Where do I go with Portuguese? How I do I get a good regiment going?

Open Forum in English
1

Hello,

I know basic Portuguese including a bunch of words, phrases, music, etc. Does anyone have a ‘Game Plan’ per se that can help me get on track and start learning the language faster?

How did you learn Portuguese as an English speaker? What did your day look like? What do you recommend as a beginner?

  • J.
2

Mother tongue- English. I have been speaking Spanish for 25 years. I started with www.duoling.com. It was great for a beginner. I then through skype I met several native speakers from Brazil. I avoid speakers from Rio de Janeiro, because I will be traveling to Soa Paolo. Now, I’m here. I really enjoy the Cafe Brazil lessons. I had just started listening to the podcast before finding lingq. I became a paying member after seeing that Cafe Brazil podcast and transcripts were available. Boa sorte

3

I started Portuguese with a Teach Yourself book, before we had Portuguese here at LingQ. Thereafter I focused on the content at LingQ, starting with the Beginner material. Mostly I just listen, perhaps 70% of my study time, and mostly while driving, doing household chores, exercising etc. The rest is reading and LingQing. Within a few month you should be able to tackle authentic content.

Cafe Brazil is great and so are a number of Portuguese podcasts from RTF, some of which have been transcribed and shared here by our member mfr (Fernanda. ( I like doing both European and Brazilian Portuguese.

4

Hi eyeforimagery
I’m a European Portuguese tutor and I have some lessons for beginners that you can check here:

I also have a wiki with resources and materials to which you can request access and I’ll be glad to grant it.

http://plnm.pbworks.com/w/page/45468365/FrontPage

As Steve mentioned - thanks, Steve, for advertising my transcripts :slight_smile: - I also transcribed some radio podcasts, but perhaps they are a bit advanced, it depends on your level.

Fernanda

5

I might add that I strongly recommend learning from material in all varieties of accents, whether the language is Portuguese, Spanish , English , French or whatever.

First of all this means you will be able to understand more people. And in my view, language learning is first and foremost about comprehension. If you cannot understand the native speaker your conversations won’t last very long.

Second of all, the biggest obstacle to fluency, in my view, is vocabulary. We need lots of words. Therefore the main task in reading and listening to content is acquiring the new words that are there. The accent is of less importance in vocabulary acquisition.

Third, listening to different accents makes our brain more nimble, more flexible and improves our ability in the language, in my experience.

If we know we are going to be needing a certain form of the language we can simply put more effort into that form, and do more repetitive listening of that form, but I would still expose myself to a wider range of accents.

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