How to improve my Portuguese language skills?

Portuguese 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. It 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 usually listed as the sixth-most spoken language and the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers. 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.

The key to learning Portuguese is to expose yourself to and practice the language as much as possible. Sure, it’s going to be more challenging if you’re not living in a Lusophone culture, but there are still numerous ways for you to incorporate Portuguese into your daily routine.

1. Read in Portuguese every day. It doesn’t matter what – just get reading! The most important thing is to read on a topic that interests you. If you’re into cooking – read a Portuguese food blog. If you like reading women’s magazines, why not read the online Portuguese versions of magazines like Marie Claire and Vogue? Current events your thing? Check out Portuguese newspapers. For literature lovers, read a book you’ve enjoyed in English, in Portuguese. Remember to write down any vocabulary you don’t know so you can look them up later.
2. Labels items in your home or office.  Write down the Portuguese name of objects in your home or office on a post-it note, then stick the note to the object. Every time you look at the item, say the Portuguese name aloud. 
3. Listen to Portuguese radio. Portuguese sounds vastly different from how it is written, so an essential part of your home study must include listening to Portuguese. Thank heavens for the internet, where you can listen to Portuguese radio stations, where you can listen to a variety of programs in Portuguese from theatre and music.
4. Talk to yourself in Portuguese. Sometimes we all mutter to ourselves. We all say things like: “Where are my keys?” or “What should I make for dinner tonight?” or even “Let’s go.” Think about what phrases you say the most – try to come up with at least 5 of them– and translate them into Portuguese. And from now on say them in Portuguese. When you can, practice saying them in the mirror so you can observe the way your mouth moves as you speak.
5. Keep a Portuguese diary. You can write whatever you like in this diary: Write about the weather. Make a grocery list. What you plan to do that day. What you already did that day. A description of a colleague at work. Until you’re comfortable with one topic, we recommend focusing on practicing the same until you finally start understanding it..

6. Get a Portuguese chat partner. There’s no escape – to truly learn Portuguese you must speak it. Thanks to communication programs like Hello Talk, Italki, Skype and Google Talk, you can do language exchange with a native Portuguese speaker. You’d speak in Portuguese for 30 minutes, then your partner would speak in English 30 minutes, with each of you correcting the other. Check out websites such as Conversation Exchange and How Do You Do for more details.
7. Create colour-coded flashcards for vocabulary and nouns. That way, when you review your vocabulary list, you’ll begin to associate the word and its article with a particular color.
8. Learn your grammar well. The Portuguese language is traditionally considered to have ten parts of speech. It has a number of grammatical features that distinguish it from most other Romance languages, such as a synthetic pluperfect, a future subjunctive tense, the inflected infinitive, and a present perfect with an iterative sense. A rare feature of Portuguese is mesoclisis, the infixing of clitic pronouns in some verbal forms. The basic form of a Portuguese sentence is subject–verb–object.  Verbs are highly inflected: there are three tenses (past, present, future), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative), three aspects (perfective, imperfective, and progressive), three voices (active, passive, reflexive), and an inflected infinitive. Most perfect and imperfect tenses are synthetic, totalling 11 conjugational paradigms, while all progressive tenses and passive constructions are periphrastic. There is also an impersonal passive construction, with the agent replaced by an indefinite pronoun. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are moderately inflected in Portuguese grammar. And there are two genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers (singular and plural). It is a null subject language, with a tendency to drop object pronouns as well, in colloquial varieties. The case system of the ancestor language, Latin, has been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined with three main types of forms: subject, object of verb, and object of a preposition. Adjectives usually follow their respective nouns.

9. Create a weekly “Portuguese movie night.” Watching movies or Portuguese programs can be a great way to help absorb spoken Portuguese – if it’s done right. If you’re new to Portuguese, it’s probably best to watch a Portuguese TV series or even cartoons rather than a full-length feature film. (The voices on children’s programs usually speak clearly and don’t use much slang, making it much easier to understand.) If you’re ready for a feature film, avoid watching it with English subtitles, as you’ll be doing more reading than listening to Portuguese. Instead, try to get a Portuguese film that offers Portuguese subtitles for the hearing impaired. The Portuguese words will help you understand oral Portuguese better as well as improve your reading.
10. Listen to Portuguese music. Nothing can pull you deep inside a language better than a Portuguese song. Find your favourite Portuguese tune on YouTube and learn the song by heart. Pay close attention to pronunciation.
11. Play pretend. Lookup a Portuguese restaurant on the internet and study the menu. Pretend you’re in Portugal and are going to order something. Practice saying what you would order and the phrases you’d need to order it.
12. Repeat a word or phrase for 24 hours: Repetition is the best way to remember words and phrases, so choose a word or a phrase that you will repeat for the whole day. Say this word or phrase as often as possible, and set reminders for yourself. You can put a note next to your clock to remind you to say the phrase whenever you glance at it.  You can also put the phrase on your phone or screen saver, so each time you look at your cell or computer, you’ll remember to say the phrase.
13. Change your technology settings.  Why not make the language on your cell phone, tablet, or computer, Portuguese?  It’s an easy way to expose yourself to the language – plus it’ll remind you to practice!

A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as “Lusophone” (lusófono). 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. It 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.

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