Learning Portuguese: Part 1
My journey into the Lusophone world
I have been studying Portuguese for the past three years, and it has been a rough ride. I have had shifting motivations, shifting strategies, and widely shifting outcomes that have all led me to a comfortable intermediate level that I can finally say I have reached today.
I have a long way to go (the rest of my life) to continue improving my Portuguese, and I am certainly not fluent, but I have made it all the way from zero to being able to hold conversations, read intermediate level texts, and follow along with TV shows without subtitles. And along with those small victories, I feel as though it is time to share my journey of learning Portuguese and how I became addicted to practicing it today.
I have decided that, after experiencing these twists and turns and slowly finding my balance, it could be helpful to other language learners to recount my experiences with Portuguese and what they taught me about language learning. So, I will have three parts coming out recounting each year of my Portuguese study until today, with tips and resources and warnings along the way.
I hope you all enjoy as I dive into the intricacies of my personal journey with Portuguese as I continue to learn and grow with this beautiful language.
Initial Motivations
I started learning Portuguese for all the wrong reasons (well, not all the wrong reasons, but most of the wrong reasons). A good reason I definitely had was a desire to expand my language knowledge and continue learning past my second language. I knew that I wasn’t satisfied with just having learned Spanish.
But, rather than picking a language for its own sake and for unique reasons, I chose Portuguese out of convenience. I believed that because I knew Spanish that it would be easy and that I wouldn’t have to put any real effort into acquiring the language — a get rich quick scheme for language acquisition, in other words.
My motivations, of course, evolved and changed over time to where I am now, with Portuguese taking on its own life and gaining a place in my language practice of its own accord.
There is a lesson and a warning here, however, about starting to learn a new language. Motivation is the most important tool you can have. There are infinite different strategies that one could use to learn a language, but if you don’t have a good reason to and a clear motivation, you’ll never be able to stay consistent for any meaningful period of time. And it certainly takes a lot of time.
Initial Strategy
The ground on which I built my Portuguese foundation was admittedly rocky. For the first year, I skipped any sort of formal study of the language, grammar, or vocabulary. Since I had a solid Spanish grammar foundation, I skipped straight to language immersion.
Don’t get me wrong, language immersion is great, but as I outlined in a previous article, there is a specific type of input that is required if you are going to really be able to retain the signals your brain is receiving: comprehensible input.
You have to be able to actually understand at least the main message of the media that you consume in your foreign language. You don’t have to understand every word or phrase or even every sentence, but as long as you get the gist, your mind will be constantly making the connections and picking up new vocabulary and grammatical structures as you listen — if you understand the basic message of the media.
This, of course, requires you to start from at least some base of understanding of the language. Listening to something way above your level is not only demoralizing and exhausting because you can’t understand what you’re hearing, but it also doesn’t really do much in the area of progress.
So, raw immersion accompanied by not much else was the strategy that I started out with, but much like my motivations, it evolved a lot and refined itself through years of trial and error. It is still a continuous process and will probably be one indefinitely as I progress in Portuguese.
Conclusion
The first year of learning Portuguese came out with more questions than answers. It also came out with much less progress than expected, and quite a few lessons for language learners to pick up from my mistakes.
Starting out can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have a language you want a learn, and you know why you want to learn it with strong reasons to back it up, you will be much more likely to succeed.
Your strategy in the beginning may also be imperfect much like mine, but that is all a part of the process. Learning how to learn is just as important as learning the content itself. Eventually, with foundational study, comprehensible input, formal lessons, or whatever strategy you choose and stick to, the progress will come.
There will be two more parts to this series detailing my Portuguese learning journey, and I hope to see you all in the next one to tackle the next phase of uncovering the intricacies of this language.
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