Can I become fluent in Portuguese in 1 month? – A Language Learning Speedrun – Day 1

On the previous post, we discussed how to prepare the mindset for learning a language. We first created a special spot in our heads and recollected every secret knowledge we had more or less willingly learnt of that language. Then we tried to deduce the rules by comparing the words that surfaced in our minds with the knowledge we have about other languages.

Now it’s time to move to the hard work.

I know that most of you dread as soon as you hear the word phonology, you probably think about those weird hyeroglyphs in the dictionary that you skip without thinking, or maybe you think about that moment of the lesson in which your English teacher tries to convince you about the usefulness of it and then starts writing weird symbols and asking you to pronounce a sound that you were sure you were already pronouncing correctly.

Though these memories might be traumatising, I need you to put this hatred aside, because without this knowledge, no language can be learnt in a short time and with the least effort possible. What paved the way for me to become a polyglot is the fact that I was a bad student who didn’t want to spend too much time studying and wanted to maximise results. If you want to go the usual path that only leads to a superficial understanding of a language, feel free to skip this part, but you will miss the whole beauty of language. If you understand its importance, don’t hesitate to read the basics of phonetics and phonology in this post (soon to come).

Among the scholars, Wikipedia is always discarded as an unreliable source. Even though it sure is filled with unprecise and incomplete analysis, its primary goal is to simply give the average Joe a ready-to-go definition on the spot and providing sources. That’s why it is a valuable tool to gather the basic information. In our case, the phonology section for languages is almost always quite thouroughly filled. Obviously, that is for those who can read the English version of the entry for the language in question; those who don’t master the English language can only hope that their native language’s section is good enough.

For Portuguese we are lucky, there is a whole article dedicated to its phonology.

Forget about those useless letters for a moment and start thinking about sounds. Pure sounds. Those symbols, most of which should look familiar to you, are the representation of the consonants of Portuguese. Imagine this grid as the human mouth as seen from the side and from left to right imagine the lips, then the teeth, then the palate, then the velum – ok it took me a while to understand what that is, but let’s just say that it’s the soft part of the palate located on the rear of the mouth – and finally the throat. These are the location where the sounds are articulated. This is all very scientifical and mathematically planned. Then if you read the downwards, you’ll have the list of all the consonants pronounced in a certain part of the mouth from the one pronounced with the mouth shut, to the one that leaves the biggest room for the air to get out. Once again, if you want more details, read this other post (soon to come).

In Portuguese there are 23 consonants and since I am Italian, I’ll compare it with the consonants of my language. The letter <r> in Italian has only one reading, whereas in Portuguese it seems to have two: one is the sound /ɾ/ which is pronounced just like in Spanish, with a simple tap of the tongue and no thrill unlike the Italian or Russian <r>; the other is /ʁ/, which is pronounced like the French <r>, with the back of the tongue touching the velum. For the rest, nothing new. Try to check the phonemic inventory of your native language too and see what you have in common with Portuguese.

Now here we have the vowels, and this is where things get a bit more complicated for an Italian native speaker. First of all, we see that Portuguese features five nasal vowels (simply put, vowels that blow the air out of the nose), which don’t really exist in Italian. My French can then come in handy here. But still, Portuguese has 9 oral vowels (simply put, vowels that blow the air out of the mouth), which is two more than the Italian oral vowels. That upside down <a>, if you want to know how that is pronounced, just click on the link to the Wikipedia article, then click on that symbol and you’ll be redirected to the page of that specific sound and you’ll get to hear it pronounced in a dedicated 1 second audio. Do this for all the sounds that you don’t know and practice pronouncing those sounds until you become quite decent at it: this step is fundamental if you want to start understanding what people say quickly. But feel free to skip this part if you like to not be able to learn fast and waste a lot of effort in a non efficient way.

Now that we’ve got this basic information, we should start consolidating it, trying to pronounce those sounds inside words. As newby learners, we should immediately start with the most common words that you are sure you will definitely use. We can use an online dictionary, but only as long as you can hear the words’ natural pronunciation. Don’t try to learn written words without learning their sound! learning is synesthetic and it needs to activate as many senses as possible. Only learning the written face of a word will only make a feeble knowledge of the words and you might not even recognise them when people say them to you. Google Translate is quite good when it comes to natural pronunciation, unfortunately they use a weird and useless phonetic alphabet created by themselves that doesn’t simplify anything So, think: What are the most common words in every language according to you?

I’ll make a list for you now, but if you can, ignore it and create your own list, though you’ll probably agree on most of them.

eat: comer
sleep: dormir
drink: beber
hello: olá (the <l> is pronounced in a much richer way than Italian and Spanish, it almost sounds like the English “dark l”, but maybe this can occur just when it is found between two vowels)
think: pensar

Alright, that’s a bit too easy for an Italian, so I will add a few more.

go: ir
take: pegar (AH! The song! That is what ay si eu te pego means!)
give: dar
be: ser
have: ter
can: poder (eu posso – yep, no <u>, it’s written with the <o>, just like in Italian, but pronounced slightly different)

When will things become more complicated? Anyway, let’s look at the pronouns too:

eu
você
ele/ela
nós
vocês
eles/elas

This sounds a bit more exotic already, but it’s still familiar for someone who comes from the same language family. Though I still have no idea where the second person singular and plural originated from, I can easily see the Latin origin of all the others: eu comes from ego, where the /g/ slowly disappeared, just like for the other Latin derived languages, and the /o/ sound shifted to /u/, a process that occured in a similar way in Romanian.

For today, we have seen enough. But if you feel you still have some energy left, don’t hesitate to look for other words, just to test your pronunciation. Tomorrow, a new dawn of linguistics awaits, and we’ll need to be prepared.

Stay tuned for day 2.