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Bucknaway1614502762

How did you learn to speak Portuguese?

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 I learned Portuguese in a hurry (six weeks, the interval between arriving in Rio and cashing in my aeromiles with Air Canada) with a Rosetta subscription.
Most useful language I ever acquired after English.  Polished it with subsequent visits.  Motivated myself with “sex needs language.”

Now that there is free Duolingo, it will probably be just as effective.  I finished Duolingo’s Chinese course in a year but Chinese is a literate language, meaning,
you need to be able to read it by memorizing a couple thousand characters.  Same motivation.

 

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Started with Pimsleur BrazilIan Portuguese CDs. Went from 16 Beginner (Level 1) CDs to 16 Intermediate (Level 2) CDs, then moved on to Level 3. Burned the CDs to mp3 files and uploaded them to my iPod.

Bought a membership to Rosetta Stone and take lessons on the app every other day.

Downloaded both Duolingo and Mondly  apps and alternate taking those lessons daily.

Every now and then, get together with Portuguese speaking groups for practice in person (Meetup and Facebook are good resources for this).

Communicate with Brazilians through WhatsApp, email and phone — trying my best not to use translator apps, if possible.

Read Portuguese and BrazilIan newspapers, magazines. Watch BrazilIan videos and news reports on YouTube.

Visit Brazil often. Nothing beats language immersion. 

I’ve been going to Brazil regularly for 10 years, and I am still learning. I’d rank my Portuguese language skills as “proficient”, but my goal is “fluent”. 

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Every day, I listened to Assimil (French equivalent of Berlitz) CDs while going to and coming back from work by car. Before reading the text, I repeated the sounds I heard, sometimes not even understanding the meaning. This method can give you a very good accent but there is a major drawback : people think that you are fluent and start speaking at full speed ... 

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On 6/2/2020 at 8:06 AM, floridarob said:

in bed....alcohol helps remove any inhibitions that you might have and it sure is fun learning from a hot guy. Just asking the names of different things and then a few verbs and you're off and running, lol

I bet you know more interesting verbs than I do. Please share.

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On 6/1/2020 at 5:15 AM, Bucknaway1614502762 said:

I want to learn to speak Portuguese, I'm looking at some learning flash cards at Amazon but I'm wondering if there is a better way.  If Portuguese is a second language for you, how did you learn to speak it?

This would be easier to answer if we know more about your language experience and history. In my case, for example, I didn't study any Portuguese. I just landed in Rio with a phrase book and started conversing. But you can do that if you know any decent amount of Spanish or Italian. If you learn better by ear, then tapes and videos would be good. If you learn better on the written page, then the options are different. If your weakness is memory and vocabulary, then flash cards are great. If your weakness is grammar, conjugations, and declensions, I'm afraid I haven't figured the solution to that myself. 

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