How LinguaMama Got Built, Part 2: Portugal, Probably
Spain was the plan. Portugal was the better deal — five years to an EU passport. We sold the house and moved to a shack to make it happen. Then we found one passport on the kitchen counter. There had been two.
By Geordie Everitt
The end of the metro line on the Málaga commuter train stops at Fuengirola.
This is useful information if you are planning a reconnaissance trip to the Costa del Sol — which is what the April 2025 trip was, in the language of people who have made a decision without yet knowing exactly what it entails. "Reconnaissance" sounds more purposeful than "we booked two AirBnbs and hoped they would tell us something."
The thinking went like this: Fuengirola sits at the far end of the C-1 line, which meant it was as far as you could get from Málaga Airport while still having direct metro access. Cheap flights into Málaga — and there are many, from most of Europe — put you forty minutes from the center of town. The high-speed AVE from Málaga could get you to Madrid in under two hours, Seville in less. The infrastructure of the rest of the continent was accessible without requiring that you live in it. The second week would be Estepona — smaller, quieter, positioned between Málaga and Gibraltar on a coastline that had apparently been hosting Europeans on holiday long enough that the entire apparatus of comfortable, affordable short-term living was already in place.
The plan, in other words, was not improvised.
Why Spain
Maria has what she describes as unprovable Spanish ancestry — lineage that gestures toward the Iberian Peninsula without producing documentation. Whether or not that ancestry is real, the affinity is. And I had been to Spain before. I liked it in the way you like a place when you visit as a tourist and the weather is good and nothing goes wrong: unreservedly, and possibly naively.
France had briefly been on the table. The south of France in particular — not on the water, not tourist-dense, one of the smaller inland towns that still had a market and a train station and could reasonably be walked. I had a feeling about it. Maria did not share the feeling with similar intensity, and in these matters we try to be honest about asymmetric enthusiasm. The south of France can wait.
Spain it was. Beautiful. Historic. Well-connected to everywhere. More affordable than most of Western Europe without yet having the infrastructure strain that oversaturation brings. April was chosen partly because it would not yet be summer, and partly because it would not yet be summer.
The Label Maker Phase
The decision made, the first practical question surfaced immediately: we were going to need to learn Spanish.
We approached this, as we approach most things, differently from each other.
My method was a label maker. Within a week of November 6th, the kitchen was annotated. Horno. Nevera. Fregadero. The bathroom got its own vocabulary. The car dashboard acquired izquierda on the left and derecha on the right and trigo integral on the grocery bag in the passenger seat where I would see it at red lights, because apparently I felt strongly about knowing the word for whole wheat. The theory — which is not a bad theory — was that vocabulary absorbed in context sticks better than vocabulary absorbed from a list. Put the word on the thing. See the thing fifty times a day. The word follows.
Maria's method was Duolingo. The super-max, fully committed, non-refundable annual subscription. From wherever she happened to be in the house, you could hear it — the little chimes, the encouragement sounds, the particular audio signature of gamified language learning doing its level best to make conjugation feel like a slot machine paying out. She was diligent. The streak was real.
These are both reasonable approaches. They are also, I would discover, not quite how language acquisition actually works.
Somewhere in the early months of this project I found a YouTube channel called Dreaming Spanish. Pablo Román, the founder, had built something unusual: hours and hours of content in Spanish, delivered at a pace and with a vocabulary calibrated for people who don't yet speak Spanish. No translation. No grammar instruction. Just Spanish, comprehensible just slightly above wherever you currently are, delivered with the patience of someone who had thought very carefully about how languages actually enter a brain.
The concept has a name — comprehensible input — and a serious body of research behind it, associated most prominently with the linguist Stephen Krashen. The short version: language is not learned by memorizing rules and vocabulary. It is acquired, the way children acquire it, through massive exposure to meaningful, understandable communication in the target language. Grammar emerges from pattern recognition. Vocabulary arrives attached to meaning and context rather than a flashcard. The explicit study of language mechanics is, at best, a minor supplement to the real process — and at worst, an active distraction from it.
I watched this and felt the specific sensation of someone whose professional background has just handed them an unexpected key.
Thirty years of working with recommendation engines, full-text search, natural language processing — the infrastructure of machines that learn from exposure, that build internal representations from patterns in data, that acquire rather than memorize — and here was a human-facing description of the same process. Tokens. Weights. Backpropagation. The way a language model doesn't study grammar so much as internalize it from sufficient exposure until the structure is implicit in the parameters. I had spent decades watching machines learn language this way. The research was telling me that humans do it the same way.
With the enthusiasm of a recent convert, I set about applying everything I knew about training a language model to the project of training a considerably squishier neural network — the one behind my eyes — to understand ñ.
The label maker stayed on the kitchen cabinets. I kept watching Dreaming Spanish. The Duolingo sounds continued from the other room.
Then I prompted Claude Sonnet about Spanish visa requirements.
The Numbers
After November 6th, we had a direction. What we needed was a visa.
The Spain Digital Nomad Visa — the Ley de Startups version — was designed for people like us, in theory. Remote workers, consultants, the location-independent. Spain had created it to attract exactly the demographic that was flooding into Portugal and missing Spain entirely.
Maria's situation was clean. She had retired. She had savings, enough documentation to establish that she could support herself without working in Spain. For her, the path was straightforward, if not simple.
My situation was more complicated. Consulting income is real but irregular — it arrives in concentrations rather than monthly installments, and the DNV requires demonstrating a specific threshold of consistent earnings. Not impossible. But the documentation exercise involved reconstructing a coherent financial narrative from tax returns and wire transfers and client contracts in a way that was, generously speaking, a project.
I sat with the spreadsheet for a while.
Then I opened a new browser tab and typed "Portugal digital nomad visa."
The Five-Year Passport
Portugal's D7 visa is designed for retirees and people with passive income. Maria qualified cleanly — retired, savings, demonstrable self-sufficiency. And the D7 allows dependents. As her dependent, I could still work consulting clients in any country that wasn't Portugal. Which was not a constraint I was ever going to bump into.
But the visa path was only part of it. The bigger draw was what it led to.
Five years of legal residency in Portugal converts to full citizenship. And Portuguese citizenship means an EU passport — the ability to live and work anywhere in the European Union, indefinitely, for the rest of your life. Spain was offering a visa. Portugal was offering a different category of thing entirely.
I had a professional connection to Portugal's financial history that made this feel less like opportunism than it might otherwise. During the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, I worked at the IMF. Portugal was one of the countries that came through our door — a €78 billion bailout from the EU, the ECB, and the Fund, negotiated under conditions that were, by any measure, brutal. Austerity. Recession. An entire decade of recovery. What Portugal built on the other side of that — the residency incentives, the citizenship path, the NHR tax regime — was deliberate policy designed to attract foreign capital and talent back to a country that had watched a lot of both leave. I had watched them make those decisions from a particular vantage point. The fact that we were now among the people those policies were designed to attract felt like a small and slightly absurd closing of a loop.
Portugal was also cheaper than Spain. And adjacent to Spain — a few hours by train across the same peninsula. These are not irrelevant considerations.
What I Knew About Portugal
Fado, for a start — a musical form so particular to one country that it didn't even attempt an international crossover, the way flamenco did. A national ceramic rooster that appears on dish towels and refrigerator magnets with an air of complete confidence that its own symbolism will eventually be explained to you, or won't. Three hundred days of sunshine in the Algarve, a claim made with the casualness of people who have stopped noticing that this is unusual.
And the Venn diagram problem. At some point during the months of emigration preparation, I had started keeping a running list of things I was not going to miss about the United States. The list was growing faster than I would have liked. The uncomfortable observation was that the overlap between that list and the Costa del Sol — Torremolinos, Benalmádena, the stretch between Fuengirola and Málaga — was wider than felt comfortable. Coral Gables with better weather and older buildings. Portugal was not that. These are novelty-seeking robots. Portugal had novelty.
I knew one more thing about Portugal, or thought I did.
I knew they spoke a dialect of Spanish called Brazilian.
Portugal, it turned out, had its own language. That language was Portuguese.
We canceled the Fuengirola and Estepona reservations. We booked a villa in Tavira, in the eastern Algarve, for the same April dates. The language question could wait.
It could not, in my case, entirely wait — because I had been building something. A hobby project, loosely. The kind of thing a person constructs when thirty years of working adjacent to recommendation engines, full-text search, and natural language processing have given them more opinions about how language actually works than any amateur has reasonable standing to hold. The AI Winter, it turned out, had been excellent training for the AI Spring. I had followed Chomsky and Pinker for years — from the politics shelf and the popular science shelf respectively, which is to say not as professional reading, but as public intellectuals whose academic domain I kept bumping into sideways. I did not know yet what the project would become. But it was there. Running in the background. Like something that knew before I did.
The Wrong Kind of Romance Language
Switching from Spanish to Portuguese turns out to be less straightforward than switching from, say, one airline's loyalty program to another's.
Both languages descend from Latin. They share a substantial portion of their vocabulary. A person with working Spanish can read Portuguese with some effort and infer quite a bit. On paper, they are close relatives.
In the ear, they are not.
Spanish is a syllable-timed language — each syllable gets roughly equal weight and duration, which produces the rhythmic, evenly-spaced quality that makes it, among other things, relatively easy for English speakers to parse. Portuguese is stress-timed, like English itself: syllables compress and swallow and blur around the stressed ones, and unstressed vowels reduce or disappear entirely. European Portuguese in particular does something with its vowels that strikes most new listeners as faintly Slavic — not what you expect from a language on the Atlantic coast of a peninsula that also contains Spain. The feel of it is different in ways that shared vocabulary doesn't prepare you for. You recognize the words on the page. Your ears hand you something that doesn't match.
Spanish, I would later confirm through direct and humbling experience, is considerably easier to learn than Portuguese.
The other problem was Pablo Román.
Dreaming Spanish had no equivalent in Portuguese. There were comprehensible input channels on YouTube for Portuguese learners — genuinely dedicated teachers doing excellent work — but none with the production consistency, the pedagogical architecture, the sheer volume of graduated content that Dreaming Spanish had built over years. The resource that had reoriented my entire approach to language acquisition simply did not exist in the language I now needed.
The hobby project that had been running quietly in the background acquired a new sense of purpose. If the gap existed — if the methodology was sound but the content wasn't there — then the interesting problem had just become considerably more specific.
It was, I will admit, exhilarating.
The Dungalow
It could not wait indefinitely.
The visa process took months, cost thousands of dollars, and generated a quantity of documentation that I will not attempt to describe without a spreadsheet nearby. In the middle of it, Portugal quietly revised its citizenship timeline — the five-year path that had been the clearest argument for choosing Portugal over Spain. Disappointing. We were already committed.
We sold the house. We sold most of what was in the house. We moved into what we called The Dungalow — a $2,800-a-month rental in Dunedin that was modest by any standard and actively punishing by the standard of the deposit we'd just turned into someone else's equity. It was the price of the ticket, and we paid it without much ceremony, because at that point the only direction that made sense was forward.
In November, the visa stamped passports arrived.
Maria Lost Her Passport
There are events that are, by any reasonable measure, setbacks. And then there are events that feel, in the moment, like the universe has decided to conduct a stress test on a decision you have already made irreversible.
We found one passport on the kitchen counter. There had been two.
Part 3: What you do when your visa is stamped in a document that no longer exists.