大咖福利影院

@hagece8690

People have often asked me, "What's he hardest language to learn?" My answer: The one you are studying now. :-)

I find the time measurements from that institute sort of laughable. The difficulty of Portuguese depends on your own language experiences and exposures. I studied Spanish and French since my youth and I found that both of them helped me pick up Portuguese well enough to do pretty well, regionalisms aside (like you said). Have been working with Port since about 2005.

But it really depends on the aptitude of each individual person, yeah? F'r instance, many Spanish speakers find Port virtually unintelligible. But the nasality of French can help a lot.

I have an American fried who speaks pure "Santos" to the point that people think he's native. I myself have been mistaken for being from Portugal (!) or a gaucho.

As for fluency, I always remember what my Brazilian wife told me when I asked "When will I speak like a native?". Her answer: "Nunca!" We are both linguistic types, too.

So language teaching institutes or app-vendors have to try to give some indication of time it takes to be successful, but the generalizations are sometimes risible.

Great question!

05/31/26聽 @hagece8690聽 Thanks for a lot of good insights.聽 A lot depends on how we define "become reasonably fluent in Brazilian Portuguese".聽 I don't believe that it's really possible simply by osmosis, but a lot of academic work probably isn't necessary, either.聽

One working definition that I think sufficient for most people who just want to live here confidently and to put in as little structured class time as possible is this:聽 聽to speak and understand well enough to navigate all the normal events of day-to-day life where they live, without significant difficulties in understanding or making themselves understood.聽 A basic course, or maybe some tutoring (including online) in order to get basic grammar down efficiently without constantly repeating the same errors should be enough, in combination with reading good newspapers (e.g., Folha or 贰蝉迟补诲茫辞)聽 to build vocabulary, and listening to podcasts in good Portuguese from those and other sources to internalize the cadence of the language.聽 In the pre-podcast era, classic samba did that for me, especially artists like Beth Carvalho, Clara Nunes, and Luiz Ayr茫o, who always enunciated well-written lyrics clearly.聽 Having the Reverso app or similar on one's phone that allows instant lookups of unfamiliar words is a big help; lookups that are postponed end up being lookups that are never done, at least for me.聽 After about a year of this, and talking to Brazilians and accepting correction, expats聽 should find themselves feeling better about their Portuguese.

To become a Brazilian citizen an expat has to score at least an "Intermediate" on the CelpeBras exam.聽 As the lowest acceptable grade that's not the gold standard, but it's a real accomplishment, and an objective milestone of real fluency, both oral and written.聽 The Edital for the year that I took CelpeBras defines it this way:

"Intermediate:聽 evidencing partial operational dominance of the Portuguese Language, demonstrating capability of understanding and producing oral and written texts about limited subjects, in familiar contexts and everyday situations, able to show inadequacies and interferences from the mother tongue and/or other foreign language(s) in unfamiliar situations, not sufficient, however, to compromise communication."

In my view, for most people achieving that level of fluency would require about a year of formal training beyond what I described above, with some emphasis on writing.聽 聽To actually study for the test, the archive of past tests maintained online by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul is invaluable.聽

The idea that Portuguese can be mastered in a "learning timeline of 9 months to 11 months" is technically true but deeply misleading.聽 I know because I did it, and here's what it took.聽 Notice how many of these requirements are purely situational, and would be difficult or impossible to duplicate, especially in later life:

1. Being 20-21 years old
2. Studying in one of the best undergraduate Portuguese Departments in the United States
3. Participating in a highly structured weekly program of three hours of large group class, three hours of small group discussion class, a minimum of six hours of individual language lab for repeating oral exercises, and variable homework time for written exercises, always including memorizing a dialogue for recitation in discussion class.
4. A burning desire to speak Portuguese, and GOOD Portuguese, since I was in high school
5. Already having learned another language following the same program, so no break-in required.

And after all of that, I spent my first three months in Brazil "deformalizing" my Portuguese, because I talked more聽 like a textbook than a real boy.聽 That, happily, is no longer true -- but I still can't codeswitch worth a damn! 馃槀

> navigate all the normal events of day-to-day life

It's a fact of linguistics that this is sufficient for many people, who don't want to read poetry but simply want to order feijoada. After that, they become fossilized (the actual linguistic term).