Olá from Cortegaça!

[christiaan]

Olá everyone! I moved to Portugal from London during the pandemic. As an English-only speaker I’ve struggled to learn the lingo and still can’t hold a basic conversation three years later.

• I work remotely running a UK business so communicate in English all day.
• I successfully used the Fluent Forever method in conjunction with Anki flash cards to learn my first 600 words and then life got in the way (professional qualification, home refurbishment, etc)
• I bounced around various apps, including the Brazilian module in Fluent Forever, and then waited years for Fluent Forever to add support for any language, which never arrives.
• It took me a long time just to decipher the new sounds, but I’m glad to say I’ve overcome that particular hurdle.
• My girlfriend has no patience and communicates with me in English. Her and her mum speak to me in Portuguese at the same speed they spoke to me on day one, which is normal speed for them, expecting me to learn the language in a week. Both of them are polyglots of European languages from a young age and don’t seem to have an understanding of what it’s like not to even be able to decipher new sounds.

For whatever reason I dismissed Practice Portuguese when I first discovered it a couple of years back. But now with my professional qualification and home refurb out of the way I have more time to explore, and now realise that my earlier dismissal was probably a mistake.

I’ve started right from the beginning and I’m quickly going over what I already know, but very much enjoying all the additional cultural explanations too. So I’m looking forward to taking my Portuguese to the next level with PP

[christiaan]

Question:

Where do I find this “new user tutorial” mentioned on the badges page?

https://forum.practiceportuguese.com/badges

@discobot start new user

[Tomas]

Bem vindo Christiaan!

• It took me a long time just to decipher the new sounds, but I’m glad to say I’ve overcome that particular hurdle.

I think close to 50% of the comments on the forum boils down to “it’s impossible to hear what natives are saying”. So with that hurdle overcome, you’re miles ahead of many of us.

Hope you have an enjoyable time on PP, and that you’ll be speaking fluently with your girlfriend and her mum before too long!

[Joseph]

Welcome, @christiaan! I hope we can help you make the progress you seek

To get the ‘Certified’ badge, just go back to the private message you must have received from @forum_bot and follow its instructions, starting by bookmarking the message. After completing the whole flow, you should get the badge at the end

[christiaan]

Hi Joseph, thank you. I never received that message from @forum_bot

The only message I’ve received was from @PracticePortuguese

[christiaan]

Not sure if this is significant or not.

[Joseph]

Ah, then maybe try to message it to see if that triggers the flow. Let me know (either here or via DM) in case it doesn’t work.

[christiaan]

Thanks Joseph, this did the trick:
@forum_bot start tutorial

[christiaan]

@Joseph there seems to be a problem with the bot. I’m using Safari on iPad OS 16.5

[christiaan]

I had to switch to my iPhone to get the link task to work for some reason.

Curiously I had to switch back to the iPad to get the quote task to work. The quote button doesn’t pop up on the iPhone.

But I managed to complete all tasks in the end, thanks.

[christiaan]

@Joseph one bit of feedback as a new user. The app helpfully provides a link to the “Forum” in the main menu, but the website doesn’t. It took me a while to figure out that Discuss > The Café is a link to a category on the forum.

[Joseph]

Thanks for the feedback! I don’t think this bot issue has been recurring, but it’s certainly something we shall look into.
And yes, the website currently doesn’t link to just the forum homepage, but directly to all the available categories, which helps give them more visibility