Better to do passive immersion before studying? First time learner

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Hi, welcome to the forum! A nice goal!

Hi Cavesa, thanks for the feedback. You're right that without the foundation, passive learning is likely to be limited. If you already know 80% of the words in a sentence, you can figure out the remaining 20% by context. But trying to understand a 10-word sentence by relying only on English cognates isn't particularly helpful.

A beginner coursebook, Assimil, and then Pimsleur seems to be a good route.

Your English is excellent by the way. What you're saying is crystal clear.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Personally, this marks the day of Portuguese:

At work earlier today, some of us talked about Paulo Coelho. 45 minutes before closing time, his doppelganger appeared. And now this topic, with a link to DLI Portuguese (which I've thought of using - some day ...). And at arm's length I have a copy of Complete Brazilian Portuguese.

Nice. It must be synchronicity. The American writer Philip K Dick described synchronicity as "Jung's acausal connective principle". I'm not sure if that's an accurate definition, but it sounds cool.

Reading Paul Coelho in Portuguese would be an interesting challenge. I'll set that as a long-term goal for 2025-2026.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Now I've read back through I couldn't possibly suggest to someone that they should burden their sole mealtime with language learning. A 65 hour a week work schedule is already abysmal and ridiculous. I would concentrate on eating and sleeping properly, one meal a day is nonsensical in a 13-hour workday.

35 is young enough, another year until all day can be spent learning Portuguese is nothing. Why burden an already full schedule?

Hey Le Baron, thanks for your concern. You're right that it would be a burden to intensively study.

Really all I do when I eat is stare at the TV anyway. I'd rather listen to Portuguese than watch American Netflix. I'm not setting any short-term goals other than to enjoy Portuguese. No stress.

Also, you're studying some cool languages. Sranantongo, the lingua franca of Surinam. Very cool.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

When I was in the military I once did 6 months working 16 hour days for 7 days a week. So only 13 hours plus having weekends free is a bit of a cake walk.

Damn, you've got my respect for that.

Also to get a 13 hour day job without a lunch break you're either a slave, a doctor or an American.

The slave driver is me. I own the company, lol. But I don't push other people the way I push myself, because I'm not a jerk.

I personally don't think there is a company on this planet that could afford to pay me to do 65 hour weeks, and the only reason I did it in the military was because it was that or prison. I also got out and the end of that enlistment quick smart.

Ah, you got the press gang. At least they didn't ship you off with the convicts going to Australia.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Hey, I appreciate everybody who replied taking their time. Other people googling beginner language learning will probably read this thread.

To aggregate the replies, I'm going to try the following:
1. One day with Essential Portuguese Grammar
2. A relaxed evening lesson with DLI or Assimil + Anki for many months, eventually Pimsleur
3. If I'm too wiped out for a structured lesson, I'll chill with Language Reactor or Bossa Nova

Obrigado pela ajuda!

[emk]

Hi Le Baron, I meant expose the brain to language to allow it to connect observable actions on the screen to words that are being spoken.

Yeah, it seems like that should work. But I know of a couple of people who have tried, including someone who watched a massive amount of Mandarin children's TV. And it's ridiculously inefficient. It's like 10x more hours than Assimil for worse results.

Actual children hear 3-13 million spoken words per year from birth. And a lot of that is extremely repetitive and interactive. TV shows are much less helpful. (However, you can actually lean a ton by listening to a parent speak to a toddler, though.)

For me, "learning by binge-watching TV series" started working when I had about 40% comprehension.

Assimil provides far less input than kids get, but it will reliably get people holding very basic conversations. And after Assimil, I then went on to read 2.5-3.5 million words of French, just random books and stuff. After doing that, I could read pretty much anything in French at 40 pages/hour. (I'm skipping a couple of steps, but mostly it was all just muddling through.)

So trying to imitate how kids learn by watching incomprehensible TV is just not efficient. There's just not enough context relative to the complexity of the language, I think.

To aggregate the replies, I'm going to try the following:
1. One day with Essential Portuguese Grammar
2. A relaxed evening lesson with DLI or Assimil + Anki for many months, eventually Pimsleur
3. If I'm too wiped out for a structured lesson, I'll chill with Language Reactor or Bossa Nova

Yup, any reasonable version of that plan will work. Try out the different courses and pick whichever feels most comfortable. Pimsleur is nice because it's hands-free. Assimil tends to sneak up on you—you're not sure if it's working, then you look back 30 lessons and everything seems incredibly obvious. DLI is typically nice for people who like rigorous practice. All of these courses are proven hundreds of times over on just this forum. So pick whatever mix you like best.

Assimil + Anki trick. If you go for the Assimil + Anki combo, there's a nice trick. Anki is fantastic, but creating cards is usually a time sink. However! Many of the Assimil MP3 CDs include a timed "lyrics" track in their MP3 files. You may be able to find a script that extracts the lyrics track and turns the entire Assimil course into Anki audio cards all at once. Imagine something like this:

anki-cropped-small.png

Audio goes on the front of the card, bilingual text on the back. Mark the card as "Good" if you understand at least 80% of the audio. Don't try to learn more than 10 new cards per day for the first month. And if a card makes you say "Ugh," just delete it. Following these rules will make Anki painless and low stress.

Sync the deck to your phone, buy some AirPods, and you can casually crank out 5 minutes of listening practice while standing in line at the grocery store. (I also remember Khatzumoto, who did flashcards while brushing his teeth. He was a little extreme.)

But honestly, given your time constraints, I'd probably only use Anki in the beginning if I could create cards in bulk. Anki's great, but manual card creation requires extra time and your hands on a keyboard.

Anyway, you've got this—any version of your revised plan is good. Good luck!

[Iversen]

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.

[Cainntear]

Hi Le Baron, I meant expose the brain to language to allow it to connect observable actions on the screen to words that are being spoken. Not absorb like a Brawny Paper Towel. I should've been more clear.

Tech analogy: you don't have the file decoder for what hits your ear.

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 -- it encoded everything that an English-speaking American could want, but as soon as non-English characters from the 8-bit ASCII set appeared, it fell apart because it tried to interpret them as 7-bit and threw the last bit away as a "checksum"... or worse... it did the checksum and considered it corrupt.

Now imagine 1990s 7-bit ASCII computer dealing with variable bit-width Unicode.

Portuguese sounds are different enough that your decoder is going to misclassify the spoken analogue to letters, known as "phonemes", and you're not actually going to properly hear the Portuguese.

It appears others have convinced you to spend your time actively learning, and that's a good thing. I just wanted to throw in an analogy as to why that's good in a way you might understand!

[Le Baron]

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.

[cito]

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.