How difficult is it to learn Portuguese for Indians?

Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal and has kept some Celtic phonology and its lexicon. It is a Romance language originating 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, while having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as “Lusophone” (lusófono). As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese and Portuguese creole speakers are also found around the world. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 50 million second-language 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 rather tough language. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) of USA places the Portuguese Language in Category 1; the toughest to learn languages for an English speaker, that requires 575-600 hours of a total to be learnt to a proficiency level as under “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)” given a learner can afford 25 hours a week at a minimum. 

To learn Portuguese you don’t have to live in Brazil or Portugal, but you would definitely need to create an immersive environment at home. Even still, the average time it takes someone to reach this level with intense, but not full-time, studying is 1.5-2 years. Learning languages is more than learning words — it involves absorbing cultures.

According to the US Department of State, Portuguese is one of the easier languages for English natives to learn due to the multitude of similarities in structure with English and having the same Latin origins as English. 

Now let’s focus on how difficult Portuguese is for an Indian!

If you know English, half the job is done, if not, you have a tough, but not an impossible, goal to achieve. If you don’t know English add another year to your learning quite literally! People who are not fluent in English often face hurdles beyond learning a new language. Rely on your motivation and perseverance to lead you ahead. 

Please be aware these prescribed methods will work best for an English speaker from India! 

Now, let’s assume as an English speaker you were to spend 10 hours each day learning Portuguese, it would then, theoretically, only take 48 days to learn the language. Which, accounting for a few days off here and there, equates to two to three months. But, that’s not realistic for 99% of learners. Plenty of learners start having in-depth conversations in Portuguese at this time but lack fluency and sentence formation as a result of a lack of grammar understanding. 

If you follow the right methods, you’ll get there fast. The difference here are the goals you set. Here are a few factors that affect your learning speed:

• The reason, why you want to learn Portuguese! Are you learning Portuguese just to converse during business or travel? Or you intend to speak Portuguese fluently. 
• How do you choose to learn it? Are you going to take classes? Use an app or online program? Or travel to a new country to learn a language through immersion? All of these have different timelines for moving from elementary, to conversational, to fluent.

Here are a few tips to learn Portuguese easily: 

• Know what works in your favour!

Portuguese is a relatively easy language to learn, especially if you already know other Romance or even Germanic languages, especially Spanish! The Portuguese language sounds very similar to the Spanish language. The grammatical structure of sentences, vocabulary, and syntax are all very much the same, and it is only accent and pronunciation that really make the difference between these two languages. Thus, there is a high level of intelligibility between these two languages, and someone who understands one language will be able to understand much of the other language.

Both Portuguese and English originate from the same language family: the Indo-European languages, and have a lot in common, even though the similarities aren’t that apparent. 

Both Portuguese and English share a number of cognates. 

Portuguese and English are SVO languages (SVO stands for Subject-Verb-Object).

If you are familiar with the different word classes in English, then you’ll feel comfortable learning Portuguese grammar. In general, both languages use similar terminology and conceptualize grammar and syntax the same way.

By default, both English and Portuguese form the plural by adding an -s at the end of nouns, the so-called s-plural.

English and Portuguese use a reversed word order to indicate possession.

Because some words in English come from the same root as some words in Portuguese (mostly Latin words), the word will be similar in both languages, with a minor difference in the suffix.

Portuguese has a lot of borrowed words from other European languages which, whilst spelt differently, are often pronounced similarly to their counterparts.

Keep these in mind. Coupled with your techniques, language learning will show results! 

• Get your 3As right, attitude, attentiveness and availability!
• Set yourself a daily goal that is achievable for your personal circumstances. A good starting point is between 30 minutes and two hours each day.
• Track your progress by taking tests regularly
• Duolingo, Memrise or Portuguese Pod 101 can be great learning resources.

English speakers themselves face a lot of hurdles when learning Portuguese with respect to the pronunciation and understanding used by the native Portuguese speakers. This is especially true for the European version, where speakers tend to swallow their vowels and syllables may be difficult to distinguish.

Portuguese also has some sounds that English speakers are not used to (for example, nasal vowels). Furthermore, some letters are pronounced differently depending on context (but when you compare “though,” “through,” and “tough,” you can see that even that can be learned), and the language contains some world-class tongue twisters. This as a matter of fact can be either, depending on you, as an individual, beneficial or unworthy. In either case, without English, Portuguese learning will certainly stump you on multiple fronts. You would need more than adequate motivation, perseverance and a bullish drive to learn Portuguese as compared to an English speaker who will have an edge over you while pursuing Portuguese.

And while every language has its own tricky parts and you should definitely not let that hold you back!

Portuguese is 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, and is an official language of the European Union, Mercosur, the Organization of American States, the Economic Community of West African States, the African Union, and the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, an international organization made up of all of the world’s officially Lusophone nations. 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. 

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