Can You Study Spanish and Portuguese at the Same Time? A Reflection
Google the three most spoken romance languages out there (in terms of total speakers, including those who study these languages as a second language), and you will most likely find Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I have been studying French for quite some time (well actually five years now) and being the impulsive person that I am, I decided to take two extremely similar languages, Spanish and Portuguese.
Truth be told though, this was not the first time that I had contact with these two languages. In the last two years, I have listened to a lot of Portuguese and Spanish music to get myself in the mood to study, with the hopes that, one day, I would be able to speak these two languages. In the final days of 2021, I saw an Italki ad encouraging users to start learning a new foreign language, and I was definitely interested. It didn’t take long for me to decide to take the plunge of courage, and I booked my first ever Portuguese Italki lesson. One week later, I decided to take Spanish as well.
Now that you all know the history of this mess that I am in, you might be wondering how I have been managing everything. To be fair, I actually underestimated the challenge, since I thought that the journey would be a breeze, due to the fact that I have listened to a lot of media and seen many videos in these languages. I was totally wrong. It was extremely difficult to comprehend grammar differences between Portuguese and Spanish. I confused vocabulary, and even got into the bad habit of making Spanish words Portuguese, and that created a whole other mess when it came time to study grammar.
The grammar of these two languages is similar to French, the Romance language that I am already acquainted with. However, what I started noticing was that I started to overestimate the grammar similarities. I was relying too much on French grammar rules, and overestimating the similarities between Portuguese, Spanish, and French especially when it comes to the preterite. In French, there is a preterite tense, however it is not used that often, and people often use the past perfect tense in place of it. So, my Spanish and Portuguese teachers were a little confused as I struggled to make the distinction between grammars in the past tense, but luckily I got over the struggle pretty quickly.
Before, I had a goal that by the end of 2022, I would be at a B2 level in both languages. However, given my difficulties in managing both languages at the same time, I probably would lower my expectations a little. Through learning these two languages at the same time, I was able to realise that language learning is a complicated maze, and that learning two languages from scratch at the same time makes that twisted maze even more twisted, which means that I have nothing else to do but to reap the consequences of my impulsive decision and hopefully enjoy the process while it lasts. That being said, I do not think that my decision was a bad one, however, it is one that I should have thought through with more caution, as (I will say it again and again), learning two languages from scratch at the same time is no easy feat.
Edited by: the Gladly Global Team
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