In a small izakaya in Kyoto, I once told a bartender — in what I’m sure was atrocious Japanese — that his yakitori was beautiful. Not delicious. Beautiful. I’d confused oishii with utsukushii, and instead of correcting me, he laughed so hard he had to put down the bottle of shochu he was pouring.
Then he gave me an extra skewer on the house.
That moment captures something I’ve experienced over and over across forty-plus countries: speaking even a few words of someone’s language — badly, haltingly, with the wrong conjugation and the wrong tone — does something to the interaction that nothing else can replicate. It’s not about fluency. It’s about the attempt.
The Languages
I should be clear about my credentials here, because they’re modest. English is my first language. I grew up in Singapore, so I have conversational Mandarin, though my reading is embarrassingly limited. I speak workable Portuguese from years of working closely with Bruno and our team in Sao Paulo. My Spanish is decent enough to survive in Latin America. My German is tourist-level — enough to order food and ask for directions and make people smile at my accent. And my Japanese is roughly forty phrases, most of them food-related.
I am not a polyglot. I am not one of those people who absorbs languages effortlessly. Every word in every language beyond English and Mandarin was hard-won, usually through embarrassment.
But that’s actually the point.
The Attempt
There’s a specific thing that happens when you try to speak someone’s language and they realize you’re trying. Their face changes. Not always dramatically — sometimes it’s just a slight softening around the eyes, a shift from transactional to personal. But it happens reliably, across cultures, in every country I’ve visited.
In Brazil, attempting Portuguese transforms everything. Brazilians are already among the warmest people on earth, but when you stumble through a few sentences in their language, something extra opens up. They lean in. They slow down. They start coaching you, gently correcting your pronunciation, teaching you slang, testing you on new words. A shopkeeper in Porto Alegre spent twenty minutes teaching me the difference between legal (cool), massa (awesome), and daora (really awesome) — regional variations that no textbook covers.
In Japan, the reaction is different but equally powerful. There’s often genuine surprise. Many Japanese people don’t expect foreigners to attempt their language at all, and when you do — even poorly — you get a response that’s somewhere between delight and respect. The bartender in Kyoto didn’t just give me an extra skewer. He spent the rest of the evening trying to teach me food vocabulary, drawing pictures on napkins when words failed.
In Germany, the reaction is more practical. Germans will typically respond to your German with perfect English, which can be demoralizing. But I’ve found that if you persist — if you keep going in German despite their superior English — they eventually relent, slow down, and engage with you in German. And something shifts. You move from “tourist” to “person making an effort,” and that distinction matters more than you’d expect.
The Humility
Language learning humbles you in a way that very few experiences can.
As adults, we spend most of our lives in a state of relative competence. We know how to do our jobs. We can navigate our cities. We can hold conversations and make arguments and express nuance. We’re good at things.
Then you try to buy train tickets in a language you’ve been studying for six months and you can’t even parse the automated announcements. You point at a menu item and hope for the best. You nod along in conversations, understanding maybe thirty percent, smiling to cover the gaps.
It’s uncomfortable. And it’s important.
In Sao Paulo, during my first visit, I tried to order coffee in Portuguese and instead asked for a horse. Cafe and cavalo are not similar words, so I still don’t understand how I made this mistake. The barista stared at me for a long three seconds before we both started laughing.
These moments of failure — of being the person in the room who doesn’t get it, who sounds like a child, who can’t express a single thought with the precision they’re used to — these moments are gifts. Not in a motivational-poster way. In a practical way. They teach you what it feels like to be on the other side of competence.
This matters enormously if you work with people across cultures, which I do every day.
When a client whose first language isn’t English struggles to express a complex idea in our meetings, I understand that struggle physically. I know what it feels like to have a thought fully formed in your head and watch it come out mangled in someone else’s language. That empathy isn’t abstract — it was earned at a coffee counter in Sao Paulo when I accidentally ordered livestock.
Language and Business
Here’s where this connects to work, because it does, in ways that go beyond “it’s nice to greet clients in their language.”
When you learn a language, even at a basic level, you learn how its speakers organize reality. Languages aren’t just different labels for the same concepts. They structure thought differently. Portuguese has saudade — a word for the longing you feel for something you’ve lost or never had — and the absence of that word in English means most English speakers have to work harder to access that particular emotional frequency.
Japanese has dozens of words for different qualities of silence. German has schadenfreude but also gemutlichkeit — a word for the feeling of warmth, comfort, and belonging that has no English equivalent.
When you learn these words, you don’t just add vocabulary. You add perceptual capacity. You start noticing things you didn’t notice before.
This applies directly to understanding customers. At PipelineRoad, we work with clients across multiple markets. Understanding how people in different cultures think about trust, authority, community, and value isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the foundation of effective messaging.
The German market, for example, responds to a completely different kind of communication than the Brazilian market. Germans want precision, evidence, and understated credibility. Brazilians want warmth, relationships, and social proof that feels personal rather than institutional. These aren’t stereotypes — they’re patterns that emerged from years of writing marketing copy for both markets, informed by enough linguistic and cultural exposure to understand why the differences exist.
You can read about cultural differences in a business book. Or you can learn twenty phrases in someone’s language and feel the differences in your nervous system. The second approach is slower and messier. It’s also the one that sticks.
Entering New Markets
There’s a direct parallel between learning a language and entering a new market.
When we take on a new client in an industry we haven’t worked in before, the first thing we do is learn the language. Not a foreign language — the industry’s language. Every sector has its own vocabulary, its own idioms, its own way of describing problems and solutions.
Fund managers don’t talk about “customers” — they talk about “LPs.” They don’t “close deals” — they “reach final close.” They don’t have “sales pipelines” — they have “fundraising timelines.” Using the wrong word doesn’t just make you sound uninformed. It signals that you’re an outsider who hasn’t done the work to understand their world.
The approach is the same as language learning. You start by listening. You write down terms you don’t understand. You ask dumb questions and accept the momentary embarrassment. You use the new vocabulary tentatively at first, then with more confidence as it becomes natural.
And just like with a foreign language, the attempt matters. When a fund manager hears you use their terminology correctly, the same thing happens as when a bartender in Kyoto hears you try Japanese. Something shifts. You move from outsider to someone who cares enough to learn.
The Doorway
I called this essay “Language as a Doorway” because that’s what it is. Not a window — a doorway. A window lets you observe. A doorway lets you enter.
When you speak someone’s language, you enter their world. Not fully. Not as a native. But you cross a threshold that remains closed to people who never try. And on the other side of that threshold is a different quality of connection.
The extra yakitori skewer in Kyoto. The twenty-minute slang lesson in Porto Alegre. The German engineer who finally stopped switching to English and let me struggle through a conversation that ended with both of us grinning at my grammar.
These aren’t transactions. They’re moments of mutual recognition. I see you. I see your culture. I’m willing to be bad at something to get a little closer to understanding your world.
In a profession built on communication — which mine is — that willingness is everything.
My Japanese is still terrible. My Portuguese still makes Brazilians smile for the wrong reasons sometimes. My German accent has been described, charitably, as “creative.”
But the doors keep opening.
And what’s on the other side keeps being worth it.