Better to do passive immersion before studying? First time learner

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Hi, I'm a native English speaker. As a hobby I would like to become fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. This is my first time learning a foreign language.

I'm 36 and will be retiring from tech in summer of 2025. At that time, I'll be able to study Portuguese for 3 hours a day. Until then, I'm working 65 hours/week and only have time to watch an hour of Portuguese videos (with Portuguese subtitles) right before bed.

Is it better to passively absorb an hour of Portuguese videos every day for 15 months, until I can study the language systematically?
Or is it better to wait?

On the one hand, 500 hours of exposure seems very beneficial.
On the other hand, am I risking creating a muddle of incorrect grammar and misheard phonemes in my mind?

Will passively absorbing Portuguese for 500 hours help or hurt when I have time to study seriously?

Thanks very much for your reply.

[rdearman]

Sorry, but if you have an hour to watch a video, then you have an hour to study a textbook, or memorise vocabulary, or read a grammar book, etc, etc. In other words, you can learn a language in an hour per day, and if you did an hour per day, you'll probably be able to have a decent level of language by 2025. So why wait? The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second-best time is right now.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

I'm busy 13 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The only time I have for Portuguese is when I eat dinner, which is my one meal for the day. That's in the last hour before I go to sleep.

[iguanamon]

Sorry, but if you have an hour to watch a video, then you have an hour to study a textbook, or memorise vocabulary, or read a grammar book, etc, etc. In other words, you can learn a language in an hour per day, and if you did an hour per day, you'll probably be able to have a decent level of language by 2025. So why wait? ...

Exactly what I was writing when I saw Rick's response pop-up. While watching videos won't hurt, I don't think that you this will take you nearly as far as doing a course.

An hour a day is enough for a course, or even two. Even though you work in tech, the free and legal to download DLI Portuguese Basic Course (in pdf with mp3's) will take you much, much further. It's not flashy. It's not modern- over 60 years old. Man is it thorough. I used it myself, along with Pimsleur, and a tutor for conversation and loads of native media. The course is a pdf. I cleaned it up and ocr'ed it for my use. I put the pdf and the mp3 audio on my tablet. I spent about an hour a day on it.

While DLI is not gamified nor flashy, it will teach you the language. You could split the hour up any way you want. You could reinforce it with anything.

Doing a beginner's course will give you so much more results for your time.

[Le Baron]

Is it better to passively absorb an hour of Portuguese videos every day for 15 months, until I can study the language systematically? Or is it better to wait?

Absorb what?

[rdearman]

I'm busy 13 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The only time I have for Portuguese is when I eat dinner, which is my one meal for the day. That's in the last hour before I go to sleep.

While I realise you're under a severe time crunch. I still think the DLI course, or listening to Pimsleur would be better for you. Pimsleur lessons are only 30 minutes long, and they are all audio. So you could eat and listen at the same time.

But I don't think you're going to do any harm to yourself if you just watch videos, just don't expect to learn much, if anything. You're not going to learn much more than if you just slept with a textbook under your pillow. Osmosis doesn't actually work.

HOWEVER!

I do want to tell you that even though I might be sounding very negative and pessimistic to you, I want you to learn! I encourage you to learn, and I really do hope that you'll be a successful speaker of Portuguese. It is a great goal, and you really should go for it.

[emk]

Hi, I'm a native English speaker. As a hobby I would like to become fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. This is my first time learning a foreign language.

Welcome to the forum! That sounds like a fun goal. There are quite a few tech people here, and people who've tried applying technology to language learning in various inventive ways.

Is it better to passively absorb an hour of Portuguese videos every day for 15 months, until I can study the language systematically?
Or is it better to wait?

People have actually tried learning by watching TV! But based on their experiences, just watching TV by itself won't actually get you very far.

The problem is that your language skills build upon each other in layers:

1. Hearing phonemes.
2. Breaking sounds into syllables and words.
3. Attaching meanings to words.
4. Assembling words into sentences.

Watching incomprehensible TV only helps with (1) and (2). To put it in AI terms, you're building a predictive model of Portuguese sounds. Which is actually a bit useful! But not sufficient.

What you want your brain to build is a model mapping from Portuguese sounds to the actual meanings. And to build that mapping, you need both the sounds and the associated meanings in your "training set." Again, to use AI terms, humans are ridiculously "sample efficient." If you can present your brain with 2-3 million words in Portuguese and the meanings of those words, your brain will understand most Portuguese. In fact, the first 200,000 words (plus their associated meanings) will get you surprisingly far.

So that's the key: Not only do you need to hear the sounds, you also need to be able to figure out what they mean. One easy way to do this would be to pick up Assimil Brazilian Portuguese and spend 20-40 minutes a day on it for 5 months. Assimil is basically slow, clear audio plus a bilingual text. It works quite reliably, and it gets you a level where you can carry on a conversation like "an unusually cosmopolitan 3 year old". (I've used several of their courses, but never their Portuguese ones. Other good courses available in many languages are Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and the public domain FSI/DLI courses.)

But let's say you really want to learn by watching TV for some reason. (Maybe your tech job fries your brain. Trust me, I get it.) If all you can handle is lazy TV watching, then you could consider:

1. Checking out Language Reactor and using it to watch Netflix with bilingual subtitles. (Or try Migaku if you're a flash card person.)
2. Buying a very small Portuguese grammar overview. You could get a laminated quick reference poster from Amazon. Or if you're feeling really ambitious, Dover's Essential Portuguese Grammar—I don't know if this book is any good, but I like their French and Spanish versions. These books have less than 50 small pages of actual content.

These two small adjustments to your plan would likely improve your results a few hundred percent for little extra effort.

On the one hand, 500 hours of exposure seems very beneficial.
On the other hand, am I risking creating a muddle of incorrect grammar and misheard phonemes in my mind?

You will never hurt your Portuguese by exposing yourself to Portuguese. But if you just expose yourself to the sounds, any beneficial effects will taper off very quickly. If you can expose yourself to sounds+meanings, you can make it quite far.

If you don't even have the time or energy to watch Netflix using Language Reactor, then perhaps you might want to consider building a collection of Portuguese music and playing it until you know it by heart.

Good luck with Portuguese!

[tastyonions]

If you’ve only got an hour during dinner I’d recommend an audio course like Michel Thomas or Pimsleur rather than native videos where you’ll pick up hardly anything, not knowing anything yet about the language.

[cito]

I think it would be best working through a book like ASSIMIL's Brazilian Portuguese with ease, putting each sentence into Anki, and reviewing every day. Do around a lesson per day, until the count of new cards (combining both the lesson and the exercises) are above what you are comfortable with, probably 10-15 for the average person. Then, don't increase volume, but take that same quantity of new cards (somewhere between 10 and 15) until you finish the deck. It might take you 2-3 days for each lesson after 50 or so, but thats okay. That will take you 30-45 minutes, between studying the book, making the cards, and reviewing the content.

For that last 15-30 minutes: up to you. Listen to some Bossa Nova (honestly one of my favorite genres, I have recommendations if you'd like!), watch some easy videos, etc. After you work through the ASSIMIL book, I suggest you do the Pimsleur course, which will take you around 5-6 months to do. Once you're done with that, you'd probably be doing not too bad and know what to do better than what I could tell you.

Best of luck. Feel free to ask me about any questions you might have with the system I have outlined.

[Cavesa]

Hi, I'm a native English speaker. As a hobby I would like to become fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. This is my first time learning a foreign language.

Hi, welcome to the forum! A nice goal!

I'm 36 and will be retiring from tech in summer of 2025. At that time, I'll be able to study Portuguese for 3 hours a day. Until then, I'm working 65 hours/week and only have time to watch an hour of Portuguese videos (with Portuguese subtitles) right before bed.

We have a rather similar amount of work time per week. But I don't think just watching video is a good use of your time at all.

Is it better to passively absorb an hour of Portuguese videos every day for 15 months, until I can study the language systematically?
Or is it better to wait?

Neither.
Just watching video is a great thing in two situations:
1.you already have strong enough basics to understand a big part and progress from there by just watching
2.you already know a similar language and want primarily to understand.

In your situation, you are likely to just waste tons of time, which would be better used for real learning. Either a more intensive and more efficient way: getting a coursebook and doing all the various types of activities it offers you, gradually learning the basics, or pick something less intensive, but still more worthwhile than random videos. An audio course like Pimsleur can be good in such a situation. A beginner podcast with more stuff like explanations and translations. Not just video.

On the one hand, 500 hours of exposure seems very beneficial.
On the other hand, am I risking creating a muddle of incorrect grammar and misheard phonemes in my mind?
Will passively absorbing Portuguese for 500 hours help or hurt when I have time to study seriously?

It won't hurt, but it won't really help. 500 hours of exposure are great, once you can benefit from it. Once you have some basics, that this expands on. Not as just stuff you cannot understand. Do not belive the current reddit and youtube popularity of this, just watching tv without anything else doesn't really work. People claiming otherwise usually forget to mention a part of the story.

Phonemes are not gonna be much of an issue. It is just a bit sad to waste the opportunity to learn the pronunciation while knowing what they are saying, and connecting it to the written word, and to your own sentences. Grammar: this would be a risk, yes, you can learn mistakes just by exposure, but it is not that much of a risk, since you'll be confused and probably not even get much out of it at all.

If I may suggest some viable ways to do this:
1.pick any of the proposed easier ways to learn during your free time now. So Pimsleur, learning podcast, Assimil, or a bit of a coursebook every day. Instead of that video watching.
2.invest a weekend or two into learning some basics (basically cramming a part of a beginner coursebook, to at least know what you are encountering) and then watch easy videos that you will get some value from.