5 Strategies to Improve your Portuguese Vocabulary
The Portuguese language is one of the world’s most exotic languages, and its beauty lies in its words. The Portuguese language is estimated to contain 250,000 words, with the most important Portuguese dictionary containing over 171,000 words. This may appear to be a large and intimidating number to someone eager to begin learning Portuguese, but here’s the good news: you only need to know about 5% of the entire vocabulary to be fluent in Portuguese. This implies that if you concentrate your efforts on learning the most commonly used Portuguese words, you’ll be fluent in Portuguese in no time. What’s more, knowing as few as 100 words can help you understand half of the words in a piece of writing or book written in Portuguese. Learn the most commonly used 1000 words and you’ll have a 75% understanding of texts in Portuguese. In addition, each new word you learn helps you guess the meaning of up to 85 previously unseen words. This implies that knowing only 1000 Portuguese words can help you guess up to 85000 Portuguese words. Doesn’t seem so scary now, does it?
Every language, including Portuguese, is built on its vocabulary that evolves over centuries with the language. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the greatest challenges of learning any language, including Portuguese!
Successful communication or “being able to articulate your thoughts and feelings clearly” is significantly dependent on the richness of vocabulary you build while learning the language. While using intelligible, comprehendible and coherent speech during conversations will make you a great communicator, eloquence in your oration will make you venerable and admirable. Since the entire idea is to convert complex thoughts and emotions into comprehensible and unambiguous speech using words that are convincing, appealing and understandable to a listener, a large vocabulary to tap in will be your greatest asset when building your first conversation in Portuguese.
Success in a career or business to a large extent depends on the impressive communication skills you demonstrate during presentations or the polite persuasion techniques you resort to when clinching deals!
Apart from this, having a good vocabulary to draw from can also help you write more effectively.
Since comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading, the importance of vocabulary development cannot be underestimated. A rich vocabulary will empower you to improve all your areas of communication – listening, speaking, reading and writing!