Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.

I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.

Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

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Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

Adventures in Language Learning

 

In 2021, feeling more than a little claustrophobic from the ongoing restrictions of life in pandemic times, I enrolled for a time in an online masters course, Português Lingua Não Materna, at Portugal's Universidade Aberta. The course itself was a mistake, or at least the language acquisition unit was, being taught by an insecure older professor who demanded perfection in writing from the course's students while being unable to write a page herself that I can remember not being full of errors (most, but not all being an inability to come to grips with the current orthographic convention), engaging in bizarre linguistic harassment like forbidding me to use Portuguese adjectives ending with -avel (WTF?) and existing in a state of imperviousness to modern research and theory.

The semester of academic involvement did me a world of good, however, leading me back to reading in a field I greatly enjoyed as a young exchange student in Max Mangold's linguistics and dialect courses at Universität des Saarlandes in the early 1980s. In particular, the work of Stephen Krashen was a welcome discovery, as it put many of Mangold's recommendations for language learning into a more effective context. For example, Prof. Mangold often recommended listening to radio or other audio sources (such as tapes) as a means of acquiring a new language, but when I tried this years later with over 100 hours of French on a long train commute to work, it got me exactly nowhere. I was getting plenty of input in French, but as I had no background whatsoever in languages derived from Latin, none of that was comprehensible input. Things might have gone quite differently with the French language had I bothered to learn Spanish in high school, for example.

The following Spring I was in Lisbon for a Covid superspreader conference of colleagues, when someone introduced me to the Duolingo language app, which he was using to review Russian for keeping up with the news on Russia's criminal aggressions against Ukraine. I tried the app myself to review my mostly forgotten Russian from the 1980s and found that my comprehension returned quickly and I could soon follow commentaries online with some effort. However, after a few months of Russian practice, my companheira announced that she had booked a holiday in Spain for my birthday four months later. So I started using Duolingo to learn Spanish, doing parallel courses for learning Spanish from English, German, Russian and Portuguese. My idea, I suppose, was that connecting the Spanish to my other languages of use might reinforce what I learned better and avoid the kind of interference I would occasionally experience many years ago when trying to speak Japanese and finding only Russian words in my head. It sort of worked.

After several months of practice with Duolingo, I discovered interest groups for that app on Facebook, the most interesting one for me at the time being Duolingo Spanish Learners. I skipped right over the idiotic discussions with fools demanding that the language somehow conform to their flawed concept of its "rules" and found a wealth of interesting recommendations for supplemental and alternative learning resources. These included books, YouTube channels (among the best for comprehensible input at many levels was Dreaming Spanish), tutorials and conversation opportunities and more.

After about a year of Spanish practice, including several months of intense conversation practice on Baselang (referral link here), I actually found myself more comfortable conversing in Spanish than in Portuguese, despite having lived in Portugal for a decade. Access to good quality comprehensible input at the beginning and intermediate levels in Spanish was the key here, and my frustration with the lack of such resources for European Portuguese grew as my proficiency in Spanish increased. I have since found some good options for Portuguese, which I will share in later posts, but since I live in a border town just across the river from Badajoz, the capital of the Spanish state Extremadura, I can usually fall back on Spanish if I'm at a loss for words in Portuguese, and I do most of my major shopping over in Spain anyway.

In the last two years, I have spent a lot of time with language learning apps and other resources not just for Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, but also for other languages I do not know but for which I have had occasion to develop special resources for translation and quality assurance in memoQ. These included Ukrainian, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic. Using the apps to learn the alphabets for these languages has made it easier to deal with sample texts in testing and to understand some of the challenges presented by colleagues and clients in need of assistance with regular expressions in languages that most technical gurus can't do anything with.

So henceforth this blog will include information and tips gleaned from my personal and occasionally professional forays into languages and alphabets for any purpose that fits my fancy. And if you, the reader, have interesting things to share in these regards, please do so in the comments.

"Unprofessional translation" and CAT tools

Those who came to this post expecting more ammunition for the war against the deprofessionalization of translation by the exploitative practices of the bulk market bog inhabited by the worst of (dis)service companies like Lionbridge, TransPerfect, thebigword and others will be disappointed. Nor will they find anything useful to combat the many technophobic misunderstandings and actual abuses of professional tools by sometimes less than bilingual wannabes whom some hope to keep away from translation by building some sort of virtual wall.

Tools are as useful as what we do with them. Hammers are good to drive nails or posts, depending on their design, weight and other factors, or they can be used to commit grisly murder, as one reads occasionally in the papers. But they can also make nice doorstops or play a part in exercise and sports. Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools or (as they are better known) translation environment tools (TEnTs) are versatile and often useful to solve problems and processes for which they were not originally conceived. The E-Learning, Translation and Ideas Bakery website and blog (included for years now in the blog roll here on the left of the page) by a Romanian colleague who teaches at university in the UK shares a number of concepts that can be described thus, and the Unprofessional Translation blog (also in the list here) which I also follow shares many stories of situations where the usual working tools of my present profession can be applied well to situations beyond the usual commercial or literary borders that most of us set for our work.

I continue to be excited by the possibilities of using TEnTs as an aid in language learning. The fact that these are so seldom used in that way is, for me, evidence of great opportunities missed by teachers and students around the world and perhaps also by the providers of commercial tools, though for the broad market of teachers and learners everywhere I would encourage the use of several excellent free and open source tools like OmegaT and the Heartsome Suite, even the web-based tool of that axis of evil, the Google Translator Toolkit.

I have documented some of my own efforts to use my main professional tool, memoQ, to support my own progress of learning Portuguese since I moved to Portugal six years ago. This was essential for getting a grip on the terminology and expressions needed to pass my weapons license exam in Portuguese when I could barely speak well enough to order breakfast, and I continue to use it as a means to track vocabulary and expressions I encounter in the newspaper, magazines and public notices such as the warning about deadly Asian wasps here (in the graphic at the top of this post). many years ago when learning German, Russian and Sumerian I kept a thick deck of flashcards for reference and practice, and at various times I have used online sites like Duolingo, Livemocha or Memrise to get farther with Portuguese or Spanish vocabulary, but none of these have proven as effective for focused study of a written language than the tools I have on my desktop computer, which enable me to compile corpora and glossaries which are adapted best to my personal situation and needs for language acquisition in a new country and culture.

One welcome difference of using TEnTs for personal projects as opposed to professional work is that one can focus on the parts most needed and need not worry about completing an "assignment". Thus I will maintain corpora with only partial translations or perhaps only simple comments to explain grammatical aspects of particularly challenging sentences. And if there is some useful external quiz engine I want to use for virtual flashcards (or I want to make printed cardstock ones or a cheat sheet to help with discussions at the tax office or sporting goods store) that is easy enough to do with the many data exchange options in memoQ, SDL Trados Studio, OmegaT or whatever.

In the same way that understanding the use of word processing software does not make you a writer, students of language who use translation environment tools are unlikely to become viable translators en masse, even if they may have that as an objective for some reason. As a professional translator, I see the attempts of bulk market providers to engage even competent bilinguals as translators and note with depressing frequency that a fool with a tool remains a fool and that language mastery will go nowhere professionally without mastery of concepts and subject matter details as well. But most people can, I think, get on farther and faster with the many challenges posed by a new language in areas of interest and necessity with the "unprofessional" aid of professional translation tools.

Caught between languages

There is an interesting article on the BBC web site now which relates the experience of twenty different people with language loss as they have changed countries and cultures. This is a subject which fascinates me personally from my own observations over many years, and the diversity of the stories related very much parallels the lack of real, general patterns I have found. These experiences are very individual, and I find it more useful to observe the state of things as they are rather than to pontificate with generalizations as I so often hear in similar discussions on multilingual parenting (with which I also have some experience).

I first became aware of these phenomena with Germans who had emigrated to the United States and, after many decades, were lost in a No Man's Land of language, having lost their skills with German while never quite coming to terms with the language of their new country. I particularly remember my shock at discovering that Inge, the nice lady who ran a bakery in a complex my great-grandfather owned in Arcadia, could barely express herself in German and had forgotten all her prepositions. Having started to learn German at school, I looked forward to the chance to converse with this native German whose English still had not really made the grade after decades, and the "neither/nor" state of her language skills was a surprise which recurred with the old neighbor from Danzig who lived across the street from me, strangers met in a grocery store and even the professors of German at my college to some extent. Visits in the past decade with my old high school German teacher in Berlin also showed how lost someone could become when out of touch with her country of origin and its cultural evolution; it felt very strange to explain to the person who had introduced me to Herman Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Bertold Brecht and others in German what ordinary people were saying on the street.

It was equally bizarre serving as an "interpreter" of English for a former partner as she spoke to family in California in a strange blended babble of US and UK English with German words embedded at least once a minute. Her writing showed little evidence of language loss, but the situation for speaking was, alas, very different.

At the same time I have met others who retain a perfect command of English after decades away from the US or UK. A certain mindset seems to contribute to this retention, but I might be mistaken. I might also be mistaken that I have suffered little loss of facility with my own native English after fifteen years away.

I have usually found that my language skills are very compartmentalized by subject. For several decades after an exchange year at the Universität des Saarlandes I found that I could converse easily on various archaeological subjects in German but was at an utter loss to discuss the same subjects in any depth in English; my family life was so intimately German for so many years that I annoyed Jewish girlfriends greatly with quite a number of spontaneous expressions in relaxed moments, expressions which somehow changed to Portuguese the first time they came to my mind and lips in a new culture, where now I struggle to recall them in the language that comes out automatically when I am angry. (My dogs are being retrained in Portuguese now after I observed that local dogs are often terrified when they hear me work with my animals in German. Apparently I also frightened some of the vets here with rather ordinary dog chat as any German hunter with dogs might engage in.)

In the BBC article, one individual talks about how words from two languages he studied briefly many years ago come to mind when he struggles to find a word in his former native language. I have long experienced a similar problem myself, substituting Russian when looking for a Japanese word or now mixing up Japanese and Russian, languages I have scarcely used since the 1980s, with my Portuguese when I am tired. Less often a German word will fall into the sentence, more often when I am annoyed, but somehow English usually does not come into play as I struggle to master the new language.

My current approach to Portuguese is a strange blend of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and old advice from Max Mangold from a conversation we once had about Hitler's interpreter, in which he related his own best experience. One of these days I'll get around to looking at a dictionary or grammar book again, though the value of that for baking cookies or bodyguarding is limited. In Germany I think it was very easy for me to retain my English skills, because the differences of cultural values between my English and German worlds made them as miscible as oil and water, but I wonder now what will become of my English a decade from now after I have been immersed in a culture which, for me, is at the very least a good emulsifier.

Have you experienced some language loss yourself or strange phenomena in the acquisition of a new language? Please share.