Does anyone know how hard portugese is as a language to learn the basics of?

My dad lives out in portugal and im off to see him in 4-5 weeks (4 weeks friday actually! )

Just wanted to see if its worth me trying to pick up the basics of portugese... i know the simple stuff like asking for drink (important! ) and well i know a couple of short phrases but cant think of them at the moment knew them last year though

I'm very good with languages, speak fluant icelandic and good german (although kinda cheating as its very similar to icelandic alot of the time) Also took french but didnt do so well with that because i was learning german at the same time, and as any other kid around GCSE age, messed about all lesson etc

phrase books are good! we had one when we went france! can sometimes pick up the basics from them too!

Try getting the daily mail, as every day they are giving away portugese cds

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/prmts/prmts.html?in_article_id=396980&in_page_id=1777

too late in the week to start collecting daily mail tokens

Am going to root about for ebooks but dont know if im wasting my time

99% of people there speak english but i'd love to try pop in more portugese

but if you collect the remaining tokens, you can send off the the complete course for only £5.99

Probably grab an e-book or something

Anyone know how easy it is to pick portugese up?

Just stick one of these in your ear

GhostWKD said:

speak fluant icelandic and good german

Click to expand...

How'd you become fluent in Icelandic?

You should be OK picking up basic Portugese - I had no trouble picking up basic Spanish, and I was doing French and Welsh at the time (although I've forgotten a lot of it ) Unless the e-book has voice clips, you might not get very far, due to phonetics.

phonetics not a problem really i can cope with them quite well, plus im guessing they'll put phonetic spellings or something - will have a root about some torrent sites and limewire etc tonight

Fluent in icelandic as its where my mums from and was brought up to always speak icelandic to my mum

So your half Icelandic, speak German, live in England, and your dad lives in Portugal. I think i have found the most multi cultural person in the world

i started learning (brazilian) portuguese a while back when i had a brazilian bitch, the BEST cd's imo are the pimsleur ones, really easy to get started, they break the lessons down into 30 min chunks, and i used to listen to them in my car on the way to work. she was really surprised at how much i picked up, although she did comment on my rio accent ...

its about $20 for the first 8 lessons which gives you good basics, the rest of the first set will cost you about $200 (depending on if you wait for their spam with cheap offers).

i would send you them as i dont need them any more, but brazilian portuguese is fairly different from normal portuguese so i wouldnt recommend it, but for learning the basics i really cant recommend them enough.

i also have a linkword languages cd, which is for the computer, you basically click words and it reads them back to you, breaks them down and gives you a key phrase to remember it with, easy to use, and it works well, if only it didnt look like it was made in VB6 ... also its a bit dull sitting at your computer hearing random words (not phrased i mean) for more than a few minutes.

Was going to suggest torrents too Alex, could get some CDs there.

LOL @ Morrit! Brazillian B*tch!

Liam

Get a phrase book and watch Portugese TV as well as trying to converse with the natives. It's the quickest way to pick up a language

In my experience, 'romance' languages such as French, Spanish, Italian and Portugese are more difficult for English speakers to learn than Germanic languages such as German, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. I was hopeless at French, but found German much easier. Seeing as English is a Germanic language it ought to be!