Our Thanksgiving meal in Porto last night was reserved months in advance. We had so many beautiful meals in Spain, Portugal’s neighbor, that I figured that Portugal would also have a number of fine-dining interpretations of Portuguese cuisine that would be interesting to try. One of the spots that was highly recommended and has a Michelin star is Pedro Lemos. It opened in 2009 by a chef of the same name, and this restaurant is a modern interpretation of the local Portuguese cuisine with some international twists. It’s located in Foz, which is a historic and very residential neighborhood in Porto.

All the dishes we were served in our multi course tasting menu were delicious, creative, tinged with Asian influences, and beautifully plated on colorful and ornate pieces of local pottery (of course, since we are in Portugal, all the ceramics are going to be stunners and custom crafted). We were even served a bottle of local wine that is two years older than me for a price that was so low that it would be unheard of back home. But one of the most interesting things of the night to me, other than the food itself, was listening to the dishes described to us in English with Portuguese accents, and noticing how certain things were said.

We’re really lucky that we learned English as a first (well for me, semi-first since I learned English and Toisan at the same time) language. There are so many nuances in this language that are hard to understand, from variations on pronunciations on certain sounds and letters to even sentence structure, that make very little sense when you speak another language first. When I studied French, I really struggled to understand when to use an article before a word or not (do you say “people” or “the people”?). There was a rule, but there were five million exceptions that “you just need to know and remember,” as my French teacher said. When you say “of the world,” do you say “du monde (which is “de” and “le” combined, or “of the”), or “de monde” (“of world)? It’s not consistent, and what is correct in this example varies depending on the exact use case. When I started to formally learn Chinese in college, I realized that the sentence structure is so simple, especially since there are no tenses in Chinese. But that makes it even harder to get English as a second language as a native Chinese speaker. For example, in Chinese, if you want to say “I like to eat Chinese food” in Chinese, it would be (in pinyin): “Wo xihuan chi zhongguo cai” (literally: “I like eat China food”). So when I learned this, I realized, ah, that’s why sometimes people who are speaking English as second language after Chinese forget to use articles in speech (“to”) or they say the country name instead of the adjective (“China” versus “Chinese”).

When the server was done describing each dish to us, she’d always end it by saying, “Enjoy it.” In the U.S. or any English-speaking country, you would know you’d never hear this. In fact, this short sentence is a quick giveaway that even without her accent that she speaks English as a second language. Instead, with a native English speaker, you’d hear the person say, “Enjoy.” But, when learning from a romance language, you rarely say a verb as a standalone and that’s it; you say the verb then the object, which is why our server said “enjoy it” rather than “enjoy.”

This reminds me to be more empathetic to people who are learning English as a second language, and of course, to remind myself that my own second language capabilities are so little in a country like Portugal, where it’s common for people to know two to three languages fluently.