Emerging South

Portuguese is a beautiful language.  Only when you start learning it, you realise how omnipresent the language is.  Just listen to Zenfm for a day and count the number of  songs with Portuguese lyrics.  Yes, even Nelly Furtado sings in Portuguese.
But today I discovered to my great shame that the songs of Lali Puna I have been listening to for years (Tridecoder of 1999 is still my favorite album).  Only this year I have been taking Portuguese courses in Belgium with a Portuguese-speaking teacher.  Before I always had Brazilian teachers.  And let me tell you: Brazilian Portuguese is very different from European Portuguese.  This is what happens when you land as a Brazilian in Lisbon...
Brazilian Portuguese is much easier to understand than the cryptic language they speak in Portugual.  Which is why probably I never discovered that Lali Puna, who lives in Munic, is singing many of her songs in Portuguese.  Contratempo, Toca-Discos, Superlotado and Rapariga da Banheira are all Portuguese songs of her.   Beautiful words and an amazing good pronounciation for someone with German roots... I only didn't succeed in decyphering the lyrics of "Rapariga da Banheira".  In Portugal the title would translate as "Girl from the bathtub", in Brazil it would be "Hooker from the bathtub". If you can decypher the lyrics from me, I will send you 6 home-made Pasteis de Nata; no one makes them better then I do.

Learning Chines is seriously overrated, a European can never get to a level where he can conduct business meetings, write contracts or e-mails in less than 5 years.  I believe you can learn Portuguese to a level where you master it perfectly, yet with a slight 'sotaque'.   330 million people speak Spanish, 220 million people speak Portuguese.  The only difference is that far less people speak Portuguese as a second language than Spanish, which makes your competitive advantage far bigger when you speak Portuguese rather than Spanish.