How to improve your Portuguese

If by taking it to the next level you mean you wanna attain a near native status in your daily life, the best way is to mingle with native speakers day in day out in practically everything in your life, try to form real life friendships with brazilians, hang out with them etc and use only Portuguese. If your partner is Brazilian, it will greatly help as well.

If you also wanna master it on paper, reading, writing etc., best to take celpe-bras exams as motivation.

Wish I could help, pass it on to me if you find a way.
I have been here a long time and barely get by with 1 class a week.
Was hard due to not many English-speaking people here and those that do were not teachers.
I am sure my friend will see your post and have advice.

Hi,

I'm in a similar situation. I know bunch of words and phrases, struggle with the dozens of conjugations (Portuguese grammar was certainly God's harshest punishment for the Tower of Babel),  but I can get by.

I think living here is your biggest learning asset, you just have to figure out how to exloit it. As already mentioned, most important is to talk talk talk português.  Brazilians who speak another language seem to make more of an effort to decipher my feeble attempts at speaking português. They know what it's like to struggle with trying  to remember and listen and formulate sentences.

There are also a lot of great YouTube channels for learning Portuguese.  You just have to find the ones with  teacher who fits your learning style. I am continually finding ones that resonate for me.

To help solidify my grammar, I have been using Google Translate to write out short stories and descriptions of things that might come up in a conversation.  For example,  my trip to Foz Iguazú, how I met my girlfriend,  what I like about Brazil, etc. Then I read them to my Brazilian girlfriend for accuracy. (Google Translate doesn't always give common phrases or idioms). These writing exercises help a lot.

Good luck, and don't give up!

Pete

stevewaugh786 wrote:

If by taking it to the next level you mean you wanna attain a near native status in your daily life, the best way is to mingle with native speakers day in day out in practically everything in your life, try to form real life friendships with brazilians, hang out with them etc and use only Portuguese. If your partner is Brazilian, it will greatly help as well.

If you also wanna master it on paper, reading, writing etc., best to take celpe-bras exams as motivation.

Hi Steve, nearly all my friends are Brazilian and I speak in Portuguese with them, but my problem is that I can get by, so don't improve. I think doing the cepe-bras exams is what I was looking for. Have you done that?

I m using Duolingo. It’s great. Short lessons with reading writing and speaking.  But. I also need a higher level and the only way to do it is to start yacking away with Brazileiros. I have not met a Brazilian that didn’t try to communicate. Always polite and helpful.  Nobody ever joked about my Portuguese, which is terrible and laughable.
My espousa I call google translate is a crutch and doesn’t help me get better. It’s too easy to let her do all the talking.

pup8617

I've held off tossing my two cents worth in because we've been without Internet all day.  But there's no sign of it returning,  so I'll try pounding this out on my phone.  If I fail, at least you'll never know. 

The pandemic has totally screwed higher education up in Brazil, but many public universities (federal and state, in states that have their own) offer Portuguese classes for foreigners.   You definitely should contact the universities,  and sign up for one if you can.   Talking to Brazilians is essential, of course, but that can only take you so far.  There are important things that only formal education can help you with.

Golsucks has recommended Duolingo.   I've gone over Duolingo in detail, and second that.   It won't teach you everything you need to know, it can drive you crazy by not explaining things, and it has some strange turns of phrase, but it will speed up your learning.  It's also given by native speakers using neutral accents, which is good experience for a beginner.

There are several good sites you can use for quick checks on verb conjugations.   I still need to check a verb on occasion, and this is one that I find helpful:

https://www.conjugacao.com.br

For a good online dictionary, I don't think you can't beat Michaëlis Moderno:

https://michaelis.uol.com.br

In addition to English-Portuguese, the same site has a Brazilian School dictionary that gives word derivations, and bilingual dictionaries (with Portuguese,  of course) for French, Italian, German, and Spanish, if you need to cross-check a word against any of those languages.

Reading newspapers is a very helpful habit that is overlooked far too often.  Quality newspapers write in excellent, contemporary Portuguese, and give you the written language in a dependable form.  Two of the best, Folha de S. Paulo and Estado de S. Paulo (aka "Estadão", Brazil's newspaper of record) offer inexpensive digital subscriptions. They both also have regular podcasts, very good for listening comprehension.  Folha's Café da Manhã podcast, offered M-F, highlights an important story every day, and ends with a news roundup.  We listen every day at breakfast.

Listening to Brazilian music - sung, of course - can be a surprisingly big help.  I recommend samba, and two of the greatest artists of the 20th Century,  Beth Carvalho and Clara Nunes.  They both made a point of recording the work of some of the best composers on the Rio scene.  The Portuguese is good, and they really push the lyrics.  I can't think of a better way to get the rhythm of the language.  It's a good intro to the Carioca accent,  too, which you probably don't want to adopt, but need to understand.

Stevewaugh recommended getting familiar with CelpeBras.  I endorse that, too, with some reservations.  CelpeBras is the test given worldwide to prove competence in the Portuguese language.   My estimate is that it's geared toward the level of a native speaker with a good secondary school education; only about half the people who take it (it's offered twice a year) pass.  So, CelpeBras can be very useful practice for identifying areas where you need work; don't be discouraged, though, if it seems impossible,  especially at first.  You can get there in time.

If you want to look it over, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul keeps an archive of prior years' tests, that can be downloaded for practice here:

http://www.ufrgs.br/acervocelpebras/acervo

Wow, all on your phone! My hero

Texanbrazil wrote:

Wow, all on your phone! My hero

Almost lost it all TWICE! 

I can see how. My multi broken fingers would type a language no one could read

Thanks abThree, your answer is extremely helpful. Yes, I did find the celpe bras papers expected a very high standard and was disheartened.

Think I'll start listening to the daily podcast - one thing I often tell my Brazilian friends is that i sometimes quite like it when I get stuck listening to the "voz do brazil" in the car in the evening, because at least I get a dose of fairly high level portuguese listening practice, so I think if I can choose to listen to something more interesting on a daily basis that will help.

pup8617 wrote:

Thanks abThree, your answer is extremely helpful. Yes, I did find the celpe bras papers expected a very high standard and was disheartened.

Glad to help!

This is why someone who really wants to master Portuguese needs to do more than just talk to people.  CelpeBras, like other Brazilian exams (e.g., the college entrance exam, the Vestibular) relies heavily on the "redação", a brief, extemporaneous essay on a topic that the student only sees on the day of the test.  Brazilian students are constantly drilled in this kind of exercise, and learn the conventions of written Portuguese in the process.  It's not a difficult skill to acquire, and once you have it, it improves reading, writing, and speaking, but it needs to be studied, it can't easily be acquired by osmosis.