Gemüse em uma caminhada no lingua-parque (PT | DE | EN)

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I will be learning European Portuguese to A2 level for residency reasons, hopefully by summer.

I have started with Linguaphone and Hugo Portuguese.

Done:
Linguaphone: 3 units (out of 40)
Hugo: Week 1
Assimil Portuguese (German base): 4 lessons

I started off with Assimil because the speed of speech in Linguaphone and Hugo was too much for me, especially with Portuguese where speakers tend to not demarcate between the words. Assimil speed was great, unfortunately my German is not good enough to make out the language notes (I could understand the dialogue translations), so after 4 lessons I tried again with Linguaphone and it was better.

I haven't been happy with Linguaphone (but I'm sticking with it as there is no other decent option). The dialogues have been boring, 3 units and still it's just "Hello, how are you, I'm going on vacation" variants. Organisationally, spreading stuff over two books, none of which opens flat, is a mess. Dialogue in one book, word translations in another, and full text translation on yet another page. Answers to exercises are in the appendix at the end of the book, rather than at the end of the lesson as in Assimil. I also don't like one of the speakers on Linguaphone.

Hugo is organized much better and I like the audio. The printing is professional unlike Linguaphone (which appears photocopied). However, like all Hugo books, the book is very terse (250 pages). I would have preferred a 600 page book for the same material.

I also plan to incorporate Teach Yourself Portuguese by Manuela Cook soon.

I think these are the only European Portuguese book+audio courses with english base

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Summer is here, and life and procrastination happened. I hope to sit in the A2 exam at the end of July. I've been back at Portuguese in the past week (after several restarts in the past few months).

Current status: 10 lessons+test covered from Linguaphone (out of 40). The dialogue has become more interesting and applicable and I'm liking it now. Hugo: somewhere in chapter 2. The terseness of Hugo is apparent even in chapter 2, no way can I absorb the material there. Needs way more pages.

Goal for June: Complete Linguaphone all 40 lessons. Ambitious, but I feel I need to do this and study further in July in order to pass A2.

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15/40 lessons covered from Linguaphone Portuguese.
I am 4 lessons behind. Curse you laziness

After lesson 10, Linguaphone stopped giving the sentence translations, which has proved to be problematic.

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Lessons 20/40 + test 2 covered. Halfway through.
The grammar points are spread all over which I don't like. I wish it had reading passages.

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Lessons 30 out of 40 + test 3 done.
75% of the course done.

I also did podcast 49 from Portuguese lab which is a reading passage at A1 level.

I am 10 days behind. I am not sure I will be able to pass the A2 exam which is in 3 weeks. Ugh.

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Encountered this sentence in Lesson 31 in one of the exercises:

Então não foram ontem ao escritório...Mas ouçam, se hoje forem, vou com vocês.

Which I think translates to "You all did not go yesterday to the office, but listen, if you do today, I'm coming with you".

This level of grammar was not there in A2 german. Seems more is expected in A2 Portuguese than A2 German.

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I've done 36 lessons of Linguaphone, and have decided to put Linguaphone on hold for now as I need to go to other resources.
From Portuguese lab, I've done 4 short stories (not the exercises) in the podcasts:
-26
-40
-49
-70

I had a 1 hr private lesson last week, which made holes in my vocabulary and comprehension painfully obvious.
In it German words kept popping into my head "wissen, nur" etc.

I bought the Portuguese reader from http://lppbooks.com/languages.html
Total of 29 chapters, 12 of them being A1. I've covered the first 7 chapters.

Listening comprehension needs lots of improvement.

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Studying like mad these past few days, I feel a bit burnt out.

-3 more chapters from the reader
-15 chapter-end text passages from sprachlernen24.de
- Read through the chapter-passages from lessons 2-8 at the bookstore today from https://www.lidel.pt/pt/catalogo/portug ... ersitario/
I really liked the texts. Great use of language at the A2 level. I am not happy about the price though (compared to other texts), so I've avoided buying it till now. 3 more lesson-passages remaining which I'll do next week at the bookstore.
-4 hours of private lessons
-1 hour of conversation class.
-wrote a couple of text passages and got it corrected by the teacher.
-looked at many words, sentence mined to remember their meaning.
-I've started on the frequency dictionary to fill in holes in my vocab till at least the top 1000 words. I've completed the top 200.
-Revision of verb forms (so many irregular verb forms that I have not been able to memorize...)

In my private lessons, we went over a couple of sample A2 tests. It's tough!! The teacher had warned me. I think the Portuguese A2 test is quite harder than A2 level. No way does a vocabulary size of 1000 come close to being sufficient. I am afraid I'm gonna fail the test next week, but I will try it anyway.

Here is one of the tasks in the exam -- I will be paired with another student, and I will get a sequence of 5 images. The other student has to ask details about the images, and I have to make up a story about the images, and basically narrate the story, orally. In the sample test, the images were a bunch of people dressed in ski clothes, jumping up, a cake, luggage, ice in airport, and airport seats. In another set, it was a girl staring into space, a wedding dress, bride and groom dancing, a pair of shoes. They want this orally? At A2 level?!

I was also stressed out about an unrelated life event for a couple of days.

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I realized I had not yet started on Portuguese music.

So, went on a search, and here are a couple of cool tunes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaZZld-LRp0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-uPAP30NuU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJPN3GZhP0U

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-Read the transcripts of the last three audio conversations from the campusuniversitario book
-Went up to the top 500 words in the frequency dictionary. Wanted to go to 1000, but that is not happening as I have so many other things to prepare for the exam.
-Wrote two practice letters from sample exams.
-Another hour of private lesson.
-We covered some prepositions of movement and the teacher gave me homework which I finished.

This exam is tough. I think I would realistically have needed like 300 hours of deep preparation starting from A0. And I've only done around 175. I somehow thought A2 took 120 hours and had procrastinated (+ life) because of this.
But no, A2 takes 200 hours, and the Portuguese A2 exam is especially hard. I consider myself B1.1 and I would have trouble passing a similar German exam. In one of the exams there are two writing exercises. In one, you have to write a flyer about your lost dog, his characteristics etc, and in the other, you have to write a letter saying and describing how things went wrong this past weekend, due to which you could not visit them. In German I can do these things, provided, I have access to a dictionary, and my grammar book, and 90 minutes. In the Portuguese exam, no dictionary, no notes, and both these exercises have to be completed together in like 35 minutes.

Ugh.