How I learnt Portuguese in 30 days

I learnt Portuguese in 30 days.

Without going to classes or moving to the country.

You can do it too if you follow these steps:

First I memorised a lot of vocabulary quickly using associations. 

Then I started getting Massive Input: lots of reading and listening.

After that I used Language Islands to improve my conversation skills quickly.

I did lots of listening and repeating drills to improve my accent and fluency.

Finally, I used translation to identify and correct all the mistakes I was making.

That’s all you need to learn any language.

Now let’s take a look at each step in detail.

But first, you might be thinking…Why Portuguese? 

Portuguese is a beautiful language spoken by over 200 million people in a bunch of different countries, including Portugal and Brazil, both amazing destinations to go on holiday or to live as an expat.

It’s got an 89% lexical similarity with Spanish, which makes it very easy to learn if you already speak Spanish.

If you’re interested in learning some other language instead of Portuguese, keep reading because this method will work for any language.

Let’s take a look at the process of learning a language.

When you start learning a foreign language, the first obstacle you’ll encounter is vocabulary.

You don’t know the words and you don’t know the meaning.

In the case of Portuguese, already knowing Spanish was a huge advantage.

It’s much easier to start reading and listening to a language when 89% of the words look familiar. 

So I skipped the memorisation part of the process in this case.

If you’re interested in learning this technique go check out my other articles, where I used this technique to learn thousands of words from languages like Russian, Arabic or Korean quickly.

But let’s go back to Portuguese now.

Once you understand enough vocabulary, it’s tme to start with the Massive Input.

This means massive amounts of reading and listening.

It depends on the language, but scientific research shows that on average you need over 3 million words of reading in a language to build a vocabulary of over 10,000 words in a language.

That’s around 20 books. 

The second element of Massive Input is massive listening.

You can read all you want and know all the vocabulary but if you haven’t listened to enough of the language, it will be very hard to understand native speakers.

Your speaking won’t be great either, especially your pronunciation.

This is why you need hundreds of hours of listening time in the language that you’re learning.

The best way to do this is to find a couple podcasts you like and to listen to them daily, while you do things like running, etc

But input is not enough, despite what some linguists and academics say.

In order to get good at speaking, you need to practice speaking.

The good news is that you don’t need to move to the country for that.

You don’t need a tutor or a conversation partner either.

Enter Language Islands.

The best method to get conversational in any language quickly.

A Language Island is basically a group of sentences about a specific topic or for a specific scenario that you memorise, to later use whenever you need them.

I created a long list of all the possible situations and conversations I usually have, or that I think I could have, and them write a long list of sentences for each one of them.

Several thousand sentences in total, that allow me to do well in the vast majority of conversations that I will have in the language.

I memorise them and practice saying them aloud.

Use text to voice technology and you’ve got an audio file of your sentences that you can listen to over and over again daily. 

This combines really well with the next exercise.

Listening and repeating drills.

This is something all language schools do at a very small scale.

Repeating 10 sentences once in a while won’t do much for your speaking.

Doing listening and repeating drills like professional athletes practice their skills, will take your speaking fluency, accuracy and pronunciation to the next level.

I’m talking about repeating thousands of sentences per week. 

It’s the David Goggins approach to language learning. It’s simple but extremely effective.

Finally, I used translation to identify and correct all the mistakes I was making.

Doing all this was a lot of work, but the results obtained were extraordinary. 

After a month I could understand spoken Portuguese no problem and I could speak it for hours with pretty good pronunciation and very few mistakes.

In conclusion, this is how you learn Portuguese or any other language fast:

1. You memorise a lot of vocabulary quickly using associations. 

2. Massive amounts of reading.

3. Massive amounts of listening.

4. Language Islands to improve conversation skills quickly.

5. Listening and repeating drills to improve accent and fluency.

6. Use translation to identify and correct all your mistakes.

This is the Natural Language Learning system. 

You can learn any language in 3 months or less.

Join the NLL course if you want to learn more.