Week 2 - 30 day Portuguese language learning speed run
A new Anki deck for conjugation and first reading
This is a summary of the second week (days 8-14) of my 30 day challenge where I try to pick up as much Portuguese as I can in 30 days. I’ve never studied Portuguese before, but know some Spanish and French (you can see my self-assessment that I did prior to starting the challenge here).
In the first week I spent about an hour per day on Portuguese, a lot of it on looking up resources that I could use during the 30 days.
This second week I spend on three big things: vocabulary, reading, and creating an Anki deck for conjugations. I also continued to listen to podcasts / audiobooks, but not as much as I would have liked.
1) Vocabulary study
I mostly continued using this Anki deck, which I finished by now (it has around 1000 words / small sentences). I still need to do reviews obviously, but have seen all cards. I deleted a lot of the words related to traditional Portuguese food and also deleted some duplicates, but overall I’d say it’s a decent deck.
I also started with this deck specifically geared towards verbs, but didn’t get very far yet
2) Reading
I started reading a book, Harry Potter e os Métodos da Racionalidade. It’s a Portuguese translation of the famous fan fiction, Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Worth a read if you’ve never picked it up! And also it’s free and I committed to using only free resources. I downloaded the English version as an epub here and downloaded an epub of the Portuguese version using Fichub. I have two epub readers installed on my phone (Lithium and ReadEra) and opened the English and Portuguese version on two different apps so I could very easily and quickly switch between them. Whenever I don’t understand a sentence in Portuguese I just look at the English version. I read the first two Chapters and would say that my speed of reading increased quite a bit over time
3) Creating an Anki deck for conjugations
As mentioned in previous posts I haven’t found a good Anki deck for conjugations yet. Currently available decks are all unusable for one reason or the other. So I set out to create my own deck using data from the Wiktionary and processing everything in Python. I’ll publish a post eventually about what exactly I did. It took me quite some time to clean all the data, get it in the right shape and create an Anki deck from it.
The current version looks like this:
It asks for the correct conjugation in the context of a sentence (so no weird “what is cantar in the 1st person singular present indicative” stuff…). You can type in the answer and it will correct your spelling, or you can skip that and just use it as a flash card. In addition, there is an audio file that gives you the correct pronunciation, a translation and also a table with the full conjugation in the current tense / mood.
The deck (currently) features a list of 57 words which were chosen to represent (almost) all conjugation patters in Portuguese, including irregular verbs. “Duplicates” that conjugate in the same way (such as “dizer” and “bendizer”) were removed. As of now it only has the present tense, but I’ll add more tenses and moods shortly and will publish the deck once it’s ready.
Daily breakdown
Here is a breakdown of how much time I spend every day
Day 8:
vocabulary on Anki: 126 cards in 15 minutes
some podcast listening
Day 9:
210 vocabulary cards in 22 minutes
Day 10:
slightly more effort today with 276 vocabulary cards in 36min
Day 11:
258 vocabulary cards in 38 minutes
Day 12 - Sunday
Had a long flight with a lot of time
30 mins: started reading Harry Potter e os Métodos da Racionalidade
finished my vocabulary Anki Deck Number 1 and started with the verb deck. Overall: 345 cards in 51min
Day 13 - Monday
no reviews
I spent several hours working on creating my new Anki deck
Day 14 - Tuesday
more work on creating the Anki deck
at least managed to review 100 cards in 15 minutes
Next steps
I’ll finalise the Anki deck so that I can finally start with working on conjugations more actively. When reading stuff I can usually figure out the meaning of a sentence, but I feel my lack of conjugation knowledge really limits the amount of speech I can produce myself. I’d also like to take some time to read more on basic Portuguese grammar. I’ve seen a few sentences in my vocabulary Anki deck and in my reading that I found confusing and would like to understand better. Maybe I should start reading on my computer so I could ask GPT for explanations more easily.
I’ll post more updates soon, so stay tuned. If you have any feedback or suggestions, let me know.