How to Use “Shorties” to Learn Portuguese

May 14, 2024

To learn a new language like Portuguese, getting lots of exposure to the language is essential. Unfortunately, many learners don’t get meaningful practice from real-life interactions on a consistent basis. This is especially true for beginners and early intermediate learners, who may find a full-speed native-level conversation in the middle of a noisy café to be more overwhelming than helpful. 🤯

Consuming audio and video content is a great stepping stone, giving you much more control over the learning process. For example, you can:

• Narrow your focus by choosing the topic and level
• Listen as often as you want
• Listen in a quiet place, or on-the-go
• Replay the audio as much as needed
• Control the speed of the audio
• Follow along with the subtitles
• Learn from the translation

To supplement our series of Units and other learning tools, Practice Portuguese also has a large (and growing!) library of European Portuguese audio and video content for you to explore, including Podcast episodes, Videos, and Shorties.

Wait, what the heck are “Shorties”?

Most of us are familiar with podcasts and videos, but what about Shorties? This is just what we call short dialogues, narratives, and articles recorded by native European Portuguese speakers and translated by our team. Most are around 1-3 minutes long, and can be filtered by level and topic, offering a more individualized and “bite-sized” option for consuming Portuguese audio.

Shorties audio is free for everyone, but Practice Portuguese members also get access to these additional features:

• Portuguese / English transcript (Synced with the audio. Toggle the translation on and off as needed!)
• Vocabulary / Expressions (Review key words. Add the most important ones to your Smart Review.)
• Quiz (Check your understanding.)
• Comments (Discuss the tricky parts with our team and fellow learners.)

How do I use Shorties to learn Portuguese?

Learning a language is about much more than just memorizing words. There are many different skills involved, such as:

• listening (perceiving the sounds you hear as words and sentences, and understanding the meaning)
• reading (understanding written language)
• speaking & writing (putting words together to communicate meaning)
• pronunciation (producing the sounds)
• usage (using the language appropriately in different contexts / following cultural and linguistic norms)

All of these skills are important, but we all have different goals, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. Maybe you already read Portuguese perfectly, but you have trouble understanding what you hear. 🙉 Or maybe you understand quite well, but speaking is another story. 🙊 Your approach to using media content depends on how you learn and where you are in the learning process.

With that in mind, we invite you to explore the ideas below about how to use Shorties (and Podcasts and Videos) to improve your European Portuguese skills. Our focus is on using Shorties features, but you could also apply some of these strategies to media you find elsewhere, such as movies, news reports, and social media.

👂🏽 Listening

• Listen with Translate off. How much can you understand? Listen multiple times to try to pick up more details. Pause after each line, if needed.
• Listen with Translate on. Visualize the scene as you follow along.
• Answer the Quiz questions to check your understanding.
• Review the Vocabulary and Expressions. Listen for these words and phrases in the audio. Think about when you might use some of the key words in your own life.
• Listen as you read. Notice the flow of the language and how the sounds fit to each word. In connected speech, it doesn’t always sound how you would expect! Slow it down using the speedometer icon if needed.
• Review a few sections of the transcript that were most confusing or that introduced new grammar/vocabulary. (But don’t worry about understanding every detail yet.)
• While you’re driving or running errands, play Shorties in the background to give yourself more exposure to Portuguese.

📖 Reading

• Same suggestions as above, but focus on reading the script without audio.
• Can you understand the Portuguese-only Quiz questions? Just like in real-life (and in the CIPLE!), you won’t always have a translation to fall back on. Take this opportunity to try to decipher the meaning of the questions and answer options without translating.
  • For example, let’s say the question was Como se chama o homem? You may not know what any of those words mean, but you noticed words starting with cham- in the script when the man and woman were introducing themselves. You also see that the choices are Daniel, Carlos, and João. These all sound like men’s names. Hey, maybe “homem” means man? Could it be asking what the man’s name is? 🙂
• Notice the wording of sentences, especially when the structure differs from English (or your own native language).

🗣️ Speaking & Writing

• Say or write a sentence containing each of the vocabulary words.
• Summarize the Shorty (or make up your own version!) by speaking out loud or writing in Portuguese.
• Grab a study partner and role-play using the script. Can you continue the dialogue on your own?
• Ask your study partner questions about what happened in the Shorty.

👄 Pronunciation

• Play the audio one line at a time. Pause to repeat what you heard with/without looking at the text.
• Too fast? Use the speedometer icon to slow it down. Remember that pronunciation can vary when it comes to a word by itself vs. the same word within a sentence!
• Read the whole transcript out loud. Slowly at first, and then faster. This will help train your muscle memory, and develop your confidence with speaking out loud.
• If you struggle to pronounce a specific word, pause the audio and use the Look Up tool to open it in the Translator. You may be able to find the word by itself, to get more clarity on the pronunciation. (Or check our Pronunciation resources here)

🇵🇹 Usage

• Filter by topic to find examples of how language is used in different contexts that are relevant to you
  • For example, filter by “Formality” to compare informal vs. formal language (tu vs. você), or filter by “Restaurants and Cafés” to see examples of ordering at a restaurant
• Check the Vocab section to see other potential meanings for a word or expression. It’s not always as literal as you would expect!
• Think of similar scenarios in your own life and how they compare to the Shorty you listened to

But I only understand a few words…

It’s okay, you have to start somewhere! It’s completely normal to only understand a few words when you start listening to Shorties. “A few words” gradually becomes “some words”, and then “many words”, and then “most words”, and then “all words”!

It takes time and patience to fill in the gaps, so don’t be discouraged if it’s mostly gibberish for a while. 😵‍💫 The important part is getting more opportunities for exposure to realistic language. It may feel frustrating at times, but having lots of input is really important to help your brain adjust to the patterns of the language.

Listening to a whole conversation is a big step up from learning isolated sentences in the Units, but it’s a worthwhile challenge. Learning happens best when you get a little bit out of your comfort zone and allow yourself to explore, face uncertainty, and make mistakes. Sometimes this means going back and analyzing a confusing translation, and other times it means staying patient and accepting that you won’t understand every detail… yet. 😉

Don’t forget that you can use the filters to choose Shorties at different levels (A1-B2). It’s quite common for one’s listening level to be different from their reading/writing level. For example, you may be able to do B2 level written exercises, but still be at the A1 level for listening.

Happy learning! We hope this gave you some inspiration for your next Shorty!