Advice from One of My Friends

Recently, I posed this question to a friend, who I call Sensei. "How do I make real traction learning Portuguese?"

Sensei taught himself Japanese whilst living in the States. Here is his thoughtful reply. I found it helpful.

Reply from Sensei:

I hear ya. To get to real fluency you need to make a big commitment. Here is what genuinely worked for me. A lot of it you probably can't do because I was a student and had some freedom, but there is plenty of doable stuff. It took me 2 years to get to respectable conversational level and after 3 years I had completely arrived.

Stuff I did that you probably don't have time for:

1- I took college classes. They are really, really helpful for getting the fundamentals down. I took classes at three schools (St. Johns, Columbia, Sophia (school in Tokyo)). Columbia was by far the highest level of instruction. If there is any chance you can audit classes on the weekend or something you should.

2- I studied abroad in Japan for a year. That was how I got from functional understanding to true conversational fluency. Are there Brazilian bars, clubs, meetup groups, soccer leagues, etc in your town? If so, go join them ASAP and make a bunch of friends who primarily speak Portuguese to each other. Nothing will replace you being around and interacting with native speakers as much as possible.

Stuff I did on my own that was critical:

1- Translate a ton of stuff. I learned to love it and did it as a hobby. I got really into translating Japanese song lyrics and TV shows especially. Your early translations will suck but there is no better way to learn a bunch of vocabulary than by translating things. You want to find a peer group of like-minded people to share your translations with so you can learn from one another. I am sure there are great communities for such things. Check viki.com I did some consulting for them last summer. Also look for Youtube channels. When guys talk about their "10,000 hours to mastery" they are talking about stuff like this. Learn to love it. Listen to portuguese music (who doesn't like bossanova anyway) and write out lyrics. Carry a notebook with you.

2- Start blogging in shitty portuguese ASAP. Make internet friends. I used to do this on a Japanese site called mixi but I know there are humongous Brazilian communities online. Check Orkut and other places. I used to use these social networks for making friends, interacting in the foreign language, and learning about the culture and various interests.

3- Consume media in your free time. Watch TV, read books, watch movies, listen to music. Learn to love it. Absorb that shit by osmosis. Learn about their pop culture. Language is heavily influenced by pop culture. Watch their morning TV shows on Youtube or wherever they get posted online.

4- Make an active effort to use every new grammar pattern & word you learn the same day you learn it. Work it into conversation or a blog post. Try to use it 3 or more times if possible. This is a lot easier when you're living in the country and can go to a bar and talk to strangers, but you must do this or you will not remember the stuff you learn.

5- Make friends who speak the language. Get some Brazilian friends who will watch Portuguese TV shows and movies with you and can explain things you don't understand.

6- Travel to the country. There is no way to fake this. I went to Japan about 15 times between 2002 and 2011.

There are really 3 things you need to study to reach real fluency:

Grammar: The only way to learn is brute force. Get yourself some good textbooks and study the grammar patterns until you master them. Use them every single day. If you don't understand something, ask someone who speaks the language better than you. Try to translate things and ask people to critique your translations to make sure you are really understanding the grammar.

Vocabulary: Translation & media consumption are your friends here. You cannot memorize vocabulary from a book, there are too many words and your brain will not retain things.

Cultural references: Media consumption & interaction with natives. They are open to sharing their culture with you, whether online or in person. You need to understand the culture to get fluent.

Expect to make a real commitment if you want to reach fluency. The beauty of it is, once you truly get fluent, you don't forget. It's something you carry with you for the rest of your life. Go put your 10,000 hours in, dude.