Back to school: Learn chess specific lingo in Portuguese!

Find a reason for learning something new and a skill you want to improve

“I’d love to learn Portuguese. My sister has married her Brazilian fiancé and I love this chess tournament in Maia, Portugal, that I frequent every year (like the one WCM Katharina Reinecke is currently participating in, the Maia Chess Festival 2025) .” Maybe it’s your time to start learning Portuguese or you say you love the openings played by GM Rasmus Svane but you have no clue about d4 openings. Maybe it’s time for you to take some chess classes on openings to dive into d4 openings to get a better understanding of what GM Rasmus Svane conjures up on his board and to get a better grasp of what your opponents try to play against you when they show up with 1. d4.

If the chess leagues are starting again, there is a good chance that chess clubs are starting their training groups again, too. There is also a good chance that coaches are open for new students after their summer holidays. Next to January 1st, this is a brilliant moment to start something new or to work more intensively on a particular skill.

Combining languages and chess perhaps?

This could even be your start to mix both topics, chess and languages. Have you already found the “languages” button on the upper right corner on the lichess blogs page? You can sort the lichess articles by language and check out how well your language skills are in chess specific lingo.

Here is an example for an article in Brazilian Portuguese about how to prepare for a tournament by enxadrista37: “Como se preparer para um torneio de xadrez”. Another ones is written by Spartako about finding better places for your pieces to make them happy: Não sabe o que fazer? Melhore a pior peça!

If you want to combine chess and languages, you could start your own blog in your target language or start participating in chess events in that language or get a chess coach for your target language. In a recent lichess article (written in English) by Vlad_G92 about selecting the right coach (“How to Select a Chess Coach: A Complete Guide for Players at Every Level“) languages play a role as well. Roughly summarized, it's said that the best coach doesn’t help if you both don’t have a shared language you can communicate in comfortably. But I want you to get to different point: I want you to add languages to your set of languages you are comfortable to use in chess contexts. So, what about that chess class in Portuguese? What moment is better than this moment right now to get back to school?