i also highly recommend porta dos fundos--i think the biggest youtube channel in brazil, hilarious skit comedy (even when political or annoyingly heavy handed), short form, huge number of videos come with subtitles in portuguese and english--almost custom made for lingqers! obviously its advanced and very slangy but the short form and genuine enjoyment factor help a lot. i pair it with more formal stuff for reading for a pretty nice balance. i also recommend for complete beginners lingua da gente--a free podcast from some years ago with 200 or so short dialogues with explanations of each line. when i finished their intermediate ones i moved on to porta.

i'd probably just skip all of the grammar lessons and just do as much reading as your can. you'll learn the grammar intuitively. do you happen to know any other languages?

For Brazilian Portuguese: How to say the alphabet and then the pronunciation for all the sounds, especially in the Carioca and the São Paulo accent. Then just get into short video youtube content right away. You'll pick up the conjugations really quickly. Don't waste your time studying those first in some rote way. There are a million conjugations and they dont use a ton of them so you'll be learning them pointlessly. The hardest part will be understanding the pronunciation initially, especially the various accent.

It's tough finding content you can enjoy and battle through understanding initially. If your understanding of vocab and sounds is low right now then stay away from Funk music because it will not make sense at all for both. Focus on CLEARLY spoken videos with good subtitles and visuals and ENTERTAINING. Here's a couple suggestions.

I love the channel ter.a.pia on YouTube. Short videos, sad stories but all have happy endings and usually have subtitles.

HILARIOUS videos are from this kid show guy but many of his older videos are geared towards young adults and they are animated so the visuals are great. Here is a link to a playlist of those

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQamLLzUTEJwrh8fvuQfgmRMKGj58tM2a

These channels use super daily life vocabulary.

Last word of advice: Don't slack. Read the forums here, lots of great advice but to boil it down to the simplest way to succeed. Read/listen to 1.5 million words minimum if you want to be "good" before your trip. That's about 3,800 words a day of LingQ studying until December 2023. Very very easy to accomplish if you start now.

Also please watch this video, I find it great and agree with everything she says. I mean, I think tackling the most difficult things first isn't the best idea, but who am I to say what is best for you? But I do think you should try to find a way to make learning the language interesting and motivating.

Hi Buxey! People have already given you some good advice. Ktjoseph said something that I find really important. You know, I teach Portuguese and I gotta say that pronunciation is specially hard for native speakers of English, it's sooo different. You know, some 20 years ago I decided to learn Russian, but internet was still a toddler and all I had was a book I found at the local library and I decided by myself what the letters should sound. Got most of them right, but had to spent a long time fixing my pronunciation once I got some real good books with audio. Same as English, even if there has always been plenty of things in English all around, I couldn't really tell I was pronouncing the sounds wrong till I had English phonetics at college. So, my advice is: work hard on your pronunciation a lot before anything else.

I mean, you're coming to Brazil, maybe you just wanna be understood, so you can ignore my advice. But if you wanna er... mingle with the Brazilians, and be treated a lot better and have everyone smile at you, sounding closer to a native will help you big time. Anyway, don't worry. Most people here will treat you well, no matter if you sound plain gringo.

as a english speaking portuguese learner the alphabet and pronounciation is the first thing you should start with to many people go straight to vocabulary and learning conjugations and have a hard time pronouncing correctly or understanding words that they hear .the biggest difficulty of portuguese and the latin languages are the verbs but they just need to be practiced often

- Portuguese nouns have gender (masculine, feminine). Masculine nouns generally end in -o and feminine nouns generally end in -a but there are a lot of irregular nouns that don't follow the rules.

- Standard Portuguese and (spoken) Brazilian Portuguese are different in terms of grammar and syntax (word order).

- Portuguese verbs are conjugated for person (I, you, etc.), tense (present, past, future) and mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative). The subjunctive mood is something that non-native speakers often get wrong.

- Non-native speakers often mispronounce or can't tell the different between ó-ô, é-ê and á-â. To me this is the biggest giveaway that somebody isn't a native speaker.

Hi Buxey! How are you?

I'm from Brazil and I think I can give you some tips to help you. First, listen to Brazilian Portuguese a lot. Here are some YouTube channels that can help you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjq5eJn530Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD9JrQbJvrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm0nHQb2ZCY

On this site, you will find song lyrics. Listen to music in Portuguese and study the lyrics: https://www.letras.mus.br/

Learn the most used phrases: https://www.amazon.com.br/gp/product/B085PRYDV6/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2?asin=B085PRYDV6&revisionId=&format=2&depth=1

Guide to learning grammar: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/portuguese/brazilian-portuguese-grammar/