Category - Learning Portuguese

We all know that a successful lifestyle connected to, or living in Brazil requires that you , though with a jungle of resources out there, it’s hard to know where to start and which dots to connect.

Personally, I’ve been through many different experiences, programs and courses in my quest to learn Portuguese and it was quite a challenge to figure out the best path to fluency.

I tried courses like Rosetta Stone, Pimsluer, a Portuguese language academy, grammar books, memory games – all without success. Although my breakthrough came in an unexpected form.

It was through a series of techniques that I’m going to share with you today.

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The cool thing about looking back in time is that we can reflect how things were done and what we can learn from them.

For literally 1000’s of years, we have been able to learn new languages fluently without the need for fancy methods.

This is due to the simple fact that our ancient ancestors understood something that we have a hard time with in the age of a pre-packaged consumerism: we are made to walk together and be mentored by others.

And through this mentoring we are given the correct resources, guidance and tips to become fluent in a foreign language.

Think about it, this has literally worked without issue for 1000’s of years!

If we were to take the mindset of 50+ years ago – let’s say our grandma – and give them the amazing resources at our fingertips today, how would they use them?

This is a question that led me to figure out how to get fluent fast, which is why I will answer it today and show you 6 resources that my grandma would use to get fluent in Portuguese.

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This is a follow up to my last post The Story of My Portuguese Fluency .

I’m often asked, “If I had to start over from scratch and learn Portuguese fluently again, what would I do differently?”

And of course, why?

My response is usually ask how much time they have as it could take me a long time to go over the laundry-list of mistakes made during my Portuguese learning process and that I will also be working on fluency, though let me go over what I believe to be the biggest (and most embarrassing) things I should have done differently:

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Me as a young squirt arriving in Brazil having learned Portuguese fluently.

I’ve told the story of how I learned Portuguese Fluently hundreds of times – at conferences, in person to thousands of different people – though today, I plan on going into more detail then ever before.

Why?

Because the brevity of those conversations usually ended in the other person getting the impression that I learned Portuguese fluently before stepping foot in Brazil, just by watching Brazilian soap operas on TV.  In all honesty the soap operas helped a lot, though there was much more to it then meets the eye for me to get …

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