PAY ATTENTION
Sentence Mining is a technique you are going to use for life.
In summary, Sentence Mining is the process of collecting sentences in your target language, in our case, Brazilian Portuguese.
Why is it important?
There are over 370,000 words in the Portuguese language. Including Old Portuguese, that number rises to over 400,000. Of course, I am not going to teach you all of them, because that would be a Herculean task, and there’s only so much I can teach in a 50-minute lesson.
Of course, just like in English, you don’t need to know all the words in the language to speak the language, but still it is a lot of words and isn’t possible to study all of them. So you need to develop the habit to study by yourself.
Every time you come across a new word or expression in Portuguese, search for examples of it in a sentence.
Let’s say you’re reading something in Portuguese, or watching a video with subtitles, and you come across the expression “de repente”.
What to do now?
I am going to show you three free websites where you can search for a certain expression and get example sentences. If you don’t find examples in one website, try the other one.
- Linguee Dictionary
- Tatoeba
- Reverso Dictionary
Linguee
Head to the Portuguese-English Linguee Dictionary and type in the search box the “de repente”.
de repente
suddenly
all of a sudden
- Os garotos brincavam quando, de repente, começou a chover. > The boys were playing when it suddenly started to rain.
Create a new deck on Anki and name it as “Sentence Mining”. Add the previous sentence to your Anki deck. I recommend searching for at least 4-5 sentences.
You can use resources like Tatoeba, and Reverso Dictionary to mine new sentences.
Tatoeba
Head to Tatoeba and type “de repente” in the search box, hit Enter.
- De repente, choveu. > Suddenly, it rained.
- Tom saiu de repente. > Tom left quite suddenly.
- De repente fiquei tonto. > I suddenly became dizzy.
There are 186 examples, so choose what you like, I chose the first three. Add them to your Sentence Mining Anki deck.
Reverso Dictionary
Head to Reverso Dictionary and type “de repente” in the search box.
- Sei lá por que ela decidiu largar o emprego tão de repente. > Beats me why she decided to quit her job so suddenly.
If you mine 15 new sentences a week, that will be 60 new sentences a month, and 720 new sentences in a year. Eventually, you will become able to mine a lot more, but don’t overwhelm yourself.