Agnostic.com
2 2

I’m trying to teach myself Brazilian Portuguese. I’m using a couple of apps and I have sung a couple of songs in Portuguese on the karaoke app Smule. It’s going so slow.

babsy 6 Apr 16
Share
You must be a member of this group before commenting. Join Group

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

2 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

0

May i help ou to learnbrazilian portuguese, cantou teach me english? πŸ˜‰

JonatasCF Level 1 Nov 17, 2019
0

Welcome to the "group" - it will hopefully grow bigger over time and become a bit more useful. I have a shallow knowledge of many languages, including Portuguese - that's the result of my work in linguistics which led to me read through lots of language courses to get a feel for how a wide range of radically different approaches to grammar work. Trying to take a language all the way to fluency is harder though, and I've only got anywhere close to that with French and Spanish so far. You just have to put in the hours, and that means hundreds of hours. It doesn't need to be a chore though, because you can approach it more like a child and do things the lazy way.

Children learn to understand their native language way ahead of their ability to speak it, and I think we should do the same. Once you've been introduced to all the basic nuts and bolts of the language (the 500 most commonly used words and all the most important phrase structures and broad grammatical rules), you should be able to make rapid progress with understanding the language by concentrating on reading. What I do is find interesting books that I'd like to read anyway (even if they were written in English) so that I'm getting a constant reward from working my way through them over and above any language learning. I either get the book both in the language I'm learning and a translation of it into English, or if I can find an electronic version of the text that can be copy-and-pasted, I can use that in combination with Google Translate (GT) instead - it doesn't matter if GT produces woeful translations, because all you want is for it to be just good enough to explain any words that you didn't know in the original, and most of the time it works really well for that, saving you all the trouble of looking up a dictionary. Any time that you have to spend looking things up in dictionaries is just hard work that gets in the way of the learning, so you want to minimise or eliminate it, and that's what GT allows you to do. You are thus free to focus on the text you're trying to read, working out what all the words mean and how they relate to each other grammatically in each sentence before moving on to the next. I'm currently working through books in Russian and Hungarian in this way, and my reading speed goes noticeably with every chapter. It's a highly motivating and rewarding process.

Once you've reached the point where you can read texts without having to look up more than a few words per page, you then own the language and will never lose it, so you're in a much better position to be able to learn to speak it. That's where I am with Spanish and French, able to read them with ease, and trying to convert from there to being able to produce sentences of my own with greater and greater ease, and that's much less effort if you delay this until after you have a near-fluent understanding of the language - your head is already full of little bits of phrases that you can simply tack together instead of trying to build them word by word.

Keep working with songs too though - they're a great way to fix phrases in your head which you can reuse, each one storing all manner of verbs complete with regular and irregular endings, and that's a more natural way to learn them than the boring way of forcing them in through tables and drills. Children never try to learn anything, and it works really well for them, so I like to work the same way.

Recent Visitors 6

Photos

Posted by David_CooperBrazil's native language groups

Posted by David_CooperI like language maps - if you find any, please share them here.

Posted by JettyWhen a word has more than one meaning. 🀣

Posted by David_CooperTest your French

Posted by JettyIneptocracy

Posted by JettyI wonder if this works in any other language, though, in Chinese, for example.

Posted by JettyWait! You don't pronounce the L?! πŸ˜‚

Posted by David_CooperI've often seen these in English, but doubtless the rest of the world does them too.

Posted by David_CooperShrödinger's cat

Posted by misternatureboyAnybody else using Duolingo to study another language? Estoy estudiando español.

Posted by EquusDanceJust read a fascinating article on the origins of language.

  • Top tags#languages #world #culture #chinese #college #hello #community #teacher #movies #Russian #hope #cats #teach #guns #insane #poetry #university #church #coffee #friends #wealth #UNsinkable #dignity #Omg #JamesRandi #animals #cultural #flowers #Israel #Christian #fundamentalist #earth #Orientation #limit #suicide #Song #mynameis #monogamy #dogs #broadcast #laws #hell #USA #stars #drug #parents #money #religious #verses #memories ...

    Members 85Top

    Moderator