Better to do passive immersion before studying? First time learner

[FumblngTowardFluency]

If you go for the Assimil + Anki combo, there's a nice trick.

Auto-generating Anki cards or something equivalent is a great idea. That would be a huge time saver. Will do, thanks.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Concerning grammar: I would get a small language guide and write out the grammar section before you open the Essential grammar book - and then save the rest of the guide for later. The guide book's grammar section will give you the essentials of the essentials and allow you to see what you need to focus on in the 'real' grammar book. That will save you a lot of time.

Thanks for the tip.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Everything in language is run through "the filter of perception" -- your brain interprets input based on what's already meaningful.

In effect, you're like early computers which used 7-bit ASCII

Great analogy. Makes perfect sense.

I work in embedded systems, so I routinely do cyclic redundancy checks to verify communication between chips on boards, as well as verifying registers written into a chip.

It is very easy to mishear Portuguese words as a native English speaker. Watching videos at 0.75x reduces this problem, but it definitely doesn't eliminate it.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

However, you can actually lean a ton by listening to a parent speak to a toddler, though.

This is worth amplifying. I had these recordings from an old BBC Spanish course and in several of them there were interactions between parents and toddlers, such as getting them to eat and go for a bath and various other things and you can see how this formative period in the L1 is much more interactive and guided. Pretty much the opposite of the one-way listening a lot of people end up doing.

It would be really interesting to create a phone app that's basically your target-language "parent".

It could interactively talk to you as if you're a toddler, based on whatever you're doing. Exactly as you describe, it could prompt you to eat your veggies, brush your teeth, etc.

Chatbots apparently make too many grammar mistakes to be useful for foreign language learning. But when they improve, this might be a viable prompt for them.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

What Bossa Nova do you like? I'd be down to listen to some Brazilian music. So far all I know is Parabéns a Você.

Some favorites (both of Bossa Nova and just Brazilian music in general): Astrud Gilberto, Joao Gilberto, and Bebel Gilberto make up an amazing family of Brazilian artists. Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto made an album called Getz/Gilberto, which is one of the founding Bossa Nova records; Antonio Carlos Jobim is also recognized as essentially the 'founder' of the genre, but it mixes lots of different influences. Luiz Bonfá, Ed Lincoln, Elizeth Cardoso, Flora Purim, and (Flora's younger sister) Yana Purim are also all amazing artists who have written some of my favorite Brazilian and Bossa Nova songs.

Awesome, thanks man. Bebel Gilberto has that great cover of "The Girl from Ipanema". Apparently it's a originally a Bossa Nova song called "Garota de Ipanema". It's funny how you can listen to a song for 15 years and not even realize its Brazilian.

Looks like a great playlist.

[Le Baron]

Chatbots apparently make too many grammar mistakes to be useful for foreign language learning. But when they improve, this might be a viable prompt for them.

It seems to me the main problem with chatbots is that the learner is the guide and prompt. It's the wrong way around. In early conversational encounters (and beyond) when you're learning a language, you aren't usually the guiding speaker, you are spoken to and asked questions.

If you were to make an app like you described above, one which asks questions and initiates encounters and expects meaningful responses, it would be amazing.

[themethod]

I just want to weigh in here to add to what others have said:

- If you don't have time to make an Anki deck, there are decent shared decks, like the ones based on the Routledge Frequency dictionaries (just look for A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese); though ideally you'd have audio for each word, which can take some time to add manually with Forvo (there is a good add-on for this but it doesn't currently work properly with Brazilian Portuguese)

- Other options are Clozemaster, Lingvist, or Drops, which also teach core vocabulary and are very "pick up and use"; the Fluency Fast Track on Clozemaster is typically best at about A2, but I find that you can start earlier by using the "Most Common Vocabulary" lists and working through those -- it also has grammar drills, reading, etc.

- I second the Pimsleur option and would point out that even if you only do 10 minutes per day, you'd theoretically get through all 150 lessons in 15 months (450 days)

- Personally, I've become a big fan of courses like Language Transfer, Michel Thomas, Paul Noble, etc. that give a quick rundown of the basic building blocks of a language, but there doesn't seem to be one for Brazilian Portuguese (the existing MT course is European Portuguese)

- "Language Reactor" is a good browser extension for actually watching videos, since it allows you to display both Portuguese and English subtitles simultaneously on Netflix; you can later choose to hide the English and eventually the Portuguese subtitles as you get more comfortable -- there's also a good Youtube channel for learners with hardcoded subs in both languages (https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakingBrazilian)

- There's a lot of great Brazilian music, and in my experience with Spanish, even just listening to music in the background can help develop your listening skills

The other recommendations are good, I just want to stress that even if you can only sneak a few minutes of an app here or there and part of an audio lesson while commuting, exercising, eating, etc., you can still make pretty decent progress in a Romance language. And combining that with watching/listening to Portuguese will take you much further than simply listening alone.

Then, once you're ready to jump into more dedicated study, you'll be able to fully focus on grammar and other nuances, since you'll already have a good foundation.

Even as someone with more free time, I'm a fan of this approach and finding ways to integrate learning into time you'd otherwise just spend scrolling social media or listening to a podcast, etc.

[Khayyam]

IME, in order for this sort of practice to work at all, you must first have built quite a solid base of basic vocabulary. If you're listening/reading and even most of the very basic words are just whizzing past you, then you're largely wasting your time. In the beginning, it's best to read and listen very actively and try to understand every last word. And then once you're sure you understand a passage/segment, repeat it until you can't misunderstand it. Start with phrases and sentences, then build to paragraphs, pages, chapters (or longer segments of a show/song--whatever you're working on). The length of material you can handle in your hour will naturally increase as your vocab grows. Eventually, the training wheels will naturally fall off and you'll understand things on the first try, with no repetition needed.

This is hard work, but it's a sure path to rendering the more passive practice you have in mind useful.

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.

[Lawyer&Mom]

Sorry I’m late to this conversation, because I’m going to disagree with everyone. 500 hours of passive Portuguese immersion will be more than enough to understand Portuguese. Now by “passive” I mean actually watching the TV show, not just having it playing in background. I did 500 hours of French TV and I was able to go from barely following anything to able to listen to foreign affairs podcasts. Now I did Assimil first and lots of Clozemaster during, but I don’t think it’s required. When it was time to repeat the experiment with my kids I just dumped them in front of French TV because I knew they wouldn’t sit still through Assimil or any other course work for that matter. Several hundred hours later (I can’t keep track of their hours as well as I did with my own), and my kids just understand French. My older one can read French books and is comfortable speaking. The younger one isn’t as comfortable speaking, but can still follow a conversation. Now Portuguese isn’t quite as close to English as French, but it’s still a Romance language. Your brain will be able to make connections between English and Portuguese vocabulary. (60% of English vocab comes from Romance languages! You’ve got a huge head start!) If I only had an hour a day I would watch TV. Save the textbooks etc. for after you have a solid foundation and you want to firm up your grammar when you have more time.

[Dragon27]

Just to put this into perspective, there's 564 episodes of a Brazilian telenovela As Aventuras de Poliana (loosely based on the classical children's novel Pollyanna by American author Eleanor H. Porter) as well as 307 episodes of the continuation Poliana Moça. They just happen to be available on Youtube for, ahem, informational purposes, and if you stack them all together you'll get slightly over 600 hours of content. 871 episodes is a LOT, it's, like, 36 seasons of an average TV show (24 episodes per season). If you put enough attention to it, not just treat it like background noise, you're bound to come out with some semi-decent receptive skill at the end.
Of course, having some preparation would be of great help, some basic understanding of the structure of the language, of its phonetical system, familiarity with frequent vocabulary.