Learning Portuguese...

"O Inglês sem Mestre"

I've been wanting to become fluent in Portuguese for a long time now.

I took Saturday lessons growing up and was able to form simple sentences with really good pronunciation, but after a few years of similar lessons over and over, I didn't feel like they were helping me learn anymore.

Over the last 10 years I've noticed that I've pretty much lost the ability to formulate a sentence in Portuguese, although I can still understand bits and pieces of a conversation.

I've wanted to find some sort of program that teaches me how to write in and speak the language, but Rosetta Stone is way out of my price range. A few weeks ago, I found Duolingo.

Duolingo is a website where you can learn how to speak several different languages, including Portuguese. They provide bite-sized lessons that feel like fun - you don't even realize how much you're actually learning. The website tracks your progress in terms of words learned and levels passed, and also records your daily streak (how many days in a row you've done lessons). All of this, for free. They also have a free app, which is really well designed - the people over at Duolingo developed a great learning tool, as opposed to having an app for the sake of saying they have an app.

I'm excited about my progress, and so I told my grandparents (who are Portuguese) that I was learning the language. The next time we visited them, my Grandpa handed me the pictured book, "O Inglês sem Mestre" ("The English Without a Teacher"). He told me that this is the book he used to learn English. I think it's so cool to be able to hold something that at one point was a really important book to my grandpa. It means a lot that he would give it to me.

I'm so glad that I'm learning Portuguese now, and I can't wait for the day when I'm fluent and can easily have a conversation!

Do you speak multiple languages? If so, which ones?