The Hard Truth
First and foremost - Even by studying one hour a day
- You won’t become fluent in 3 months
- You won’t become fluent in 6 months
- You won’t become fluent in 1 year
- Your knowledge of Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and whatever can help, but most of the time it will get in the way.
- You will make mistakes, a whole lot of them.
- Don’t expect to become fluent by learning grammar.
Don't be afraid to speak!
Brazilians will often appreciate your efforts to speak their language and will help you along.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
If you are interested in the inner workings of how learning a new language affects us I highly recommend you to watch the following TED Talk by Lera Boroditsky.
TED Talk - Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes the Way We Think
Learning anything new can be challenging and sometimes overwhelming, and this is especially true when it comes to learning a new language. At first, we may think that learning a new language is a pretty straightforward process: we learn a few words and expressions, a bit of functional language, watch some movies, and that’s it!
I wish it were that simple, but unfortunately, it’s not.
Realistic Goals
A word of advice
Não coloque a carroça na frente do burro. → Don’t put the wagon ahead of the donkey.
Our version of
Put The Cart Before The Horse
Language learning is a marathon, not a sprint.
I’m not going to pull any punches here, Brazilian Portuguese is tough, really tough. We have a multitude of accents, strange contractions, over 40 possible conjugations for each verb, tenses that don’t even exist in English, every noun has a gender, and even groups of things have a gender, and so on.
You will not learn Brazilian Portuguese in 3 months
You will not speak like a Brazilian in 3 months
Having realistic goals helps avoid frustration in the long term.
KEEP CALM AND KEEP IT LIGHT
Research shows that students perform better in language learning when they’re not stressed. Give yourself a break and don’t expect to understand and speak everything perfectly after hearing it just once. Learning a language takes time and dedication, but the rewards are well worth it.
So let’s take a look at what’s really involved in speaking a language.
Speaking
If you’re a native English speaker, when you use the expression “a bitter pill to swallow,” you know that you’re not talking about a literal pill someone has to swallow; you’re referring to a fact that someone has to accept but finds difficult to do so. You know this because it’s internalized in your brain—you’ve heard it, read it, and written it enough times to understand that whenever someone uses it, that’s what it means.
Notice that when you use such an expression, you’re not focusing on the individual meaning of the words that make it up, nor on the grammatical function of each one of them. You couldn’t care less whether a is an indefinite article, bitter is an adjective, pill is a noun, to is an infinitive marker, or swallow is a verb. You probably haven’t even thought of these chunks of grammar since high school—lol. So there’s no need to focus solely in grammar when learning a new language.
1ST TAKEAWAY
When you’re speaking you are always focusing on meaning, not grammar or individual words.
Comprehension
Since we have concluded that meaning plays a key role in speaking, let’s put it to test:
By the way, if you’re someone who likes sesquipedalian speech, I shall defenestrate you at the first opportunity I get—and you’ll be feeling quite timorous afterward.
If, by any remote chance, you understood the sentence above—congrats! If not, then you don’t know what sesquipedalian, defenestrate, and timorous mean.
What’s the point? The point is: you have to know a word before you can use it or else you’ll be talking nonsense.
Language Input → Language Output
At first, your language input should be greater than your language output.
Vocabulary
Think of a language as a brick wall, with words serving as the bricks, they’re what give sentences their meaning.
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