I've been studying Portuguese since February and I'm doing pretty good, I'm intermediate now and can do past and future tenses fairly well. Working on vocabulary expansion now, it's the fun part of language learning instead of the drudgery of conjugations. It's definitely not Spanish, but speaking Spanish helped tremendously with the language pickup. The down side is that my spoken Spanish is terrible now, but I can still understand it. We've been looking into it since last November when we were also considering Alaska, and have made a few friends there, have one Brazilian friend stateside. It took from March until a couple weeks ago to get the kids passports renewed, insanely slow. Husband is going shortly to check out the houses we have been looking at online as well as scope out each area before we pull the trigger.