How difficult is it to learn Portuguese for an Indian?

With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 50 million L2 speakers, Portuguese has approximately 270 million total speakers. In 1997, a comprehensive academic study ranked Portuguese as one of the 10 most influential languages in the world. Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Brazil. It is usually listed as the sixth-most spoken language and the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers. Being the most widely spoken language in South America and all of the Southern Hemisphere, it is also the second-most spoken language, after Spanish, in Latin America, one of the 10 most spoken languages in Africa. While having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as “Lusophone”.

Portuguese is a language that is not only popular but highly influential as well. Apart from being a part of the big five romance languages, it is also one of the most widely spoken languages. With that said, if you wish to learn the language, but are conflicted regarding how tough the language is going to be to master, then worry not. First of all, it is important to establish that no language is tough or easy. Languages cannot be put into a bracket of ease or not that easily. A language that might be easy for you to master, could be tough for someone else due to the difference in your native languages. So, in order to understand if you could learn Portuguese easily, you need to understand where you stand.

In India, English a compulsory language, that everybody has to master as their first language, nowadays. Therefore, we will consider the FSI distinction of languages. FSI or Foreign Service Institute of languages, all the languages around the world are divided into 5 groups, based on level of difficulty for a native English speaker. These groups are:

1.Group 1: Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish [Languages closely related to English.]

2.Group 2: German [Languages similar to English.]

3.Group 3: Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili [Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English]

4.Group 4: Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepal, Pashto, Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik), Polish, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Zulu [Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.]

5.Group 5: Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese [Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.]

Once you have successfully established your starting point, you can start to build the base and understand what exactly troubles you the most.

According to this list, Portuguese falls into group 1. Group 1 consists of those languages, that would be the easiest to master for a native English speaker because of the close relation to English. It should take you approximately 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) to master Portuguese and if you wish to master just the speaking skills, then it would take you even lesser.

This is a basic analysis of the difficulty of learning Portuguese. As mentioned previously, no language is specifically easy or difficult. It all comes down to your conviction, determination and efforts. To ultimately master any language, you need to devote time and effort and stay motivated throughout the process. If you can do that, then you can master a language like Portuguese in no time.