Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Mar 14, 2023 7:47 pm

TSS42 wrote:We are visiting Portugual in the summer for 5 days. I am wondering if I should start learning Portuguese or not.

So, what do I do?
1. You could work thru an introductory course, just to be able to say "hello", "goodbye", "please", "thank you", "stop thief". If you discuss it with the rest of your "we", you might find a Portuguese course is something you could do together.

2. I think you might enjoy spotting any similarities to Italian.
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby Cainntear » Tue Mar 14, 2023 7:49 pm

I'd start it and possibly not get very far. But I'd definitely start it anyway.
Which isn't to say you should do it, just that I would if I was in the same situation as you.
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby german2k01 » Tue Mar 14, 2023 11:05 pm

You should learn them to witness how polite or impolite locals are with each other. Had I not learned these few basic words in german, I would have not known how polite Germans were with each other. They speak them ad infinitum to showcase their politeness with each other. However. their politeness towards foreigners esp South Asians and Africans is very much debatable. :D

Danke :D
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby rdearman » Tue Mar 14, 2023 11:22 pm

You never know about the emotional attachment thing, you may end up prefering it to Italian. :D
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby Iversen » Tue Mar 14, 2023 11:49 pm

Just learn something about the pronunciation and a few touristical words and phrases - a five days trip is not reason enough to start a new language. But learning just those few and simple items will make your holiday much more pleasureable - the Portuguese will appreciate that you can pronounce placenames and items from menus etc, in a recognizable way, and it is always a sure sign of good intentions if you learn to say "thanks" and "may I have the bill" and "where is the loo" in Portuguese. You can carry a small language guide with you, but don't expect to use it while interacting with local people - that just won't function. A phone with a translation program will be more practical than even the smallest booklet.
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby tastyonions » Wed Mar 15, 2023 12:35 am

Going by your profile you have decent Italian, so once you learn Portuguese pronunciation picking up the tourist basics of the language should be quite easy.

Who knows, maybe your five day stay will lead you to fall in love with the country or language. :-)
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby Axon » Wed Mar 15, 2023 7:44 am

I'm definitely the type to learn what I can about a language for a visit, no matter how short it is. After trying different approaches for this over quite a few countries in the past, there are a couple of tendencies I've noticed.

First, I've always regretted not knowing more. Even in places where I can get by with English, there's so much of the native language around that I wished I could understand. This was true even in a place like Riga, where I recall basically everything having written English around that allowed me to travel around without anybody translating for me. Later, in Lithuania, I did need to communicate something during a minor emergency and ended up having to use Russian, as whatever Lithuanian I had picked up from a Kauderwelsch phrasebook wasn't doing the job.

Second, of the things that are important to know, numbers and times are the least fun to learn but the most useful. Knowing English, Spanish, French, and Italian, you'll be able to pick up the numbers in Portuguese with no trouble at all.

In fact, with your language background, you could learn the numbers, a couple of pleasantries, and some phrases for a taxi driver without much effort. If you have several months, why not devote a bit of time to it? It may briefly interfere with Italian, but you could make your Italian that much stronger by consciously focusing on the differences. And after you drop Portuguese once your trip is through, the interference will quickly fade.
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby garyb » Thu Mar 16, 2023 1:30 pm

I've always found that a little basic knowledge of the language, even just enough to pick out a few of the words I'm hearing and seeing, has made a big difference to a trip! And learning some basic structure and pronunciation could unlock quite a lot, given your Italian knowledge.
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Re: Should I bother learning Portuguese just for a 5-day visit?

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 16, 2023 1:55 pm

In my first answer above I didn't see one short visit as reason enough to start learning a whole new language from A to Z, but in the same message I also wrote that learning some elements of the language would be a good idea. And if you actually get infatuated with a language and a culture during your visit then that could of course be reason enough to continue to study it, but now with the goal to learning it as more than preparation for just one specific trip.

That being said, I have in at least one case done a little bit more than learning a few touristical phrases by heart, namely in 2006 when I bought a trip to Cabo Verde. The problem was that the flight only took me to a flat and boring island named Sal, so I contacted a local travel agency to organize a trip to two other islands. And because I wouldn't have a guide I thought that it might be prudent to learn a little bit of Portuguese - and when I got to Cabo Verde less than a month later I could have short conversations in Portuguese (with some Spanish vocabulary to fill out the holes). And when I spent 5 days in Maputo in Mocambique half a year later I could speak Portuguese quite fluently and only switched to English when my hotel tried to kick me out of my hotel room because my Danish travel agency had made an error.

So in this case I did actually get something out of learning the fundamentals of a language for a one week trip, but for my trips to Asian or African countries I didn't do the same thing - I just learnt a few basic words and phrases (plus a lot of geographical and cultural stuff). However I also brought home various dictionaries and other books as souvenirs from those trips, and some of them turned out to be essential for learning or refreshing a couple of other languages. For instance my one and only Indonesian dictionary was bought in Manila.

In June 2008 I did something similar: I wanted to refresh my Romanian before a trip to Romania and Moldova, and during my preparations I accidentally hit upon the HTLAL forum - and got hooked on language learning... :shock:
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