Learning Portuguese
This month I decided I’m going to start to learn (Brazilian) Portuguese. My goal is to reach a B2 level, with a focus on speaking, and avoid falling into the trap of speaking Portuñol.
My background in Portuguese
I’m not starting completely from 0. During the pandemic, I had too much time on my hands and decided to start learning a bit of Portuguese. I did a deep dive for about 1 month and had 2 tutoring sessions. I was all in. Then, I started traveling, and then moved to Mexico. Portuguese got pushed to the bottom of my priorities, because it wasn’t something i really “needed” to learn.
Why now?
From now until the end of the year, I have no big trips planned, and I think this is the best window I’ll have in the next couple of years to really focus on Portuguese.
I always thought that I could get to a pretty good level of Portuguese with 6 months of focus and practice. That sounds great, but is useless if I never actually go for it.
Next year, 5 of my best friends are getting married, and between bachelor parties and weddings, I’ll be on the hamster wheel of traveling and trying to get back into a routine. I don’t see any way that I’d find the time to learn Portuguese.
Although I don’t have a trip yet planned, I want to visit Brazil at some point in 2024. If my Portuguese gets pretty good, I know I’ll make it happen.
As they say, now is as good a time as any, so why not?
Spanish and Portuguese
Speaking Spanish gives me a huge advantage. The “lexical similarity” between Spanish and Portuguese is around 90%, meaning that Spanish speakers inherently know a bunch of Portuguese words before they even start learning Portuguese. But don’t be fooled; English has around 35% lexical similarity with Spanish, and 60% similarity with German. Just because some (or a lot) of words are similar doesn’t mean you can speak the language.
I’m using Spanish as my source language. Imagine using flashcards for learning: one side would have Spanish words, and the other side would have their Portuguese equivalents. The simplest way to think of this is to imagine that if I were using flashcards, one side would be Spanish, and the other would be Portuguese.
How I plan on learning
Since my north star is conversational fluency, I want to get talking as soon as possible. I learned Spanish informally, not by starting with verb conjugation tables, and I think it really helped. Kids don’t study languages, they acquire it.
I hired a tutor who I’ll have 1, 1 hour class per week with. For now, that’s all the formal classes I’ll have. Maybe I’ll realize I need more later.
The first month I’ll spend my time informally understanding the language. I’ll maximize spoken input, try to mimic an accent I like, and learn the Brazilian intonation.
Then, I’ll have to study the verbs, focusing on present, future, and the past tenses, focusing on an 80/20 approach. Alex Argüelles, one of the most well-respected linguists in the world, says you need to learn around 230 verbs to master 90% of spoken, written, and high level literature in a language. I don’t really care to get to the level of mastering extremely formal written Portuguese, at least for now. My guess is that the Pareto Principle for my goals in Portuguese is to probably learn around 100 verbs to start.
Come October, my focus is going to be on almost exclusively speaking. I’ll still have to learn a lot, but I want to use conversation to spark different questions.
We’ll see how it goes, and maybe I’ll record a video at some point with my progress.
Até logo, & vamos lá!
