Is Portuguese Hard To Learn? (Find Out!)

Relatively speaking, Portuguese is one of the easier languages for English speakers to learn. It’s closely related, and has many comparable rules to English. However, learning any language is a difficult process, and learning Portuguese is really only “easy” compared to other languages. Still, Portuguese is among the easier to learn.

So, in short, the answer is yes and no.

Language learning takes time and patience, and you won’t get anywhere without some major commitment.

With that said, being an English speaker will certainly give you a considerable head start in your missing to learn Portuguese.

Let’s find out more.

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How long does it take to learn Portuguese?

When asking this question, there are a couple of important ways we need to look at it.

Firstly, let’s consider the period of intensive study.

When learning any language, initially, the best thing to do is go to classes.

You need to start from the ground up and get to grips with grammar, syntax, and basic vocabulary.

How long this can take will of course vary from person to person.

In general, though, Portuguese will require around 23-24 weeks of full-time study.

This translates to around 575-600 hours of actual teaching, meaning around six months of full time study.

Now, comparatively speaking, this is certainly not very high.

This is about as low an amount of time as you can get a grip on any language.

With this study under your belt, you should be confident in conversing on a day-to-day basis in Portuguese.

However, the fact is that this is far from the whole story.

Once you’ve finished this period of study, ideally, you would spend a good amount of time immersing yourself in the language.

Live in Portugal for a year or so, speaking the language every day, and immersing yourself in the culture, too.

Most tutors will agree that there really is no substitute for this.

It’s by far the best and most efficient way to learn any language.

After one-two years of this, you should be practically fluent.

So, in total, you are looking at least at 18 months of study and immersion to be fully competent, if not fluent, in the language.

This is the lowball figure, so it may take longer.

This is a long time to study or learn anything, for sure, but it’s a great deal less time than most languages would take to learn.

So, just how difficult is it to learn Portuguese?

How difficult is Portuguese to learn?

There are a couple of ways we can look at this, too.

It’s worth mentioning that learning any language is always challenging.

It’s never easy and will always take a great deal of time, patience and commitment.

With that said, relatively speaking, Portuguese is certainly among the easier languages to learn for English speakers.

Helpfully, the U.S. government has a body that ranks the relative difficulty of learning a given language.

This is a scale of I-V, with I being the easiest and V the hardest.

Portuguese sits comfortably in category I, making it among the easiest of languages to learn.

Now, within that category, of course, there is still great variation between the difficulty levels of each language.

Portuguese is probably a good deal harder than Norwegian, for example, while being much easier in many ways than Romanian, all of which are category I languages.

In short, learning Portuguese is relatively easy, but not easy in its own right.

Is Portuguese easy to learn for English speakers?

A big question about the ease of learning a given language is the person’s native language.

Languages are broadly categorized into families and subfamilies.

While English is a Germanic language and Portuguese a Romance language, they are both Indo-European languages.

This means that they are both broadly categorized in the same family, meaning they are relatively closely related.

Thus, grammar is very similar, there is a great deal of shared vocabulary, and cultural differences—which can present a surprising hurdle to language acquisition—are quite small.

So, all in all, Portuguese is very closely related to English and this makes having English as your native language a big advantage in attempting to learn the language.

Though the two might seem, on the face of it, very different, English and Portuguese are a lot more closely related than English and, say, Serbian.

Is Portuguese harder than Spanish?

On a basic level in terms simply of the language itself, Portuguese is not much harder to learn than Spanish.

Most would probably agree that its somewhat more complex grammatical rules and syntax make it a slightly more challenging language to learn, you can pick up both in roughly the same amount of time.

That said, on a technical, contextual level, Spanish is probably easier just because of the vastly higher number of Spanish speakers in the world.

There are 400 million Spanish speakers globally, meaning there is a wealth of learning resources available for the language.

However, there is still no paucity of information on Portuguese learning, and in the modern age of information, you’ll have no difficulty finding the help you need.

So, again, learning languages is never an easy process. You’ve got to take time and commit yourself to many months of study, at the very least.

If you want to get serious about your Portuguese skill, then it could take another year or two to become fully fluent.

This is an extremely rewarding learning process, though, and being an English speaker will certainly make Portuguese a lot easier to learn.

 
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