The first few weeks of my 30 day Portuguese language learning challenge are over. Here is what I’ve been up to:
Day 1:
- researched lots of resources on Portuguese, downloaded 6 different Anki (a flash card app) decks
- watched videos on Portuguese pronunciation
- read a summary of basic Portuguese grammar to get started
You can find the full summary here (including links to all the resources I found)
Day 2
I mostly focused on vocabulary flash cards (using this deck). I’m currently travelling in Israel and don’t have internet connection on my phone, so doing lots of listening and reading is a bit harder. Therefore I only did flash cards today and got to 339 cards in 39 minutes. That amount of cards is probably not really sustainable long-term, but for my 30 day challenge that works well.
Day 3
Again, I mostly focused on vocabulary flash cards today. 223 cards in 30 minutes. That’s a bit less than yesterday, but the cards were a bit harder as they were mostly English —> Portuguese (while yesterday I mostly did Portuguese —> English).
I also listened to Mia's Portuguese Podcast to go to sleep. I don’t find the content very interesting, but then again I don’t understand a lot anyway and the pronunciation is very clear and relatively easy to follow.
Day 4
Today I downloaded the Pismsleur App (someone on Reddit suggested it to me). The app is rather pricey (and I committed to only using free resources). But they have a first example Portuguese lesson and I listened to that. It was really nice - but progress was much too slooow for my taste. They did have a reading exercise that explained pronunciation though, which I found excellent.
I also looked into audiobooks on youtube and found for example Gulliver’s Travels, a History of Brasil, or the Little prince. Also Harry Potter and more. I briefly started with Harry Potter, but didn’t understand that much.
A lazy day in terms of flash cards: 119 cards in 15 minutes.
Day 5
385 flash cards in 49 minutes! That counts both new cards and revisions. I also changed my phone language to Portuguese. Language immersion for the win!
Day 6
274 cards in 36 minutes. Also listened a bit more to Mia’s podcast. Still listening to Harry Potter, but still don’t really understand a lot.
Day 7
Again, vocabulary study. 262 cards in 40 minutes.
Summary and next steps
So here is my overall process in terms of vocabulary. Fichas are cards, but every word (‘note’) has two cards (English —> Portuguese and Portuguese —> English). So overall, the deck has about 1100 words of which I now ‘learned’ about half. That, of course, was only possible because many words are similar to English or Spanish words.
I plan to finish the deck in the next week or so. Depending on how I feel then I’ll either just keep revising these cards or look for more (there are two other decks linked for verbs and nouns).
Overall, I want to focus more on conjugations and reading in the future. The problem is that I haven’t found a good Anki deck that does Portuguese conjugations well. I previously liked this deck, but it has 1000 verbs (resulting in around 50k cards, which is just insane). Maybe I’ll use Linguno or I’ll create my own Anki deck if I can find some time.
I’ll be back from my travelling on Sunday, so then I can start working more on conjugations. Until then, I’ll keep doing the vocabulary cards and I’ll look for something nice I can start to read.
Time commitment so far:
I spent about 3.5h on day 1, around 2h of that on looking for resources, 30min on reading grammar and 30min on watching youtube videos on pronunciation. On studying and revising flash cards, I spent 39min on day 2, 30min on day 3, 15min on day 4, 49min on day 5, 36min on day 6 and 40min on day 7. Ignoring day 1, I therefore spent around 30-35min per day on studying flash cards. In addition, I spent maybe 10min per day listening to podcasts on average, and a few minutes looking for new resources or doing other things. Including day 1, I’d say I so far spent around an hour per day on learning Portuguese.