"Hoje é o dia perfeito pra fazer tudo direito!"
"Today is the perfect day to make everything right!"
Falamansa - 'O dia perfeito'
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
The Hard Truth
First and foremost, if you are learning a new language for the first time ever
- You won’t become fluent in 3 months
- You won’t become fluent in 6 months
- You won’t become fluent in 1 year (kinda)
- You will make mistakes, a whole lot of them.
- Don’t expect to become fluent by learning grammar.
"Oh Armando, I don't believe you. I’m built different when it comes to learning! I still remember some high school Spanish, and I’m a quick learner. Out of the 8 billion people in the world, I’m clearly the most special one."
Hum... have a look at Alecrim Dourado.
That said…
It’s not impossible!
Learning anything new can be challenging and sometimes overwhelming, and this is especially true when it comes to learning a new language. It is a big change in how your brain works and how you perceive reality; it humbles us and makes us more empathetic towards people who don’t speak our native language.
How Does Learning a New Language Affect our Brain?
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
At first, we may think that we need to learn words, and when we have enough words inside our heads we will be to translate our native language into our target language (the language we are learning) and speak fluently, elegantly, like a native speaker, understanding all of the accents, everything we may do in our native language.
Example:
I am going to give you a piece of my mind.
What is the word for I?
What is the word for am?
If we translate the previous sentence literally into Brazilian Portuguese, we will get:
Eu estou indo te dar um pedaço da minha mente.
But… that makes no sense in Portuguese, unless you trying to say you’re going to drill a hole inside your head, take out a piece of your mind and give it to someone. So word for word translations just don’t work.
- Image from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, used for illustrative and educational purposes. All rights belong to their respective owners.
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
- I want to sound like a native speaker (you won’t for now)
- I will learn this language in 3 months (if you don’t have a life)
- I want to understand all of the accents (possible)
- I don’t want to make any mistakes when speaking (that’ll be a long journey)
Those are the types of thoughts that will lead to frustration and eventually giving up on learning a new language, drop them if you want to learn, you are going to feel vulnerable and dumb, we don’t need any limiting thoughts here.
Having realistic goals helps avoid frustration in the long term.
Language learning is a marathon, not a sprint.
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. Discipline beats motivation.
Focus and Time
This is very important. Language learning takes time.
Because of social media and the so-called influencers many people end up thinking that learning a language is something fast and easy (giggles) and those same people come up to me and ask me if it’s possible to learn a language (generally Brazilian Portuguese) in a short amount of time, and answer is… it’s possible, under very specific conditions.
Spanish has about 90% of similarity to Portuguese, most of the time, people who speak Spanish can read Portuguese and understand most of it. The same goes for French, and Italian even if it’s in a more moderate way.
So, for a person who speaks another Romance language, Portuguese will be easier, now for people who already speak two or even three Romance languages, they will probably understand 98% of Portuguese, and because of that they will only need to develop a active vocabulary to speak the language, because they understand it already.
I had a student who speaks Spanish, French, and Italian. Another one speaks Spanish and French, they progressed really fast because they didn’t have to train their ear to listen to Portuguese.
Now for someone who never learned a foreign tongue, doesn’t speak another Romance language, it’s going to be a whole different story.
When it comes to language learning, you will need to listen, read, speak, and write the language. All of these abilities will build up slowly, but be sure to spend as much time as possible with the language. If you only study for 2 to 3 hours a week, your learning will be very slow. But if you study for 1 hour a day, then it will be almost impossible not to learn Portuguese. It’s difficult to assess the amount of time that takes to learn a new language, but generally it hangs upon your dedication and time set daily to study.
If you study only 3 hours a week, then at the end of the month, you will have only studied 12 hours, within one year you will have only studied 144 hours, in 10 years that will add up to only 1440 hours of language learning, that’s 60 days. But if you study 1 hour a day, then at the end of the month, that’ll be 30 hours, in one year, that’ll be 360 hours, in 10 years, 3600 hours, that’s 150 days of pure learning, something gotta come out of it.
timeline title Language Build-up Over the Years This year : Basics and Understanding the Language Next year : The language feels natural to you ... : Stupid amount of Language inside your brain Future Years : Living the Language
Of course, that is the ideal scenario, but people have lives, responsibilities, goals, families, and jobs to take care of. Be sure to take a break whenever needed. It is enough that you want to move forward and have a clear goal in mind. Without the desire to study, not even the most efficient method, nor the best teacher in the world, will be able to help you. If you have this limiting mindset, I recommend that you go somewhere else.
Another important thing is being autonomous. There are a stupid number of free and great resources nowadays, bilingual dictionaries, free online movies, reels with subtitles, language exchange apps, AI (we’ll have a talk about that later), Anki, books in public domain, YouTube and so forth.
The truth is that you don’t even need a private teacher if you have the time and the mettle to do what it is needed to do to learn. Part of this blog is dedicated to teach you how to self-study, search for information and learn the language without depending on anyone.
Why you shouldn’t focus on grammar
Many people think that if they learn the inner workings of a language, that is, its grammar, they will be able to speak it fluently. Unfortunately, that could not be further from the truth.
The first reason is that they are only adding more to the mix. You are already struggling with pronunciation, listening comprehension, conjugations, tenses, accents, and a whole bunch of other things, so this will only make it worse and eventually lead to frustration.
The second reason is that you would need to know your native language grammar, and most people do not.
Most people don't know their own native language grammar even though they speak the language and studied its grammar in school for years and years.
How are you going to associate reflexive pronouns with their equivalents in your own language if you do not even know what a reflexive pronoun is? Or how are you going to associate subjunctive constructions if you do not know what the subjunctive is? And how are you going to learn a language through grammar concepts like the infinitivo pessoal (personal infinitive) if it is a unique characteristic of Portuguese and does not exist in your native language (sorry Spanish folks)?
Speaking
If you’re a native English speaker (even if you are not you might have the same expression in your native language), 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. So there’s no need to focus solely in grammar when learning a new language.
Comprehension
Since we have concluded that meaning plays a key role in speaking, let’s put it to test:
Let's see...
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. Contrary to what many may think, vocabulary doesn’t consist only of individual words, but also of idioms, sayings, chunks of words, slang and more. It’s everything you need to understand someone speaking or read a piece of text.
Examples:
Ela é bonita.
She is pretty (the word ‘ela’ is vocabulary)
Mateus, dá pra fazer um bolo de chocolate?
Mateus, is it possible to make a chocolate cake? (the expression ‘dá pra’ is vocabulary)
A vida não é um morango.
Life is not easy. (Lit: life is not a strawberry) a common saying in Brazil, it’s vocabulary too.
When you have enough of those expressions inside your head, your language journey will become easier and easier and you will understand more and more.
Understanding vs. Remembering
Let’s say that you’ve came across the expression “de vez em quando” in Portuguese. You did some searching and concluded that “de vez em quando” means more or less the same thing as “once in a while, or from time to time” in English. Now, you understand what “de vez em quando” means. You write it down on a notebook and then you look at it one day later, and then you forget about it, one week later you don’t remember what “de vez em quando” means :(.
You understood what it means, but now you can’t remember it, and if you can’t remember it, you can’t use it. To solve that problem it’s advisable to use the power of spaced repetition.
The Power of Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is the process of reviewing information when you are about to forget it. It works like this:
If you are learning the expression dá pra fazer, you are going to review it at certain day intervals. First, you are going to review it in 1 day, then in 2 days, then in 5 days, then in 7 days, then in 14 days, and so on. If you can’t remember what dá pra fazer means, you are going to start all over again and review it in 1 day, then in 2 days, then in 5 days, and so on. That way you will focus on what you are weak at, and the easier parts will be reviewed less.
The picture below shows how it works.
- Adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
By using this method to review the vocabulary you are learning, you are going to focus on what you find difficult and the easier parts will take longer to be reviewed.