years.
Machine translation in 2019 was worse than people remember
Translation has gotten a lot better. If you tried this today you would have an easier time than we did, and I think people underestimate how much worse it was then, because they are thinking of the version on their phone right now.
It was slow, it was stilted, and it dropped things. Idioms came out as nonsense. Anything with more than one clause in it arrived scrambled. If I wrote the way I actually talk, she got word salad, so I learned to write in short flat sentences like I was filing a report.
None of that is the real problem, though. Nonsense is obvious. You see nonsense and you ask again.
The thing that actually caused damage
Sometimes it flipped the meaning.
Not garbled it. Inverted it. It would add a “not” that I did not write, or drop one that I did, and produce a clean, fluent, completely confident sentence that said the opposite of what I meant.
So “I really enjoyed meeting your family” arrives as “I didn't enjoy meeting your family.”
Think about why that is so much worse than gibberish. She had no reason to doubt it. It read like a normal sentence from me. And I had no idea it had happened, because on my end I had sent something perfectly nice and was waiting for a perfectly nice reply. What I got back was her being hurt, about a thing I never said, and then we would have to work backward through the translator to figure out what had gone wrong, using the same broken tool that broke it.
That is what it is like to argue when you are already upset. The instrument you have to repair it with is the one that caused it.
I eventually learned to read the translation before sending it. Every message. Proofreading Portuguese I could not actually read, looking for a word I half recognized, trying to catch an inversion in a language I did not speak. It helped. It did not always work.
Four words in a car
A few days into my first trip to Brazil in February 2020, we were driving to her parents' house so I could meet them, and Fabiola decided I should greet them in Portuguese.
Prazer em conhecer você. Pleasure to meet you.
She coached me the entire drive and I could not do it. Specifically I could not make the r. The Portuguese r sitting inside a consonant cluster like that was a sound my mouth had never been asked to produce, and no amount of repetition in a moving car was going to install it.
It took me about a year to get that sound.
This is the part people miss about learning a language as an adult. It is not only that you do not know the words. Your face does not know how to make them. I could see the sentence, I understood the sentence, and my mouth returned an error.
The other translation problem
Underneath the language thing there was a second one, which is that Fabiola and I are not much alike.
She is outgoing. She performs, she is comfortable in front of people, she is good at rooms. I am an introvert and a programmer. Certain textures bother me. Noise bothers me. Plans changing bothers me more than it reasonably should.
I have never been formally diagnosed with anything. But I watched Love on the Spectrum at some point and recognized myself in it clearly enough that I stopped reaching for other explanations, and in the years since, traveling around the US, we have met people on the spectrum who I click with immediately in a way that makes a lot of sense in hindsight. Somewhere on it is my honest answer.
Put those two things together. One person who processes the world out loud and one person who needs the plan to hold, trying to work out a disagreement through an app that occasionally inverts the meaning of a sentence.
That is a harder problem than vocabulary. Vocabulary you can look up.
Where we landed
Not in the middle. That is the part I did not expect.
Fabiola is fluent. A few things still come out sideways, but she gets meaning across without effort, and she has moved on to the harder problem of American regional accents. She likes to go out and do things, so she has had to decode Alabama line dancing, plus Georgia, plus Florida, plus whatever is happening in the rest of the South. She collects accents now.
I am on something like day 240 of Duolingo. We fly back to Brazil every year and her family notices each time that I have more than I did. I read Portuguese reasonably well and I follow a lot of what I hear. Speaking is where I fall apart. Anything complicated goes through a translator. Anything simple I handle with a handful of words and a genuinely committed amount of gesturing, and her family gets my meaning, and it works.
She learned my language. I learned enough to be understood with my hands.
I used to think of that as an unfinished project. It is just true about us. She did the harder thing and she did it faster, and the reason we can argue properly now is mostly her work, not mine. I get to say that out loud because it is not a small thing to be married to someone who crossed a language to reach you.
The rest of it, Brazil and COVID and how the two of us ended up living in a fifth wheel, is in How We Met.