Preparing to Learn Brazilian Portuguese
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to try to use mnemonic techniques to learn Brazilian Portuguese. I want to see how far I can get in 30 days. I travel a lot and if this technique for learning languages works, I’m going to use it often.
I looked for a book on Portuguese vocabulary that had words organized by topic, but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t find any flash cards or other vocabulary resources either. The closest thing I could find to what I was looking for was a Portuguese-English visual dictionary:

Portuguese-English visual dictionary
The dictionary organizes vocabulary by topic, so, for example, all the types of beans are found on one page:

Beans
I’m thinking that the visual images will be helpful also.
I need a list of verbs that is systematically ordered by conjugation group, but I think I can find lists of Portuguese verbs online. I have a small book of Portuguese grammar, and there are plenty of grammar resources online, like this one.
For general pronunciation and comprehension, I may buy a Pimsleur set. I listened to the first 8 Pimsleur lessons before I went to Portugal in 2009, and I like their audio because the speakers on the CDs have a neutral Brazilian accent instead of a confusing mix of many strong regional accents, like most language CDs.
The Plan
- The setting for my images will be San Francisco.
- Portuguese has three types of verbs, so I will use three different parks.
- There are two types of nouns, masculine and feminine, so I’ll separate the city (or individual settings) into at least two sections.
- I’ll need a park or similar setting for adjectives.
- I’ll use rooms or small settings for memorizing verb conjugations.
I haven’t started yet, but I’ll post updates about my progress.
I wonder how this project is going. When you have mastered Pimsleur Portuguese you can try the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (Brazilian) Portuguese. It’s in the public domain (as all products of US Govt are) and can get both levels w/ 2-3 dozen hours of mp3 audio and the PDF manual, at: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Portuguese
The Portuguese project is temporarily on hold. My motivation for learning (Brazilian girl) is not in the picture anymore. 🙂
How were you planning on memorizing the verb conjugations in rooms?
I was thinking of putting the conjugations along some short journeys like this:
Journey #1: faço, fazes, faz, fazemos, fazeis, fazem
Journey #2: fiz, fizeste, fez, fizemos, fizestes, fizeram
etc.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_verb_conjugation#Basic_tenses_and_moods