Portuguese and English

Students, who have an interest in languages  (Portuguese, English, or other languages) very often ask the following question: “Is European Portuguese a very hard idiom to learn?” There isn’t a simple answer so we should say: “It really depends on several aspects”.

There are around 7000 languages around the globe. European Portuguese and English belong to the same family, the Indo-European cluster that contains around 400 other idioms that include Russian, French and Greek (among others).

Native speakers of this group of languages are half of the globe’s population. However, each idiom has its own features. So, what makes these two linguistic relatives different and how can we do a comparison that can help us to say that European Portuguese is a hard idiom?

The idiom difficulty is relative

If you’re learning a language (Portuguese or any other idiom) is always easy and hard. The idiom that you speak (your mother tongue) can transform the process of learning European Portuguese (or other idiom) an easy or a hard goal, it really depends on the level of similarity of the languages that you already know and that you intend to learn.

Setting objectives is very important when learning Portuguese!