I live in Portugal and am studying European Portuguese here at a university. Having just completed B1 I still find it difficult to understand native speakers especially when they talk fast and join up words. Which exercises would you suggest to focus on from the website to improve listening skills?
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I sympathize completely! I too live in Portugal, and I’m completing my B1 course. It is still a struggle to understand spoken Portuguese. Between regional dialects, use of slang and speaking styles, phew - it is exhausting. When I worked in Sweden years ago, my Swedish colleague spoke perfect fluent English, but came to me one day and said (in hushed tones) that he couldn’t understand a thing that my American co-worker said. My American co-worker came from the deep south, and I had to admit that sometimes I had trouble understanding him. So I don’t beat myself up too much when I can’t understand street talk in Portugal. I find the shorties on PP to be a good listening exercise because you can slow them down and then gradually increase the speed as you listen to it over several times. I also find that certain Portuguese newscasts articulate pretty clearly, and that helps. I would love to find TV shows that are spoken in Portuguese but have English subtitles. I haven’t found any of that on Portuguese TV so far, unfortunately. Of course, at my level, I can’t expect to understand everything said to me, so I do ask someone speaking to me to slow down or repeat.
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Olá, @Tommy-D! This is, understandably, a common challenge for Portuguese learners. I think it’s important to maximize your exposure to the spoken language, and I would say that our shorties and podcasts are the best way to do that over any single exercise. I have personally shared some tips before in this other thread: Understanding spoken Portuguese irl
Here’s also an overview of other related threads: How to work on conversational engagement at A1 level? - #3 by Joseph
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I’ve found two things immensely helpful:
- careful practice of MY pronunciation. Oddly, the better and quicker I can speak the FlashCard Smart Review phrases, the better and faster I can hear PT.
- YouTube PT. Listen to everything PT, be it from Portugal or anywhere else. It’s brutally hard but you can repeatedly listen to the same video without driving actual people crazy asking them to repeat. Turn on subtitles as a crutch but learn to hear without them. The BR accents are different, but that very difference will train your ear to the full range of PT to the point that PT/PT sounds pleasantly understandable.
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Thanks all. The feedback is very useful.
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I had a look on Netflix for material to help me practise listening. There isn’t much there, but there is a (mainly) excellent thriller series called Glória, set in the Cold War. It’s very effective at evoking the atmosphere of the Salazar years.
Being on Netflix, you can switch between English and Portuguese subtitles, and rewind as often as you want to check your understanding.
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Check out Pôr do Sol on RTP Player: it is a rare series with both English and Portuguese subtitles. It is also hilarious if not politically correct - it’s a satire on over the top soap operas. There are also quite a few RTP programs with PT only subtitles, though you kind of have to sift through manually to find them (no ‘subtitles’ filter that I could find).
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