I am at a C1/C2 level with my Spanish, and therefore after a few weeks of studying Portuguese and getting used to the sounds, I can understand infinitely more words and phrases than I can produce. In other words, I can produce little to nothing, but can understand 70-100% (depending on the dialogue). In such a scenario, when do I add LingQs? For example: let’s take a sentence as easy “I can speak a little Portuguese”. off the top of my head, I can’t think of how to say it, but could easily understand it. If I came across this sentence, should I add a LingQ for every word in that sentence?
Having gone from Spanish to Portuguese I have some experience. Don’t worry about what you can say now. Enjoy the language, listen and read a lot. There are always words in Portuguese that surprise you. Either you don’t know what they mean, or they are quite different from Spanish. I LingQed a little over 4,000 words and phrases over more than a year, off and on.Mostly I just listened and read. I used a lot of intermediate material to get the flow of the language. You can find some of this material in our library.You should start reading books and listening to podcasts of interest to you.
It took me longer than I expected to get used to the language, to where I could start speaking. With enough input, you start to be able to say things, your vocabulary just activates. You may start speaking whenever you want,of course, but based on my experience, you will need 3 months or so of solid input to get to where your speaking will really take off.
Interesting, I’ve never tried purely input based learning. I’m excited to try it the other way around this time! Sounds great in theory, especially since it’ll mean that my listening will definitely never be behind my speaking, as was/has been the case with my first two languages.
When you say that you got a little over 4,000 words, does that number count every conjugation of the same verb as a word of it’s own? or are they 4,000 separate words / phrases?
I am talking about the number of LingQs I created here, the number of words and phrases that I saved to my database here at LingQ. The stats tell me that my known word total is over 20,000, and that I read 140,000 or so words. This only deals with my activity at LingQ since I read a lot in Portuguese away from LingQ and listened to hours and hours of podcasts for which I didn’t keep statistics.
When you create LingQs these are highlighted in yellow and that helps you notice them when reading at LingQ. Noticing is a big part of language learning. If you deal with comprehension first, or at least make it the first goal, then you feel much more comfortable in conversations when you start speaking since you can understand what people are saying, Good luck.
I agree with Steve. At first, it’s about understanding. Every word you can understand easily, consider it known. Lingq words which are different enough from Spanish to be challenging. Keep reading, listening. Ability to speak properly will come over time.
In the meantime, know that you can make yourself be understood by speaking “portuñol”
