Learning Portuguese is hard.

@Inubia Or Irish which is way harder than Portuguese. nollaig shona daoibh go léir.

12/20/22 I agree with Inubia, except for the "they don't really want you to learn" part. For some bizarre reason, Brazilians believe that Portuguese is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, but that's different, as well as being preposterous.

I've run into a lot of expats who have complained that Portuguese is "too hard to learn". They were usually people who expected to pick it up through osmosis, without putting in any effort. Of course they failed. Then, there were people who had convinced themselves that they just couldn't learn languages. They really can't learn languages, just as people who convince themselves that they can't learn to drive really can't learn to drive. In both cases, though (absent physical or mental deficiencies) the problem is totally between their ears, and resolves itself when they decide that they NEED to do this thing.

Forget about writing for the moment -- that's not language, it's just an imperfect graphical representation of language. At its simplest, a language is a set of oral symbols arranged in conventional patterns to communicate thoughts, conditions, and observations. The fastest way to learn the symbols and patterns is to be taught them systematically, because in daily life no one is exposed to more than a random sample of them. The only way to turn them into a habit is to practice them. Neither of those things is hard, but they do take time, and a reasonable tolerance for short-term frustration.

I don’t see that Portuguese is any more difficult than Spanish. You just have to commit time and energy. Make realistic goals, and meet them. No different than anything else you want in life.

@KenAquarius Spanish is way easy or it was for me, I wish I had learned Spanish first.

@ltoby955 I took Spanish in school, and for me there is not a lot of difference. The verb conjugation is essentially the same.

The idea of plurality and masculine/feminine is more or less the same. I do find it amusing that "Mango" is masculine in Spanish and "manga" is feminine in Portuguese. I have to wonder who decided?

I speak on the level of maybe a 10 year old, but I seem to get along ok. I once read that if you have 300 or so words you can communicate in any language.

I do find it amusing that "Mango" is masculine in Spanish and "manga" is feminine in Portuguese. I have to wonder who decided?
-@KenAquarius

Each language classified "new" words -- words that entered it after the fall of the Roman Empire -- more or less at random.  Portuguese apparently took the word directly from the Malay "mangga", and analyzed it as feminine because of the "a" ending.  For why Spanish masculinized it, I got nothing. 😁

For other language nerds, I explained what happened to "old" words that came directly from Vulgar Latin here:

https://www.quora.com/In-Indo-European- … Al-Brown-8

Hard is Mandarin and Russian ( Cyrillic ), and Arabic. 

Put this way.  You figure out Portuguese, you are half way to learn French, Italian, Spanish.

Stop bitching. 

@sprealestatebroker