That will be an "I am," not a "Yes."

Learning a new language: Beneficial? Yes. Practical? Yes. Mind-changing? Most likely.

As my knowledge of the Portuguese language has expanded, so has my overall knowledge of the Brazilian "mentality."

According to Zamira Derbisheva, a doctor and professor of Philological sciences at Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University, "It is well known that human culture, social behavior and thinking cannot exist without language. Being a social and national identity, and a means of human communication, language cannot help bearing imprints of ethnic and cultural values as well as the norms of behavior of a given language community. All is reflected in the vocabulary of a language. But it should be noted that the grammatical structure of a language more exactly reflects the mentality of a nation as it is closer to thinking. 'While the number of words in a language represents the volume of its world, the grammatical structure of a language gives an idea of the inner organization of thinking'." Therefore, it's not just the language that I'm picking up as I study Portuguese, it's also a bit of the mentality of the people who speak it.

In one of my classes, we talked about languages and their terms for color. Some languages have color terms for only white and black. For example, there are 7 languages in New Guinea that only use white and black to describe color. There are six African languages, though, that have their color wheel terminology extended to white, black, red and green. Then there are 2 southeast Asian languages who have their color wheel terminology open to 11 terms, like our color wheel, which includes the basic colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, gray, black and white.

It's not that the languages with less words for the basic colors than our own are wrong... it's that they think differently. According to the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, each language and culture expresses a unique world view by its particular way of slicing up reality into named categories. They don't need as many words for colors because the culture is different and therefore the need for the different categories for color are different.

A similar idea is brought up with the Eskimo words for snow. Eskimo languages have vast numbers of words for snow, many more than the English language. Does that mean that the English language is inferior to the Eskimo languages? No. It means that we have different needs for categories and, with the way we think and live, we don't need as many categories for snow.

English represents the culture and ideas of the people who created it. Portuguese does the same. Yes, I am learning a lot from living here in Brazil, but the thing I don't often think about is how much I am growing from learning the language. And how much it changes the way I think.

And these differences in language thinking have begun to influence the way I share my ideas in English as well. In Portuguese, you don't answer a "Yes" or "No" question with a "Yes" or "No." Instead, you answer it with the verb. If someone asks in Portuguese, "Are you a student at PUC?" my answer would be an "I am," not a "Yes." If someone wonders, "Do you like pizza?" I would answer "I like." If they question, "Do you study on Thursdays?" I would answer, "I don't study, No." This seemed strange to me for the first months living here but now it is normal, and it shows a small difference in thinking between Portuguese speakers and English speakers.

Yes, my experience in Brazil has changed me. I will never be the very same person I was when I left the United States. But it hasn't just changed me in the obvious ways, in the ways we can pinpoint. It has changed me in ways we can't see or count. It's amazing to think that I am beginning to better understand the Brazilian mentality through language- and it makes me wonder how many other little things are changing me.