Learn Portuguese: Strategies to Achieve Fluency

So you are learning Portuguese, that sounds great!  There are plenty of good reasons for doing it, and I am sure you have yours. 

While some motivations are instrumental and demand short-term results (for instance, learning a few useful phrases for traveling), others rest on a long-term commitment to learning the language. 

This article is for long haulers who fully embrace Portuguese and stay put throughout a long, at times bumpy, learning journey. Read on.

1. Practice daily

You will learn Portuguese faster if you practice daily. While this might sound like a platitude, this basic principle is neglected by language learners all the time. 

Keep this in mind: you will be better off practicing your Portuguese for fifteen minutes every day than for two hours once a week. 

See, our brains perform best when fed regularly. By keeping in touch with your target language every day, you will need less time to recap and build upon what you’ve learned the day before.

Put another way, you will be more effective in cycling new input into long-term knowledge, meaning that you’ll make better use of your time and energy. 

Conversely, if the gaps between practicing sessions are too long, your brain will spend almost all its energy recapping what you’d learned last, and little will be left to go forward. That’s close to learning paralysis! Who wants to be in that state?

Lastly, practicing your target language daily gives you a sense of tangible progress, which nurtures your mental strength and perseverance. In other words, a sense of tangible progress is vital for you to stay put with it.

Now that you’re sold on the importance of daily practice, let’s see how we can make it happen as naturally as breathing.

2. Melt it into your daily routines  

There is no better way to enable daily practice than to build it into your daily routines. Here’s the thing: you don’t need to time-block your day to stay in touch with Portuguese! Just take it with you as you go through your daily routines.

For instance, try to recall the words for the objects you’re seeing: what’s the Portuguese word for “stove”? And how do you say “fork”? Do this exercise now and then throughout the day.

Another thing you can do is speak out your actions at any given moment. How do you say, “I am taking a shower” in Portuguese? What about “I will eat lunch now”?

Here are some more suggestions.

Why not spend five to ten minutes every morning listening to a podcast episode at breakfast? Finding a language exchange partner is also an excellent tool to keep you engaged.

Default your mobile’s operating system (or any other devices) to Portuguese and get automatically exposed to the language.

Do you use a guided meditation app to relax right before you sleep? Maybe you can set it to Portuguese (or find an equivalent app in Portuguese).

These were only a few suggestions to melt Portuguese into your daily life. Now it is up to you to take it into your own hands and other ways that will fit your circumstances.

3. Keep it aligned with your interests

You learn best when resources that align with your interests. Making your language learning a meaningful experience will keep you motivated and on track.

Sure, there may be many resources out there – from flashcards and language exchange apps to podcasts and YouTube channels. However, separating the wheat from the chaff is not always easy, especially for beginners still finding their way in.

One way to avoid getting drowned in this sea of resources is to be selective and choose only those materials you resonate with.

Are you into sports, music, gaming, food, or outdoors? Whatever it is, try to select the content that best agrees with your interests and hobbies. In so doing, your Portuguese practice will become effective and sustained over time. 

Also, try to build your language practice into your social life as much as possible. As social beings, we get nurtured by engaging in meaningful relationships. Melting language learning with our social lives will make it more fun and relevant, thus more sustainable in the long run. 

Maybe there are things you can do locally such as taking part in language exchange meetups. If in-person meetups are not an option in your area, try to find language exchange buddies online to practice with. 

4. Prioritize in-context learning materials

Prioritize in-context input over vocabulary lists or grammar drills. In-context learning materials are anything you can easily relate to and make sense of. Short stories for language learners would fall into this category.

One advantage of practicing with in-context input is that you can expand your vocabulary and natural feel for Portuguese much faster. You will learn a lot of new words and idioms from context without even having to look them up.

Besides, provided the materials are compelling to read and listen to, you’ll feel more motivated than otherwise. In other words, it becomes easy for you to stay out and practice daily.

When properly designed for language learners, these materials are propped with colloquial expressions used in everyday life. That helps you develop a sound idiomatic feel for Portuguese and, as a result, you’ll sound more natural when speaking.

Think this way, what would make you learn Portuguese the best? Being exposed to the language as spoken by native speakers, or going through tedious word lists truncated from their context?

The latter option only leads to that situation where you may know many words but can’t string them together when you try to speak. We’ve all been there, right? So, consider using more in-context learning materials to learn the language. Its benefits will show rather quickly.

5. Drill your speaking

One common belief among language learners is that it will be a good while until you can start speaking in Portuguese. Wrong. You can and should drill your speaking early on in your learning journey.

Here’s the thing. The ability to speak in your target language stems, to a great extent, from you getting used to doing just that – to speak it out.

Much of the speaking barriers experienced by language learners (even at the advanced level) are due more to them feeling uncomfortable doing it than the lack of vocabulary or knowledge about syntax rules – knowledge alone won’t cut it!

So, making yourself at home speaking in your target language – regardless of how basic and rough it may sound – is a great move towards fluency. 

Now, you will have to be patient until you reach the point where you can engage in meaningful conversations. Hands down! But that kind of fluency is not what I am talking about here.

Instead, I suggest you practice speaking Portuguese by saying short and plain sentences, using whatever vocab you’ve already learned thus far. 

There are several strategies to go about it: from speaking out your daily actions in Portuguese (e.g. I am taking a shower  > Estou a tomar um duche), through shadowing audio content as you listen to it, to finding language exchange partners or an experienced tutor who can hold the space for simple conversations.

It won’t sound spotless. Not even close. You will time and again stumble on things like word order, wrong prepositions, mistaken words, unclear pronunciation, and so on. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Making those mistakes is an important and integral part of the learning process; learning to accept and feel comfortable with it is critical to advance your language skills.

6. Embrace your mistakes

Whether they relate to grammar, lexicon, or pronunciation, you will make mistakes while speaking Portuguese. Left and right.

It would surprise me otherwise! Think about it, learning a new language is among the most complex processes human brains can undertake. It takes a long time to master it and whoever says otherwise is lying to you.

Making those mistakes is perfectly fine and expected. What isn’t right, however, is to let the fear of making them prevent you from speaking. That’s a problem, and unfortunately a common one.

So, an important piece of advice for you: embrace your mistakes early on to grow out of them as soon as possible. 

Accepting that your speaking won’t be flawless and being at peace with it will prevent feelings of awkwardness from sneaking into your mind and holding you back. In other words, accepting and embracing mistakes prevents fear and shame from getting in the way of your practicing and learning the language. 

Here’s another thing you can do. When you speak in Portuguese, focus on passing through your message, not grammar. Who cares if you said the wrong preposition!? You’ll be understood anyway. Just be present and focus on making yourself understood.

In adopting this pragmatic mindset, you will quickly realize that you can indeed communicate in your target language. And that’s what languages are for anyway, right?

As soon as you understand that, you will feel more confident and won’t shy away from speaking when the opportunity arises. Then, you enter a virtuous loop that only gets better by the day.

7. Mind your pronunciation

If there is any language skill often neglected by language learners, that is pronunciation. Yet, pronunciation does matter: clear pronunciation is crucial to whether or not you get past the fluency threshold and how quickly you achieve that.

The better your pronunciation is, the more confident you feel in speaking Portuguese. Higher confidence will make you interact more often and get better at speaking. As you improve your speaking and pronunciation skills, you’ll feel even more confident… You get the idea, it’s a virtuous cycle.

And yet, many beginners prioritize things like grammar while assuming that pronunciation will eventually fall into place as time goes on. Sorry, that’s not the way it works. It is rather the opposite. 

See, the longer you go on with an underperformed pronunciation, the harder it will get to mend it down the road. Thus, you should get familiar with the Portuguese sound system as soon as possible.

And look, I am not suggesting that you should sound like a native. That’d be silly. I only mean that your pronunciation should be accurate enough to avoid compromising your speaking confidence and ability to make yourself understood (an underperformed pronunciation will jeopardize both).

Rest assured. A clear speech is perfectly reconcilable with a foreign accent. There’s nothing wrong with having a foreign accent. Besides, it is part of your identity and you should own it.

8. Don’t overdo grammar

You don’t need to spend many hours studying Portuguese grammar to become fluent in the language. Actually, you can learn it organically by engaging with organic materials such as short stories. 

While I think grammar has its place in language learning, I also know it can be overwhelming and counterproductive when people rely too heavily on it while learning the language.

Putting too much focus on grammar makes language learners self-conscious and insecure when they speak. Moreover, grammar-checking every sentence as we speak is a heavy process that will slow us down and get in the way.

Conversely, learning grammar organically through reading and listening is gracefully effective in that you are naturally absorbing the language’s syntactic patterns at a deeper level. Learning grammar in this fashion will help you be more articulate and sound more natural.

Studying grammar often feels appealing because it might deliver a sense of control and progress. I get it. However, grammar prowess is not a reliable indicator of fluency. It is then fair to argue that studying and understanding grammar rules can give you a false sense of progress.

Let’s nonetheless not forget that we all have different learning styles and preferences. I know many students who get a kick out of drilling Portuguese grammar. If that keeps you motivated and on track, why not hold on to it? 

There are no ultimate recipes and you’ll have to figure out the learning style that suits you best. Just keep in mind that relying too heavily on grammar has drawbacks and with that awareness find your balance between grammar-focused and organic learning styles.

9. Be kind to yourself

Learning a foreign language from scratch as an adult is a long journey and it takes discipline, perseverance, and willpower to carry it out and succeed. (Who tells you otherwise is lying to you.)

In this article, I suggested that daily practice and compelling materials are key ingredients to keep you motivated as you push it through.  

Yet, there will be times when you may run out of steam and feel hopeless about the whole project. When that happens, you want to transition from a warrior-like mindset and be kind to yourself. 

You see, language learning is anything but linear, not least in the way you experience your progress. Today you feel exhilarated about how well your language skills are developing, only to become heavily disappointed the day after when, say, you measure yourself up against someone else only to realize that you are lagging behind. 

Emotional rollercoasters are common among language learners. You’re not alone here. Sometimes it will feel great, sometimes it’ll feel not that great. That’s how it is.

Don’t be too harsh on yourself when you seem to be losing your grip. Give yourself a break if you need to. You are here for the long haul (I hope) and a short break won’t detract you from your long-term goal. Come back to it when you feel recovered.

And keep this in mind. Though it might feel wobbly in the short term, your language skills will steadily improve over time and you will eventually break into fluency. All you need to do is to trust the process, be patient, and keep at it.