Hi
I am Gabriele from Germany.
One and a half year ago I met a man from Portugal who worked in the Netherlands … Corona crashed everything and he went back to Lisboa where he is until now. To manage the time of separation and my “saudade” I started to learn Portugues completely on my own around one year ago with a really bad App, CDs for listening in the car and later with books. I knew some things about grammar and vocabularys but never spoke to somebody (with my “namorado” i only speak english).
Long time ago i learnt latin and a bit french but french brings more confusion in my brain because I mix it with portuguese. Latin i thought i forgot all but with portuguese parts of my latin kmowledge comes back and that helps.
So after 10 months of separation from my boyfriend i went to Portugal in June 2021 first time of my life, not knowing what will expect me. I didn’t feel ready to speak portuguese but I could read and translate written textes. And sometimes I understood a sentence and my boyfriend and his friends were very surprised😊
The 4 weeks in Sintra, Lisboa and Costa da Caparica were wonderful and end of september 2021 I went a second time to Lisboa, but only for a week. Between summer and september 2021 I changed my learning strategy. I put away the grammar book and started to exercise listening and speaking with “practise portuguese” and other Youtube channels and in september 2021 my ability of understanding spoken language was much better than in june 2021 and I started to order food myself or to say little sentences.
My motivation to learn the language is so big and now when I started “Practise portuguese from the totally beginning” I notice how much I learnt without knowing…It’s so good to feel the the progress!
The goal is, that I want to talk to my namorado and his friends in portuguese, perhaps i will live in Lisboa parts of the year, perhaps I will work there, who knows😆
So this is why I am here.
