During a recent trip to Portugal, I gave a tour guide a small tip. A few minutes later, I was drinking wine at noon and getting some unexpectedly good language-learning advice from the woman pouring it.
It all happened near Vila Real, a small city in northern Portugal, where my dad and I were staying as part of our trip up the Douro valley.
A few miles outside the city is the Casa de Mateus, an 18th-century Baroque country house. I hadn’t known before, but its façade appears on the label of Mateus Rosé wine.
My dad and I joined a guided tour of the house. At the end, I gave our guide a small tip and he seemed genuinely touched.
As we crossed the courtyard a few moments later, he suddenly asked whether we’d like a glass of wine.
Despite the early hour, I said “Sim”.
He took us into the wine shop on one side of the courtyard and asked the woman behind the counter to pour us each a glass.
I managed to say in broken Portuguese that I would like white and my dad would like red.
Somehow, since turning fifty, I seem to have lost the ability to digest red wine, while my dad can still drink it quite happily at 88.
The woman asked where we were from, and we chatted about Portugal and a little about her own past.
By this stage, the conversation had switched to English. But then she offered me a piece of language-learning advice that got me thinking.
Get out of the big towns, she said. Go to the smaller places and talk to people.
She’s right, though as someone who’s naturally rather shy, it’s not always advice I find easy to follow.
Perhaps that’s one reason I enjoyed this encounter so much. I hadn’t needed to find an excuse to start a conversation. The opportunity had simply presented itself.
Part of learning a language is finding or creating situations in which people might actually talk to you.
That doesn’t mean every conversation will be in your target language. Nor does it mean that small towns are somehow magically better for language learners.
After all, our own conversation had taken place at a tourist attraction, and mostly in English.
But the situations you put yourself in can affect the opportunities you get.
I suppose the trick is to leave yourself open to these opportunities, rather than always rushing on to the next thing. You may only manage a few words in your target language, but even that can be satisfying.
And sometimes a brief exchange will stay with you long after the conversation is over.
My dad and I finished our wine and went out to walk around the lovely gardens, past the box hedges, the roses and the vineyard.
Perhaps it was the wine, but I felt strangely elated by the unexpected encounter.
You can’t make moments like this happen. But you can put yourself in situations where they might.
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