Day 1 - 30 day Portuguese language learning speed run
Looking through lots of language learning resources
See the introductory post of the series here.
First day of learning Portuguese from scratch! And wow, it’s a lot. Especially the pronunciation was surprisingly hard for me.
How I spent my time
I spent most of my time today on gathering resources that I can use over the next 30 days. So far, not much studying, but mostly preparation. In particular, I was looking for resources on basic grammar, vocabulary, conjugations and podcasts that I could listen to. I also started listening to podcasts a bit. In summary:
2h: looking for resources for vocabulary, conjugations, grammar, and podcasts
30 mins: listening to podcasts (but I was in a bus anyway)
30 mins: reading through basic grammar explanations
30 mins: watching youtube videos on pronunciation
5 mins: doing flash cards (but mostly to try them out)
So overall, the majority of my time spent today was on gathering material, and only about 1.5h of actual learning / studying.
Here are some of the resources that I found:
Vocabulary
My first go-to place was Anki, the popular flashcard app. Anki has a so-called spaced repetition algorithm that shows you flashcards in increasing intervals so you can optimally retain information in your long-term memory. Their community page has quite a few decks for learning Portuguese shared by other users.
Here is what I found:
This phrase collection with European Portuguese audio, which is an updated version of another one
From what I can tell, it looks really nice and helpful. Starts with single words and has good audio. That’s probably what I’m going to use for now
Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese
I like it less. It doesn’t have audio and it tends to have too many meanings. For example, the word “a” is translated as “1) to, at, 2) as definite article: the, 3) as direct object: you, her, it”. I appreciate you have to get the meaning across somehow, but that’s not working…
I also came across this deck on Portuguese phonetics. Fun stuff! But hell I’m not going to use it… Just tried out two flashcards and it just teaches you the phonetic alphabet. Better to learn pronunciations on the job!
Conjugations
When learning Spanish it was extremely useful to have a lot of practice with conjugations. Being able to understand and produce a certain conjugation quickly is an important step towards fluency in a language.
Again, I looked to Anki for help. Unfortunately, I didn’t find quite what I was looking for. My ideal conjugation deck would ask for conjugations in the context of mini-sentences, and ideally the tense/mood that’s necessary would become clear from the context (i.e. by using something like “one minute ago, she … (arrive) home”).
This Conjugation of Portuguese Verbs looked good. It has audio, and conjugations are presented in context. I think for now it’s a bit too advanced for me unfortunately - it starts with all tenses at once and doesn’t provide translations for the sentences.
This (Brazilian Portuguese) Conjugation Trainer is so far my favourite. I wanted to learn European Portuguese, so it’s not ideal. But overall quite good. It has example sentences (sadly without translation) and you can click on the card to expand the full list of conjugations, which is really nice.
This one is is fine, but it forces you to translate everything from English. Some may like that, others not. One problem I see is that e.g. for past tenses, it may not always be obvious which tense is correct in Portuguese. I’ll try the other one first and might look at it again.
This one asks your for complete conjugation tables, which seems a nightmare to me.
I also found a few websites. Ideally, I’d want to have an app, not a website, but some people prefer using their computer.
Linguno seemed really good. They have example sentences with translations and conjugations are shown in context. At first sight I have to say I’m impressed. Will likely use it in the future.
Conjugemos seemed ok, but not as good.
Pronunciation videos
Portuguese pronunciation is difficult - at least to me. So I spent some time today to watch a few videos on pronunciation. Here is what I watched:
How To Pronounce and Read European Portuguese like a Native!
Very good explanations and examples
How to Pronounce Portuguese Like a Native Speaker
Quite detailed explanation of all the different sounds in the Portuguese language. Slightly technical, but I found it quite helpful to learn about the complexity at least once in the beginning. Aaaalso I realised it’s Brazilian, not European Portuguese.Simple Sentences and Disappearing Vowels - European Portuguese Pronunciation
Provides some intuition on how words are often contracted in speech
It was important for me to get some basic understanding of Portuguese pronunciation. I hope I can do the rest with the example sentences on Anki and by listening to podcasts or watching videos. But for the beginning, I highly recommend watching these videos at least once!
Basic grammar
I’m hoping that Portuguese grammar is sufficiently similar to Spanish and French that I can pick up a lot of the concepts on the go and don’t have to spend that much time studying it explicitly. But I still find it useful to read through grammar explanations. Even if I don’t remember everything, I’ll be able to link what I see to things that I’ve already encountered in the past.
I found this basic grammar overview from Practice Portuguese quite useful to get a first intuition
Portuguese Essential Grammar and Portuguese Grammar - haven’t looked at them, but I thought having a book would be nice..
Podcasts
Podcasts are useful to get some exposure to the language on the go. I usually play them at 80% speed to be able to understand anything. But it still helps a lot. Here are the two podcasts that I downloaded:
Practice Portuguese
Mia's Portuguese Podcast
I found the second one a bit easier to listen to and could already understand a bit. The first one was mostly gibberish to me… But then again, it’s only day one :)
So that’s it for today! I’ll keep you updated for the rest of the journey. If you have thoughts and ideas, let me know!
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