A little background info about me: I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, where I lived more than 20 years of my life. In Brazil we all speak Portuguese, everyday and everywhere, and less than 3% of the population speak English fluently.

Brazilians take mandatory English classes in school, but for a number of reasons — including a quite broken national educational system and the lack of exposure to the language on a regular basis — we don’t learn it enough. We think we do; quality standards are so low in certain regions that one can really quickly be considered an advanced student in language schools. But when you move to an English-speaking country and English becomes your primary language, you very soon start to realize how your “5-star”, “advanced proficiency” in English can only get you so far.

Paulista Avenue, São Paulo (photo: Marcos Lamego)

We do get to listen to American music on the radio and watch Hollywood movies somewhat frequently (dubbed on TV, subtitled in theaters). But when you lack grammar, vocabulary, and/or cultural references, it all tends to sound like gibberish or background noise.

And then you get a job in UX.

“Normalmente se tem como base a aniquilação de alguns requisitos como uso de cores e imagens reais, utilizando-se somente blocos para representar os espaços e tipos de conteúdo. Quanto mais detalhada a informação, melhor a interpretação do especialista. Wireframes também podem servir como guia para que os desenvolvedores saibam o posicionamento correto dos objetos.”

The paragraph above is an excerpt from an article, written in Portuguese, about the role of wireframes in the design process. I’m sure you are smart enough to grasp a few words here and there, even without ever been exposed to the language. And there’s a big chance that, if you’re reading this article, you already know what wireframes are used for.

But what if that was the only way you could learn more about a discipline you have a lot of passion for, and very little experience with?

Every single UX blog or website that my mentors would send me (“you should add this one to your Google Reader!”) was written in English. Every. Single. One.

Back in 2005, when I started working in UX at a big digital agency in Brazil, content available in Portuguese about our discipline was close to zero. Every single UX blog or website that my mentors would send me (“you should add this one to your Google Reader!”) was being written in English.

Aside from the headache that reading and listening to a foreign language for several hours a week brings, it was also a matter of depth: the smarter the writing, the harder it is for a non-native speaker to understand all the subtleties and smart thinking hidden in between the lines.

The lack of fluency in English was holding me back in UX.

And I had to do something to change that.

Cultivating a reading habit

The best way of solving a challenge that is bigger than yourself, is to start. There was no other path, really. Google Reader (sigh) was the best partner I could ask for in that process; blocking my calendar from 8 to 9am every day of the week was another key step to get me where I wanted to.

Every morning I would spend at least one full hour reading all the feeds from the day before, carefully organized in folders: User Experience, Technology, Advertising, Art, and… well, Memes.

I had to be fully immersed in that new language, and that had to include way more than just UX sources.

Every Saturday morning I would spend about three hours looking back at everything I had read the week before, and translating that knowledge into articles that I would publish, in Portuguese, on a UX blog I decided to create to help me in that process. Having a place to document what I was learning was an important piece of the puzzle. When you go through the exercise of retelling a story in your native language, with words that you know exactly how to play with, you force yourself to fully understand the meaning and the intricacies of what you are trying to communicate.

Through that same blog — I thought — I could help other Brazilian designers along the way that were not as proficient in English.

Understanding expressions

“…and run a ballpark estimate to avoid surprises later on…”

“…to set up a touch base with the team every morning…”

“…make sure you cover all the bases in the design process…”

“…be able to handle curveballs right off the bat…”

It was not just about individual words. When you’re born in the nation of soccer, reading expressions like the ones above can be disorienting.

It’s what I like to call “Baseball English”. After a couple years living and breathing the American culture, you learn to understand, appreciate, and respect each of these expressions.