I completed all the mini stories for the language I’m learning and 3 other courses on LingQ (Portuguese). I’m a bit lost now and not sure what to do.
I struggle most with the phonetics and listening part of the language. I can read pretty good and I understand a good bit when I read anything. But when it comes to listen and speaking and the phonetic pronunciation.
What should I do now? I’ve found a lot of youtube material to be too challenging. ShouldI just go back through the stories a few more times to get clear on the vocabulary?
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I mainly use podcasts on YouTube. There are different ones for different levels, including beginners. You probably have to search a bit to find something that you feel comfortable with.
A lot of newspapers have language learner material on their sides, and some newspaper sites provide simple language. News in general might be useful as they provide short content with “on point” language (no slang, clearly and relatively slowly spoken so that elderly people can understand it).
You might also be able to find universities that provide free material for you to study.
Last but not least, but not free, are language learner ebooks. There are plenty duolingual books out there, often accompanied with audio files (usually you can download them seperately). You can import ebooks in LingQ, although you may have to remove the copyright protection. (Via Calibre or a similar tool).
Note that I don’t study Portuguese, so I cannot judge how much content you’ll be able to find. But as it is a rather widely used language, I would be surprised if you encounter a lot of troubles.
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Ok thanks, so at this stage I should be looking for stuff that fits my level basically
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You could still try importing some things that are still above your head. On most things that you import there is an option in the 3 dot menu for the lesson to “simplify lesson”. So you might import some news from one of the regular news sites, simplify it and get it closer to your level.
If it’s not simple enough, you can get on chat gpt. Ask it to modify the article and or summarize it but to use A1, A2, B1, etc. level language. If it’s still to hard ask it to simplify even more until it’s something you can read easier.
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you must, must, must do the lingua da gente podcast. Each episode has a brief discussion about all the grammar before and after the dialogue, but someone also just put the dialogues themselves (between 10 and 90 seconds) on LingQ. I would listen to each one 20 + times. Its still beginner level but its worth laying a very strong foundation before going on to native content. There are 5 or 6 batches of intermediate ‘communication exercises’ from the same university/professor team after you finish lingua da gente. If you listen to each one 20+ times that should keep you busy for a while–my biggest regret was not drilling to listening more at the beginning because my reading is approaching upper intermediate now but I still struggle with listening comp in the anarchy of the real world (i.e. outside one on one convo)
Since Portuguese is relatively close to English, from there I would reccomend just reading short non-fiction (wikipedia, news articles, movie reviews) and listening while reading to podcasts or youtube channels that interest you. There is some great lower intermediate content in the library already provided by some incredible users (Portuguese daily life, mundo afora, meu diario, etc)
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I would recommend importing the YouTube videos of Speaking Brazilian Language School. In particular, there are several vlogs (bakery visit, Rio tour, hiking by beach) that are entertaining and designed for beginners with very clear, slow, enunciated speech.
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Are you focused on Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, or both? If Brazilian, there is a ton of material out there. If European, there’s less but I have found a pretty good stash of it with increasing levels of difficulty, and have shared quite a bit in the writing exchange (in Portuguese). Feel free to follow me and/or reach out if you’d like specific tips. Note that I haven’t reached what I would call fluency, but I am definitely at an upper intermediate level where I’m having conversations with native speakers regularly, reading in Portuguese pretty fluently, and understanding the majority of authentic native content (not all.) European Portuguese is much harder to understand than Brazilian, as it is an stress-timed language (meaning some syllables at regular intervals are pronounced and everything else is swallowed) whereas Brazilian Portuguese is a syllable-timed language (meaning every syllable is pronounced.) Cheers
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can you share this? " lingua da gente podcast" I can’t find it on youtube or on LingQ. Thanks! Do you think drilling the mini stories again is a good idea? I have went through them 3 times or so but could maybe go once again
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its very personal, i find dialogues much better than the ministories, which are more a way to encompass all the grammar and structure of the language in lieu of a textbook (one thing that surprises most novice independent learners is just what a low stage of the process having covered all the grammar actually represents). But LingQ is all about the ministories because thats what works for steve. (not for nothing, his speaking is far worse than his reading and listening apparently are in the languages he records himself in).
listening is boring but it is the core skill of language acquisition. its surreal that i can zip through texts in miliseconds that i can hardly understand if played even at normal speed, in a language with a relatively uncomplicated and predictable phonology. so i would reccomend blasting the s**t out of these dialogues (the more advanced lessons from the same guy switch to monologues). between lingua da gente and then the other ‘comm exercises’ you are talking about maybe 500 lessons from 10 seconds to 2 minutes–i try listening a few times without text, read with the text and audio sped up, and then just audio again sped up since ive read it now, several times each at least for steps 1 and 3. and then the next day reviewing previous as well as the new ones, and then returning to a given lesson again after a few days. this is the ideal and you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but the point is i did 2-4 times and shrugged and moved on which was really dumb. ive lived in brazil a year and a half, have had intimate relationships all in portuguese, read somewhat advanced stuff, and its very painful not to be able to take advantage of these social circles ive found where everyone rattles away at normal speed because im B2 in speaking and reading and still basically an advanced beginner in listening.
reading while listening is also a vital tool in any language. i guess the ideal diet would be regular pure listening/pure listening with corrective or overlooking the dialogue as described above, with easy content; reading while listening with slight speed increase for at the level content, and then just reading for more advanced content, with the last thing being the easiest to study and by murphy’s law the least important, unless literature is really all you care about. eventually for fluency you will need to crush the listening and train your ears not to reject the foreign sounds which is much more sensibly done sooner than later, IMO.
the mini-stories are okay but have a lot of constructions that are not really used even though gramatically correct. it seems to grate the whole input hypothesis because even though input based, it is contrived; and the CI hypothesis is as much about not resisting nature as it is about the correct order of operations.
go to any podcast app and search for it and youll find it. and search for ‘communication exercises’ in the library for the follow up to that
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I go for the easiest books I can find and that I find ok or pleasant to read. I buy and import them if I need to.
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