Advice for learning Spanish after Portuguese

[fresh_air]

I speak Portuguese well enough, and starting in April next year I want to start learning Spanish. I already understand quite a bit of Spanish if I really concentrate, but it's not good enough to allow normal communication. Often times comprehension is only permitted with educated guesses, or through context.

I see tons of material from going Spanish>Portuguese (like the FSI course), but the reverse is less common. Any recommended courses or methods? How long would you suppose it would take?

[iguanamon]

I did it the other way. If your desired outcome is to speak Spanish, then my advice is to get your Portuguese up to a high B2 before you start learning it. If you want to consume it passively, then you should be fine.

Spanish and Portuguese are similar in many respects and markedly different in others. The similarity is such that it can be extremely difficult to keep them separate at lower levels, like with B1 Portuguese. Even at C levels it can be difficult for me depending on which one I've been speaking the most and then having to switch to the other.

As to going from one to the other, I tried the various "from Spanish to Portuguese" courses when I first started learning Portuguese and found that they made me see Portuguese through a Spanish prism. It was too confusing. I then went to Pimsleur and DLI Portuguese Basic (my advanced Spanish enabled me to jump in at Volume 4). The DLI course was almost monolingual with minimal English. This helped me to focus on Portuguese as a language in its own right. I also worked with a Brazilian tutor twice a week.

There are tons of Spanish courses. There are certainly courses in Portuguese base. I know of two from Brazil- "Como Dizer Tudo em Espanhol" by Ron Martinez and "Curso de Idiomas Globo: Espanhol". Myself, I would just learn Spanish and leverage my Portuguese to help me advance more quickly.

To sum up, if you just want to learn Spanish passively, you can probably do that without too much worry of affecting your Portuguese. If you want to learn it to use it in speaking and writing, then wait until you advance your Portuguese at least to high B2. Even then, it will be a struggle to keep them separate. I know it's hard to resist, but waiting will serve you better than rushing in and ending up with a mishmash in both.

[SGP]

To sum up, if you just want to learn Spanish passively, you can probably do that without too much worry of affecting your Portuguese. If you want to learn it to use it in speaking and writing, then wait until you advance your Portuguese at least to high B2. Even then, it will be a struggle to keep them separate. I know it's hard to resist, but waiting will serve you better than rushing in and ending up with a mishmash in both.

This very advice is something that some others gave, too, when they were explaining the issue of possibly mixing them up. "Them": two closely related languages, not necessarily Spanish and Portuguese. It seems to me that this advice is also based on something they were experiencing themselves, rather than something based on solely making some conclusions and deductions.

By "experiencing" I don't mean that they mixed up those languages themselves, but only that they realized that there is the High Probability Potential of Doing So.

While pondering upon the underlying reason for this very probability of confusing those two, especially when one didn't really advance with any of them yet, there is an analogy that came to my mind.

Do you know those Forest Pathways caused by a certain type of animals, or also caused by humans?
As we know, the footprints of the various species differ.

If one Forest Pathway was caused by bears, for example, then it greatly differs from those caused by rabbits.

Also, it is no secret that some of these pathways are stronger than others.
If the bears only recently started making one of those, then the footprints of other animals, or those of humans, can easily interfere and even entirely delete and replace them.

But if it is an old and very strong pathway, things differ.

Now the various species of animals, or the human species [this one is meant as the singular, because species is used for both], can be compared within that Analogy's Explanatory Framework to the various languages.

And the pathways being strong or not can be compared to already having advanced with a certain language or not.

This analogy also explains why, after already having reached something like the B2 level of one language, it at least is easier than before not to mentally replace Spanish with Portuguese or vice versa.

Because even if, for example, humans start using the pathway with the bear footprints too, and even if after some time there will be some very visible and long-term human footprints, there is hope of the bear's tracks still playing a major role in that forest's pathway appearance.