*TDLR: I want to learn #Portuguese. I like learning things and I want a challenge. *
I'm the kind of person that enjoys learning new things. I'm not particularly good at it, I just kinda enjoy doing it.
When I was a teenager, I heard my favourite band for the first time. I immediately knew that I wanted to learn to play guitar so I could write songs like that. I bought a guitar and I learned some basic chords and taught myself how to play all their songs.
5 years ago, I moved to Japan. When I came here, I couldn't speak Japanese at all. Since then I have taught myself in my free time. I guess I am now an intermediate speaker but I can get by in most daily life situations and can read enough kanji to know what is going on.
I guess the point is, I kinda like learning new things.
So what's the plan?
I am an ESL teacher. I teach people English. Therefore lots of people ask me for advice about how to learn a language. I am always happy to help and I tell people things that I wish I had done when I started learning Japanese.
The problem is that I have never actually used that advice myself. I learned Japanese in such a backwards and inefficient way that I learned from my mistakes the hard way. It would be nice to try the strategies out for my self.
I don't have so much free time, but I think I can spend about 15-20 minutes a day to study Portuguese. I have a rough plan of action in my head, but I will share that in another post on another day.
Why Portuguese?
Well, it is not some language I have chosen at random. Even though I have never been to Brazil (yet) My wife is from there. She is 3rd generation Japanese but she was born and raised in Brazil. Portuguese is her native language and I want to learn it so I can communicate with her.
Since we speak together in English, and we live in Japan, she doesn't get the chance to speak Portuguese as much these days and that makes her sad. I would love to be able to speak with her in her native language as I guess it would make us closer.
Also, I kinda want to be able to understand all the bad words she shouts at me when she is angry 🤣
Goal Setting
Goals are good for learning a language because they help you stay motivated. My goals are pretty arbitrary though because the main goal is to practice the tips I give other people, which doesn't really translate into making progress in a new language. Still, goals are good so I should set some.
Anyway, let's say that in 6 months I want to be able to understand 1500 Portuguese words. This should be less than 10 words a day so seems pretty manageable with something like Anki. I quite like Anki, but it can be time consuming. In terms of what words I want to learn, I will focus on the most commonly used words for now, but ones that are relevant to my own experiences.
I also want to be able to make some sentences, so I want to learn some of the most common grammar patterns. I will probably learn a new pattern every few days and write down a bunch of sentences using the pattern every day.
After 6 months, I would like to be able to have a basic conversation with my wife in Portuguese. Nothing too fancy, just enough that she will be impressed 😇
Resources
For this, I have zero clue at this point. I will use Anki to help me memorise words. I will also try to make learn some basic grammar patterns that I think will be useful based on my daily life and needs in the language.
I do enjoy listening to target language materials as much as possible, so I might ask my wife for some interesting podcasts and stuff to practice listening. Input is always valuable when learning a language.
I'm lucky in the fact that I can just ask my wife questions that come up. I have a feeling that her answers will be vague at best though. "It's just that way, why are you questioning it?" Is probably going to be a common phrase in our house for a while.
Moving Forward
I want to document my journey in some way so I will make some sporadic posts on here related to learning Portuguese and my progress. If you are interested in that kind of thing, please keep an eye out for them.
I would also love to hear your advice. I am on the look out for good resources that I can use as well as any language learning tips you may have.
Bonus Cat Pic
If you have made it this far, you deserve a reward. Here is a pic of my cats as a token of my gratitude. This is MelonKun and PanChan trying to share the same cat bed for some reason.
Thanks for reading this post. If you want to learn English, then feel free to check the lessons I upload or check out my website for lots of videos, podcasts and articles.