Transcript of AE 1287 - How I Got Fluent in a Language without Leaving Australia

G'day you mob, how's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. So today I've got something a little different. I have tried to get back into creating videos on YouTube! And today is one such video. So I thought I would sit down and sort of talk a little bit about my journey learning Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, to fluency, and all the resources that I used. Um, how I worked on fluency, improve my reading, all of that sort of stuff.

So it's a rather long video on YouTube that you can check out. I will include the link in the description so that you can watch this video if you want. There are loads of sight gags, so to try and mix things up and make it more interesting to watch, I've kind of inserted little clips from films. They'll make more sense if you watch the video. Listening, you may sort of get an idea of what's going on. But yeah, they're sight gags, right? They're sort of jokes that you kind of have to see. So you've been warned with regards to those!

But you should be able to enjoy this episode nonetheless, and I would love for it to be a, an open discussion. If you guys have tips and tricks for how you've learned foreign languages, hopefully Australian English to fluency, be sure to leave them in the comments on the video, or send me a message and we can have a chat about it as well.

But yeah, let's get into today's video. Or podcast episode rather. Ah ah ah.

Guys, how's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. I am your host Pete. Today I thought I would discuss how I learnt Portuguese [speaks Portuguese] and why I still suck. [speaks Portuguese] in Portuguese. Why I still suck at Portuguese.

Okay, so the journey. Probably about a decade or so ago, I was learning French like crazy. I'd studied French, Chinese, I'd done Japanese and Indonesian as well at, um, primary school and high school. French was my strongest, and it had been like a decade since I had really learned French. Well, anyway, long story short, I started training MMA in Brazilian jiu jitsu, was meeting loads of foreigners in Melbourne and was quite envious of the fact that they spoke so many languages and quite often very well.

And always felt a bit insecure. It was just like God, I live in such a multicultural city but I only speak English. I don't speak French anymore, I can't communicate well and I really wish I could. So I spent all this time learning French, probably about 2 or 3 years, going at it full on. Got to a really good level and obviously doing jiu jitsu, Brazilian jiu jitsu. I was meeting lots of Brazilians, so I started learning Portuguese as well.

And that's where this story comes, because Portuguese is now way better than my French. Because partly because I don't really use French anymore. So it's kind of taken a nosedive. But yeah. So today's story is about Portuguese. What I did, what I would do if I went back, you know, what advice I would have for myself. And hopefully you guys can take from this. Take what's useful, discard what isn't, and make the rest uniquely your own. Is that the Bruce Lee quote? Anyway.

Okay, so when I first started learning Portuguese, I started with Duolingo at the time. [Ooh, brother. Ooh! What's that?] This was probably 2015? Maybe? Maybe about that? So at the time Duolingo was pretty good in terms of its use. It was a good kind of introductory avenue to the language, to the basics of the language, to learn the 2000 most common words.

The main problem with it now is that it's so commercialised that, you know, it has algorithm built into it, and the whole purpose of Duolingo is to make money now. At the time, it was free and you could do a lot of stuff. I think they made their money at the time from translating. You know, people would upload documents and students on there could translate them between two different languages. And I think that was the business model at the time. Now they're selling, you know, a subscription to Duolingo Plus or whatever it is. And so their motivations have shifted from just being the best language learning platform for beginners, to now needing people to stay on there for as much as possible, to either buy a subscription or watch as many ads as possible.

And so when I went back to try and use Duolingo a while back, checking out Chinese or something, it It was so slow, like it took so long to learn anything, and it seemed like you were just going over the same five words from a single lesson. And so I feel like it has totally changed and is now all about keeping you on there for as long as possible, watching ads or buying a subscription, and not necessarily about introducing you to the basics of a language as quickly and as effectively as possible.

So at the time, I used Duolingo. I think I smashed through the tree in a matter of weeks. I think it may have been like a month or so. I did the entire Brazilian Portuguese tree. And I just kept reviewing things, right. I was just trying to get a basic idea of how the grammar worked, the vocab.

And Duolingo, at the time, I felt was really good for pronunciation. Because you've got lots of little short phrases and words, and you could hear them being said often by native speakers, and you would have time to repeat out loud. So I was very speaking focussed from the beginning, and I felt like that helped develop my Portuguese.

But yes, now would I suggest it? No. I would suggest finding other materials. Duolingo is probably a massive waste of your time. If your goal is to rapidly expose yourself to the basics of a language, both vocabulary and and grammar. I guess as well as, um, pronunciation. So there's that.

Number two. So what did I do after that? After I had smashed out Duolingo and gotten the basic idea for it. I've sort of jumbled these up, but I'll go through them. I started looking at basic Portuguese grammar books. I can't remember the exact brand. I'll chuck it up on screen.

One of those things that I noticed quickly, using this grammar book, was that there were quite stark differences between the languages and the grammar that was used. The weird thing that I encountered is that, at least from my experience, it seems like Portuguese Portuguese, they follow the rules a lot more stringently, and use a lot of the more formal pronouns and conjugations.

Whereas Brazilian Portuguese seems to just constantly be deleting these rules. Or not, not actually applying these grammatical rules. [Fuck the rules! Don't worry about it.] So getting my head around that was really confusing. Because there seemed to be like no materials for learning Portuguese grammar online compared to when I was learning, say, French. Or when I looked at Spanish and Italian, those three seem to have so many resources.

Whereas Portuguese, it was just a vacuum of useful material. To try and master the grammar, you would have to get online and search specific grammar points and try and emphasise the fact that it was Brazilian Portuguese, and not Portuguese Portuguese.

And like, one of these examples, I remember with my wife, we got together before I was very fluent in Portuguese, and she's from Brazil. And I remember using the word 'rapariga', which means 'girl' in Portuguese Portuguese, in front of her. I can't remember if I was using it to refer to her or not.

And she just looked at me, horrified. And I was just like, What? I was just trying to say, like, you know, Whatever, 'girl'. And she said, in Brazilian Portuguese, 'rapariga' means 'whore'. [Whoops!] You know, 'slut'. You can't use it the same way. And I just remember being like, Why? Why?

So there were all these stark differences between the two languages, which made it kind of a nightmare at the time to try and and and learn from traditional grammar resources. So what would I do now? I would probably rely heavily on ChatGPT, whilst also looking at resources online that focus solely on Brazilian Portuguese. There must be so many better ones out there now.

Now, paired with this, the grammar books, pretty quickly I found some podcasts that were really helpful. And the first one I used was Brazilian PodClass and this was useful for me coming out of Duolingo and learning the basics of the language. Because it was bilingual.

So it would have Portuguese first, and then they would translate literally every single line into English. This podcast aims at teaching Brazilian Portuguese. [Portuguese voice over].

As I said, this was really helpful and the good thing was these episodes were structured around themes. So they would have like a dialogue at the start that they would then translate. They would go through the vocab in the dialogue, which might be related to, say, the airport. And they might talk a bit about pronunciation and grammar as well.

And so I think I went through maybe 3 or 400 of these episodes in a handful of months, and it was just so good for, again, taking that next step and getting used to Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary and, you know, learning the difference between how plurals are formed depending on the word endings and all those sorts of things, you know. They have different pronunciations for like alveolar, aviary changes from singular to plural.

So this was a brilliant podcast. The thing I found difficult was that pretty quickly, after a handful of months, although I still felt like I had a lot of grammar and everything to learn, I felt like it was holding me back because there was just so much English in this podcast.

[You've been holding me back this whole time!] It had gotten to the point where that podcast would have been so much more useful if it had that initial stage of, say, being in a bilingual setting and then quickly transitioned into just being Brazilian Portuguese, because then you would just be doubling your efforts. You would have 100% immersion in the language every time you listen to an episode, instead of 50% in English, 50% in Portuguese, which kept sort of jarring you whilst listening.

So that led me to try and find another podcast at the time. And again, I haven't looked recently. There's probably so many more, so apologies for that. If you've got some suggestions, let me know below.

But I found one called Café du Brazil. I think it was Cafe du Brazil, right? Brazilian cafe or cafe from Brazil. Now this was brilliant! Because it was like a radio show that they turned into a podcast episode. And they had two hosts on there that would chat. It was 100% in Portuguese [Portuguese language] Cafe Brasil, also Luciano Perez [Portuguese language].

They would give you a transcript. And they even had access to Brazilian music. So they would have this really cool structure of having someone ask them a question, like a call up show on a radio, you know, people from Russia or people from America or people from Vietnam. You know, people from all over the world learning Portuguese were asking them questions.

But also there would be Brazilians ringing them up and asking them stuff about Brazil, like, Why do we do this? Why is this a thing? Why do we say this? And then they would go into usually I think, a song. And they would play a section of it and talk about the vocab from that song, which was just really cool. This was brilliant. It was hard going at first in terms of adjusting from Brazilian podcasts and a bilingual podcast to one that is effectively two native speakers talking. [This is not fun for me.].

I didn't even know if they spoke English. They may have just been Brazilian speakers and so they weren't dumbing things down. They weren't speaking slowly, they were just chatting away. And it was hard going at first, but the transcripts were the lifesaver for me. And I got so much out of studying, one episode at a time, printing out the transcript, taking notes, and just repeating again and again and again, really trying to squeeze as much juice out of that lemon. [Squeeze the lemon.] That was every single episode.

And I feel- we can probably talk about this a bit later, but I feel a lot of people skip that stage or move on from that stage too quickly. That stage of intentional study, using a resource and just being as repetitive as possible, to the point that you squeeze as much lemon out of that, as much lemon, as much juice out of that lemon, as much lemon out of that juice as you can. [I have to squeeze the lemon. Oh, you heard me.] So that you, you're just doing insane reps. You're getting exposed to loads and loads of content, and you're probably acquiring all of these things you're not even conscious of acquiring, whilst also studying things that you are. You're finding difficult aspects of grammar, new vocab, expressions, all that sort of stuff.

So that was what I did with podcasts. What would I do differently today, or would I do the same thing? I think I would probably do a similar sort of thing. I think I would probably have spent less time with podcasts, with Brazilian podcasts as a podcast, and tried to move on to 100% Portuguese as soon as as possible, and really dive into those materials to try and just get used to hearing the language 100% of the time, and just immersing yourself and using that, that process of repetition. Lots of immersion, lots of content, lots of exposure leading to acquisition of grammar, vocab, expressions, just trusting that process. [Trust the process.].

Because I didn't so much focus on just mass immersion at the time and trying to just sort of passively expose myself to content, trusting that I would eventually pick things up and be able to use them. I was much more focussed on 'I need to learn every single new piece of vocab' aspect of grammar before I can move on, and I don't know how helpful it was being hyper focussed on it to that degree.

I think there's probably a happy medium. You need to obviously do the work, do the repetitions and really focus on getting as much as possible out of a specific item thing that you're studying, right? Tv show, podcast episode, page of a book, whatever it is. But you can also fixate a little too much and think you're never going to be ready to move on, if that makes sense. [You gotta relax a little bit and just take it easy.].

So this leads me to talk about Anki or Anki. Now I was using this, this is an SRS spaced repetition system right. Effectively a program you use on your computer or your phone. You create flashcards for yourself using the vocab that you would be trying to learn. And you would review those cards on a daily basis, typically. [That's a lie and you know it.].

And it would really help with learning vocab quickly. Now, diving back in after years of not using Anki and sort of learning about what a lot of the polyglots are saying online, and also what a lot of the academics are talking about with it. And it may not be the most effective way to learn a language these days. Or at least, you know, for most people it may not be the most effective use of your time.

It really depends, I think, on what you enjoy and if your memory works that way, and also the process that you're going through. [Well, I'm convinced!] We can probably talk about this a little bit. A big issue with Anki, and I think why it gets a bad rap, is that people either use it for or think that it's used for just learning single words at a time or expressions by themselves. So effectively pieces of language out of context, and it's just trying to mass memorise those things individually. [Not a great plan.] And I think I agree with people when they say that's useless, or at least not very effective.

When it came to me learning with Anki. I was using the sort of 'mass sentence mining' kind of approach where I would be using websites like Reverso, Tatoeba, as well as dictionaries online, I think, what have we got, dictionary online de portugues or what's the other one? Pribram. But I would be looking for sentences using the words, the pieces of grammar, the expressions, the slang terms that I was trying to learn. And I would be mining those. I would be taking those off the internet and then using those sentences in Anki and on the front of each card, I would have the piece of grammar, vocab, whatever it is removed from that sentence. And on the back side, I would have the entire sentence with that piece of vocab or grammar or whatever it was so that I could test myself.

Beyond this, I would also try and have conversations with myself. As I was reviewing the cards, I would be saying the phrases out loud. I would be using them as a way of talking about topics. You know, if I was learning the word for, say, dog, I would have a phrase that would be like, Yesterday I went to the park and I saw five dogs, and then I would use that when I was studying that card to try and cause myself get myself to say a phrase spontaneously using parts that were in that sentence.

It could be transcribing that sentence and using the same grammatical structures, but changing the nouns or the adverbs or whatever in it. It could be that I might try and pretend like I'm having a conversation with myself, you know, say 'I went to the park yesterday and saw five dogs'. 'What colour were the dogs?' So 'I saw a brown one'. 'I saw a green one'. 'I saw a blue one', you know, that sort of thing. And then I would move on.

So I was really aware at the time, at least, of the pitfalls of Anki being that you can just get good at memorising the material in there for the sake of getting good at using Anki. But I kept thinking consciously, how do I actually use Anki to memorise content that I can use in the real world? Because I don't want to just get good at being able to review cards. I want to get good at being able to use the stuff that I'm learning, remember it and use it actively.

Would I do that now? I don't think I would spend anywhere near as much time with Anki as I did in the past, because there were times where I was reviewing, say, 200 cards a day. It would take two hours, and it was a lot. And a huge problem with it is that it's hard to maintain your discipline and motivation if you fall off the wagon. If you miss a day all of a sudden instead of having 200 cards, you've got 400 cards, and pretty quickly it gets to the point of being like, [Fuck this dude, I'm out!] I've missed a week and I have a thousand cards to review. It's going to take all day. I'm just tapping out. So there's that kind of pitfall with it.

The other thing is that you would probably get the same sorts of results if you just kept reading. If you kept watching TV shows with subtitles, without subtitles, repeating scenes, dialogues and just getting loads and loads of immersion. So I'm still sort of on the fence. I think there's probably a place for Anki if you enjoy it. [Fucking sadist. Fucking sadist!].

The other thing to mention with Anki that I found really helpful, and I think helped me a lot, was the process of making the cards was probably 80% of remembering the vocab. Because you're thinking about it for like five minutes whilst you're searching for sentences, you're looking for photos that are related to the sentence or the word or the vocab. You're then putting them in and you're thinking, how do I make a good flashcard that's going to test my memory?

And you're also obviously seeing all these other words and phrases and pieces of grammar that are associated with that word as you look up sentences. So funnily enough, I think reviewing the cards was probably 20% of the use of Anki for me and the 80% that I found really useful was just getting together a list of stuff that I wanted to put into Anki from, say, reading podcast transcript, watching a TV show, whatever it was, and then all the thinking and planning I had to do to create those cards, that was probably pretty helpful.

But again, if you think about it, it's kind of a weird use of your time. It's not necessarily as enjoyable as, say, you know, reading a chapter of a book multiple times and just using a dictionary to look up all of the new vocab and then moving on. You'll have to tell me what you guys think.

[I'm gonna go read a book with pictures.] But that was my experience with Anki. I do recommend it to some of my students, but it just depends on what kind of learners they are, what they enjoy, and how kind of fixated they are on learning new vocab quickly and memorising it because it is, it is definitely powerful at allowing you to remember stuff. I used to have the craziest words on the tip of my tongue whilst I was always reviewing stuff.

All right, so next, books. Was I reading a lot of books? Now you can find books that are I think are helpful and not helpful when you're sort of an intermediate learner. What I did at the time was I quite often searched for books that I was already interested in learning, or learning, reading, consuming in my native language. So quite often they were books that had been written in English. But I would look for the Portuguese version.

So things like, you know, the Harry Potter series, Game of Thrones, uh, Lord of the rings, things that were going to be heavy in dialogue. There was sort of a trade off I would have between inherent motivation and interest and passion. So, you know, there would be plenty of things. At the time I was studying biology and I wanted to learn about things like, you know, human evolution or Neanderthals or whatever it was.

I would have to think and consider, how motivated am I to learn about this stuff right now? And can I do it in Portuguese? Versus consuming books like Harry Potter where they're really, really dialogue heavy? The side of that that's kind of you have to juggle up is I've already read it before, so I know it, which is good and bad, right? It's not new. So it may not be very interesting in that sense. You're not learning about new parts of the story. But on the other hand, the fact that you've read it before, you'll know the story in the back of your mind. You'll have a basic idea of what's going on, who's saying what in different scenes, depending on how much of a Harry Potter head you are.

And so there's a kind of use in that, because it's not 100% novel, pun intended. It's not completely unique. It's not completely new. You can follow along because you've already read it in English, and it's also easy to find in English for you to be able to compare, right?

So I always had that kind of issue juggling up those things. Am I going to consume some content? Am I going to read something that is dialogue heavy, that will help me with acquiring vocab and grammar in common spoken Portuguese that I can go out and use? Or am I going to be using materials that I can't really say? I'm going to take loads of commonly spoken English from? You know, if I'm learning about the evolutionary history of native Australian rats and how to talk about that in Portuguese, I can probably talk about it with people, but there's going to be very few people that care, right? Or are interested.

They're just going to be like, [What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know!] So I felt like that was really useful, especially too, with common books like Harry Potter. You can find audio books for them. And in fact I found on YouTube, loads of people in Brazil would actually read out the chapters and just upload them to YouTube. [Portuguese language].

It was a weird phenomenon where for some reason no one took them down and you would be able to find, say, five different people who had literally read every single Harry Potter book, chapter by chapter and uploaded those to YouTube so you could get different accents and different voices reading out the same chapters. So I would quite often go through the different voices of different channels and just study the same chapter again and again and again, so that I could boost my listening comprehension skills with different accents, but also do those repetitions and learn the vocab and everything out of them. So yeah, I think books are immeasurably helpful.

I would probably suggest trying to find the audio with the book at the same time, because if you compare up those two things of listening and reading at the same time, it's two birds, one stone, you know, you're training your ear at the same time as you are getting better at reading and able to see the words that are being spoken.

And from what I remember with research, looking at language acquisition and getting better ability at speaking and listening, it's much better to do both of those simultaneously than to do them separately or just do one of them right. Just reading alone or just listening alone.

Because if you read, you're not working on your ear, and if you're just listening, you're not going to hear 100% of the words that are actually being said. Spoken contractions take place, all that sort of stuff, and you're probably just going to not notice it and keep moving on with the story.

So I would definitely say whatever you end up reading, it's going to be a plus, but try and find something that has the audio to it as well. You have a transcript and you have the audio and you can do both simultaneously.

So next: series movies and the news. What did I do with watching TV shows? Netflix was my friend. I found a lot of Brazilian TV shows on there, I think was it like Bom Dia, Veronica and there's, there's like three something. Is it just three's or something like that? I watched a whole bunch of these series a few years back, and they Netflix was brilliant because it had subtitles.

You could also watch it dubbed so you could flick through just having it in Portuguese, having it in English, and having it with or without Portuguese or English subtitles, playing around with any of those combinations and again, doing that repetition of watching one episode many times to be able to squeeze as much juice out of that lemon as possible was really helpful.

Another thing that I did to try and really help me with learning different accents and dialects of Brazilian Portuguese in particular, was I would use YouTube and try and find the different news shows that would stream, and quite often there was one that was called, you guys are gonna laugh at me, who are Brazilians. Globo Rural. [Portuguese language] Globo Rural. Effectively, like rural news. It was farmers, right? [Portuguese language] And the reason it was funny is because I remember all these Brazilians would always be like Why are you watching Globo Rural? [Is this- what is wrong with you?] They're talking about like the price of fish and cassava and all this other stuff.

And I'm like, you don't understand. They go through all the different regions in Brazil, right? There's like 25 different accents in Brazil. They've got a dozen or two states, and there's so much diversity there.

And Globo Rural was great because they would just be going from state to state and talking about things like, you know, vets treating horses, the harvesting of a soy crop and the prices of soy going up and down. So I was just, I was learning so much. There would be a lot of person on person interactions, a lot of informal language, loads of different accents. But then also they would be talking about things I was interested in, like animals and plants and farming and how to take care of bees and all that sort of stuff. So I found that really, really useful. [You know, they used to call him weirdo in school.].

So if you haven't done this before, get on YouTube and try and see if you can find a new show that is in your target language from that country. And if you can find one that is like a variety show type thing where they're interviewing a lot of different people and you can get a lot of different voices, different accents and topics in a very short period of time. And you can just keep watching that same episode. It is just really, really useful, really, really useful. [That's the good stuff.].

So yeah, would I go back and do that? What would I do now? I think I would do much the same. I would probably try and spend more time for longer with specific things I was watching. So like if I was watching a series on Netflix, there is definitely that part of you that is like, God, I want to see what's going to happen next. And you may rush through the season a little too quickly, guilty, and not end up doing your reps. And so you have to be aware of that push and pull, that relationship between intent, active study with materials, and relaxed, passive consumption of materials.

The first is going to help you boost your language skills very quickly. The latter is not going to help you with that as quickly. It definitely is better than nothing. As I said to my students, you know, what are you watching on Netflix? I watch a lot of stuff in Persian. You know, I'm from Iran, I watch loads of Persian shows, and I'm like, [I'm afraid that's not going to help.] So if you can just switch that and start watching stuff in English, that's that's a bonus.

But beyond that, if you can get to a point where even if it's just for a short period of time, every single day, you have a specific episode or portion scene from a film that you study intently with, with subtitles, without subtitles, you do repetitions, you take notes, you try and think, what don't I use? That's being said here. Is there new vocab? Is there new grammar? Are there expressions being used? What's happening with the pronunciation? Is their connected speech happening? You could use it as prompts for being able to speak out loud, and try and copy the people who are talking and mimic their accent.

You know, if you can do that for a short period of time, every single day before you move on to just consuming content passively, I think that is probably the key. If you can do this short, bulky, kind of intense period of study, and when you are getting burnt out with that, that's when you move on to the whole I'm just going to passively consume for the rest of the time. The issue I think loads of my students have is that they move from this area of intently studying something with, you know, a reason behind it to just the passive stuff really quickly. And the problem is you get to a stage where you're like, I can understand and follow along. So my English is pretty good. All I need to do is more of that and I'll get better, and I think you will, but it'll take longer compared to if you pair these two things up. Trying to work smart, not hard.

So I think that is what I would go back and focus on. I would be trying to make sure that I have my sort of study period that I get in there and really intensely kind of study for a short period of time, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, before moving on to just say, a few hours of consuming something to insert here that I didn't put on this list.

We have ChatGPT now, and I've been talking about this with my students so much recently when doing English classes, and I'm still astonished at the lack of people using ChatGPT, whether they're doing it for language learning or anything else. It is so useful. It's not perfect, and you have to pay attention to the responses you get, and quite often you have to tailor the responses, change your prompts, ask it to improve something, change something, adjust something.

But the use is just out of this world. [It's horrifying.] It is so fast at being able to help you with language learning, being able to give you answers. So I'll give you some some stuff and I might save this for a future video. What I would do now with ChatGPT is when I'm watching a series, if I'm having trouble with vocab, I would take the vocab or I would take the subtitles with the vocab. I would copy paste it, I'd have it in a document and then I would open up ChatGPT, free version or not, paste it in there and say, define each of these words or phrases or slang terms, and then give me five sentences using each one and explain the context.

And you can make this as complicated or as easy as you want. It's up to you. Your imagination is effectively your limit, but you can get on to ChatGPT paste in this stuff and then say, give me a list of sentences using these words and phrases and explain how they're being used or whatever. And you can just read that. That can be your homework.

You can ask ChatGPT to make you a quiz. You can ask it to give you written worksheets, written questions, fill in the blank questions using the vocab that you've just studied. You can ask it to write in a certain style. Can you write in the way that Mick Dundee speaks in Crocodile Dundee and write me a short story about how he gets lost in the bush and a crocodile nearly bites his leg off? Make it 500 words long at the level of B1, B2.

And within 20s it'll just spit that out. If it's too complicated, you say, can you make that at the level of A1? Write that story again, but at the level of A1 at the level of A2, if you need it to be more complicated, say, can you write it at the level of C1 or C2? It's just endless. So it's a great resource. Today, if I went back, I would be using the shit out of ChatGPT paired with all these other resources that I was studying.

And again, you can talk to it, you can ask it questions, you can treat it as a conversation partner. It has like 60 different languages on there. You can talk to it in your native language and have it respond in English or your target language. You can get it to to correct you spontaneously. So like if you're having a conversation with it in English and you make a mistake, you can say, can you correct any mistakes I make? So it's just brilliant. Check it out. I would be using that like crazy.

Moving on now, conversations with my wife. So pretty quickly I started trying to use the Portuguese with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, right? That was a motivating factor as well for me to keep learning Portuguese and wanting to get good. She had a really good level of English. She was obviously a Portuguese speaker from Brazil and I wanted to be able to talk to her in Portuguese. It was almost like a respect thing of you've put all this effort into learning English. I want to be able to speak your native language. As our relationship progressed, it became important because she had family and friends and all these people back home in Brazil that I had never met who didn't speak English. So I wanted to be able to communicate with them instead of having to use her as a translator.

[Can he drive this if he's drinking as well? You must be under 0.05. Oh, I'll just translate. Yes, you can drive drunk.] So I used to have conversations with her all the time. I would ask her about things. I would ask her about slang, about swear words, about her, her life in Brazil. I would ask her to talk to me in Portuguese.

Now, the thing that I would talk about here that can become an issue is you shouldn't treat your partner as your teacher. You shouldn't treat a teacher as a teacher. And what do I mean by this?

No one is going to teach you anything. At the end of the day, no one can teach you a language.

No one can force you to be able to speak that language without you yourself doing the work. Anyone you're interacting with can talk to you.

They can answer your questions, but you still have to put in loads of work. You have to do the legwork. You have to do the majority of the hard work. Taking that pressure off my wife and never treating her like, you know, I would show up to chat to her and it was her job to teach me to speak Portuguese. I never had that kind of relationship with my wife or with anyone else who was a Brazilian Portuguese speaker. Even people I got lessons from. It was always I was there to ask questions and to try and communicate with them and have conversations.

But I took charge of my own learning. That's the main takeaway point here. Don't expect other people to teach you anything really.

When it comes down to it, people can expose you to content, they can chat to you, they can give you ideas, they can discuss things, but you have to take charge of teaching yourself.

So that was a big thing that I was always conscious of with my wife. And I also didn't want to put that pressure on her, because I know people who've had that kind of dynamic or relationship in the past. It quite often gets to a point where the spouse, the other, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, whatever is just like, screw this, I don't want to talk any more in Portuguese. This is not fun. I don't enjoy this. [I want to go home now. This isn't fun anymore.] You're just making me feel like I need to be teaching you constantly. So making sure that dynamic is not there and that it's always fun. It's enjoyable.

So I remember my wife and I, we used to have to drive to and from Canberra. We were living in Canberra at the time and my family lived down here in Melbourne, and it's a seven hour drive and we would just chat away in the car for like seven hours in Portuguese and it was broken Portuguese on my part, but it was a lot of fun and it helped rapidly improve my fluency.

It's doing that work of just speaking and my wife being like quite often being like, What the hell? [I don't know what he's saying. Do you understand? I don't know what he's saying.] What are you talking about? Do you mean this? Do you mean that? You know, and then just us having a laugh. So making that enjoyable and doing that. When it comes to conversations with people, it just is absolutely brilliant.

So would I change anything there? I probably would have tried to talk to her even more, to be honest, because the other thing is that you have that bad habit when one of you speaks both languages very well, but the other one speaks only one of those languages really, really well, it's very easy to kind of keep switching back to that language that you both share. That makes ease of communication a lot better. And we did that more than we probably should have, or at least more than I should have. [Whoa, how'd that get in there? Yikes. Whoops. Whoa!] It's something to be aware of, and you have to constantly be fighting that urge to follow the path of least resistance. And that goes for a lot of things, right? That goes for study material as well. You can get to a point where things are too easy and you need to keep pushing yourself.

You need to keep searching for that barrier of of discomfort right? Between language you don't understand and language that's too easy. You have to search for that sort of frontier and constantly be pushing it forward.

Next one: moving in with Brazilians. I ended up moving in with a whole bunch of Brazilians in Canberra with my wife. In fact, it was five Brazilians and me in a house. The thing that really helped with that was that quite a few of the Brazilians in the house didn't speak really good English, [Look, I don't have time for that.] So pretty quickly my Portuguese actually crept past their English. And that was because a lot of them worked with other Brazilians. So they were speaking Brazilian Portuguese at home. They would go to work and speak Portuguese, and then they would get home and they would consume Portuguese TV shows, movies, all that sort of stuff. [This is not helpful.].

Whereas I was obviously in Portuguese for a greater proportion of the time comparatively. And that really helped, especially when we got to that point of my Portuguese being better than their English. I would often take advantage of the situation of that path of least resistance, because they may want to try and speak a bit of English with me, but as soon as they would get to a point where they're like, Oh, you know, I can't speak as quickly and as effortlessly as I want, they would switch to Portuguese and put me in that position of not being able to understand or speak as easily.

[Sucks to be you, nerd!] And so I kind of pretty quickly just decided, Fuck it, you know, I'm going to just accept this, I'm going to take it. And it really helped really quickly. It was a sink or swim kind of immersion that I created for myself in Canberra. [Help me! I can't swim! I'm drowning!] And I guess my advice for you guys and my students would be if you're in that kind of a position of living in a sharehouse or needing to rent a room in a house when you come to Australia, or if you're living in Australia, for the love of God, try and do what I did.

Where you move in with other people who don't speak your native language, or at least don't speak it as well as you do, if that makes sense. The number of students that I had in the past that would tell me things like, I'm Colombian, I came over from Colombia. I've been here for three years, but I still don't speak English. And I would probe a little bit and it would turn out they're living with Colombians. They got a job with their Colombian friends. They only watch Spanish TV. And I would just be like, [Oh, fuck me, man!] No shit, Sherlock.

Like, you've done everything that you can do to pretty much avoid learning English. So if you're moving here and you want to live with people, try and move into either a house with loads of other foreigners from other places where the shared language is English, or try and find Australians ideally if if your goal is to learn and speak Australian English as well as possible, that's the key, right? Moving with other Australians, they're unlikely to speak your language. And if there's multiple, they're going to be speaking Australian English all the time, which is, you know, great for you.

So yeah. Would I do that again? Would I move in with Brazilians? Hell yeah. And I would probably try and live with them for longer. I think we only ended up living there for 3 or 4 months. But that and speaking with my wife as much as I could every single day for several months, it really boosted me from that kind of beginner level of being able to put together the odd phrase and have a basic idea of what someone was saying to intermediate and intermediate advanced, where I could now express myself a lot better and talk about a lot of different topics. And yeah, it was uncomfortable initially, but it paid off in the long run.

So why does my Portuguese still suck? I've got two kids now that I've had with my beautiful wife.

My son is five, my daughter is three. When we first had my son, we were speaking Portuguese at home probably 90% of the time, and it was absolutely brilliant. It was great for my Portuguese. We were talking all the time.

The issue came when my son started going to Day-care and there's a certain threshold, I think, that we passed with how many days he started going to Day-care. I think he started going three days a week. As soon as he was able to speak English at about 3 or 4, he started realising around him. Everyone else spoke English, so any single person he would interact with would speak usually just English, but may speak Portuguese and English as well. But that common factor of every single person that he interacted with definitely spoke English. He worked out pretty quickly. He didn't have to speak Portuguese. [Why are we doing this again?] He could just speak English to everyone and no matter what, they would always understand what he was saying.

And so now, more recently, they've been at Day-care ever since because we, my wife and I both have to work. We got to a point where they were at day-care four days a week, and the thing that was beautiful with my son was that he ended up making the best little mob, a little group of friends at Day-care, but they were all obviously English speakers. And so every day he goes to Day-care or like four days a week and he interacts with 20 other children, all of whom only speak English, or they may speak other foreign languages at home.

But the common denominator of just speaking English at Day-care was there. All of the teachers were English speakers, so he was just surrounded by all the time. He was also spending a lot of time with his grandparents, with his uncle and auntie. Again, they only speak English.

And so our issue was that the kids would always be speaking in English back to us. Even if we were speaking in Portuguese with them, they would understand it, but they would just reply in English and it became an exhausting battle to try and get them to speak in Portuguese. [I only speak English, I'm sorry.] And my wife, who works in reception and admin, is using English all day, every day. But when she gets home, she's in English mode and she doesn't often switch now to to Portuguese.

So we've unfortunately ended up in this situation where we probably use Portuguese at home maybe 50% of the time, if we're lucky, but most of the time it's English and you get into that phase two of because the kids are always asking and speaking in English, even if you try and speak Portuguese to them, they sort of snap you out of it constantly because it requires more cognitive effort to keep replying in another language to someone who's speaking to you in English, than it does to just use the words that they're asking or saying to you and reply back, if that makes sense.

So unfortunately, I would say, you know, do you have bilingual kids? I would say they understand. They can definitely understand Portuguese, [But I don't speak it.] But they can't string a complicated sentence together because it's just not something they've practised. I think we could have gotten around that if my wife hadn't gone back to work, and if we didn't send them to Day-care, I think there would be a lot better. And ironically, that tends to be the pattern I've seen with other families around us that are Brazilian.

Typically, the only children I've interacted with now who speak Brazilian Portuguese and English really well have two parents who are Brazilians who only speak Portuguese at home, and they don't send the kids to Day-care very often. So that balance, I guess, of Portuguese and English, is much closer to 50/50 than in our case, where it's probably more like 9010 or 9020.

So that's been a real kind of eye opener. It's been difficult because I kind of wanted the whole time for my kids to be able to be good at both languages, primarily so that they could chat to family, but it hasn't ended up that way. I think they'll understand them, and hopefully it's there and we can sort of reignite it in the future if they're interested.

But yeah, for now, it's definitely a frustrating thing of them speaking and understanding a lot more English than Portuguese and to my Portuguese has stagnated. That's where we probably need to focus the end of this video I have just been overwhelmed with work, with family life and everything, that it's become really difficult to find time or to make time to study and do what I need to do to keep pushing my Portuguese, to keep improving it.

So one thing I have noticed is that my pronunciation hasn't changed. My fluency has probably diminished a little bit since I was really focussed on speaking at all the time, but I can still talk a lot about everyday things, and that's the kind of gift and a curse thing I can talk a lot about doing the clothes, doing the dishes, cooking dinner, changing nappies, family events, all that sort of stuff because it's what we're always talking about.

But if someone comes over who's from Brazil and they say, you know, [what's your opinion of modern art?] I would be like, I just don't have the vocab to be able to express my ideas clearly and quickly and concisely in Portuguese, because it's not something I do very often. So yeah, that's why my Portuguese still sucks a great deal. And the most frustrating part that I have to share with you guys, because I have like an area of fluency that is still very good.

The annoying thing is that it falls a lot of Brazilians, and they'll think that I have the ability to speak a lot better than I can. [No, trust me, I'm stupid.] And so that is a gift and a curse. It's infuriating. You know, when they come over and they're like, [Portuguese language] you know, blah, blah, blah, how are you? Is your family all good? And you're like, yeah, me and my blah blah blah. My mom's this, that. And then they'll they'll switch the topic and you'll be like, [I'm sorry, I just can't do it.].

You just took me from advanced to beginner and we're gonna have to switch to English, so. Yeah. Ah. All right, wrapping up, the future. I think you kind of have to decide what you want and what you're comfortable with. I am pretty proud of where my Portuguese got to and where it is today. [Still sucks.] And all things being equal, I'm still glad that I have Portuguese. That's good enough to communicate with people. So I could go to Brazil tomorrow. I could find my way around. I could chat with people. I could get to know people. I could probably make friends pretty well. [Oh! Como estas?] I probably couldn't get a job. I don't think I would be confident enough with my Portuguese to get a decent job, say 100% in Portuguese, but I'd get by.

And so, you know, there's that side of it. And I have to keep thinking. I have to trade off. How much do I want to spend? How much time, energy, and effort do I want to spend getting my Portuguese to say, a C1 or C2 level, or being able to talk about loads and loads and loads of topics when at the moment my main focus is my family, my kids, my work. That's what matters the most at the moment.

Yeah, I think Portuguese is always going to be there. I can reignite it in the future and at the moment I just use it for day to day stuff and, you know, the odd bit of TV shows, movies and that sort of stuff to passively learn. And I don't want to feel guilty about it, but I do at times wish it was a lot better than it was, right.

But the thing is, it's not it's not free. Like having a good body from going to the gym. It's something you have to maintain and keep working on if you want to keep it. Anyway, it's turned into a massive episode. I hope you enjoy it. I would love to know your experiences and if you have any questions or anything else, chuck them down below in the comment section. I'm Pete, this is Aussie English. Thanks for joining me. Tooroo!