Category Archives: Learning Portuguese

Learning a language can feel like climbing a mountain sometimes. For every word you learn there are certainly a thousand more. I know that I don’t know every word in the English language so it is unlikely I shall ever learn every word in the Portuguese language!

Whilst fluency is always the goal of the language learner, we need to keep an eye on the basics of language: learning those words that we know we will need to use at some time or another. Of all the hundreds of thousands of words in any given language, we only tend to use a certain percentage of them. Some people have a greater vocabulary than others but a lot of the time we use basics staples. For example I know what the words ‘rhetoric’ ‘lapel’ and ‘usurp’ mean but they are not part of my everyday language. Much the same goes for ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ which I think I can safely say will never get a look-in in a conversation (and this will be the only time I ever write it!). Words that we know the meaning of but never use are called ‘passive’ words by linguists.

When faced with that very high mountain, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to relax and accept you are never going to learn every word there is in your target language. Once you have done this, you can then rest in the knowledge that it is positively ok not to learn every single word you come across.

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Yesterday I wrote about how to improve your listening comprehension when learning a language. I promised you a list of Portugeuese radio and tv stations on the internet to help you with your studies so here goes. These are all European Portuguese stations.

TELEVISION
First stop is RTP which is a major site for television and radio in Portugual. For television go to TV and choose Television Online. You’ll get a list of about 12 pages of programmes they have available to watch online. Once you are on this page, clicking on the green tv/radio online button at the top will offer you a menu of ‘RTP mobile’, ‘Programas em Direito’ and ‘RTP International’. RTP International won’t run without something called ‘Octoshape plugin’ and I’ve yet to make this work! It’s a shame but there’s plenty to keep me entertained regardless. The list of viewable programmes online will certainly keep you going for a long time!
I nearly always come to this site to watch the Portuguese news. Watching the news is one of the best places to start because much like English news, the newsreaders tend to pronounce their words very clearly and therefore it’s much easier to understand than perhaps a movie or general drama would be. Radio is also available on the site as well as podcasts.

TV Ciencia
Probably one of the best links as far as streaming news quality as the picture is crystal clear. From what I can gather the station is quite politically orientated. Maybe I have just been unlucky when I’ve watched that it always seems to be about politics! That said the site does say ‘sceince’, ‘technology’ and ‘culture’ so I think there is much more to it.

If you want to explore further there is a list of Portuguese television stations accessible online from WWITV and Beeline TV

RADIO

TSF
A major station in Portugal. I listen to this one a lot as it’s similar to radio four in the UK and has a lot of interviews and general talk shows. Just click on the play button on the right hand side of the page and listen live. Alternatively you can go to archived programs ‘Arquivo Programas’ and listen again. This is useful if you want to test your listening skills as I described yesterday. You can also click on the links on the left hand side of the page to listen to current news items that have been aired.

Antenna 3
One of my favourites for Portuguese pop, rock and indie. Basically an excellent independant station that’s pretty popular from what I’ve seen. They play music from the UK and US as well as current chart hits in Portugual and European hits. A good way of getting to know what’s hip in the Portuguese music scene. Click on Emmisão online and it’ll play through your windows media player.

Surf Music
A huge list of Portuguese radio stations

Multilingual Books
Another list of radio stations

Plenty to get you started, I hope you find these useful x