Why I Failed My Portuguese Goal (and What It Taught Me About Enjoying the Process)

Introduction

Last October, I set myself a goal: learn Portuguese well enough in three months to speak with my Portuguese family by the end of December. You haven’t seen a video of me speaking Portuguese with them on this channel, and there’s a simple reason for that — I didn’t hit the goal. But the reason I failed taught me something more useful than the goal itself would have.

Copying a Method That Wasn’t Mine

My only real experience learning a language on my own was Japanese, where deep immersion before speaking worked well for me. So for Portuguese, I tried to replicate the exact same approach, optimized for speed. I asked ChatGPT to generate practice sentences for every verb, in every tense, for every pronoun — “je mange une pomme le matin, tu manges un kiwi le soir, il mange des pâtes,” and so on — and turned them into flashcards.

It didn’t work. Reviewing those cards felt boring almost immediately, and boring cards don’t get memorized — not just because the process feels tedious, but because impersonal sentences generated by an AI simply don’t stick the way personal ones do. Within a couple of weeks, I’d all but stopped.

Doing the Opposite

What eventually worked was closer to the reverse approach. Instead of trying to absorb theory before producing anything, I started writing to Gemini directly: “I want to be able to speak Portuguese with my family. Correct my mistakes as I write to you.” Then I just started narrating my day, badly. “Today I’m going to eat at my parents’, we’re going to eat this, maybe drink some wine.” When I hit a wall — how do I conjugate this? — I’d ask, get corrected, and move on.

This forced me to learn conjugation in service of something I actually wanted to say, rather than as an abstract exercise. It was less “efficient” on paper than a curated grammar drill, but I looked forward to doing it every morning, because I was working toward something I actually cared about: an upcoming conversation with people I love.

Why the Same Method Didn’t Transfer

The deeper lesson here is that what worked for Japanese didn’t automatically work for Portuguese, because the two experiences of learning were completely different. Japanese, at the start, felt like decoding a genuinely foreign code — different word order, different vocabulary, nothing familiar to lean on. That difficulty made heavy immersion feel engaging; I was constantly discovering something new.

Portuguese, as a Romance language close to French, didn’t give me that same feeling of discovery. I could often guess the general meaning of a sentence even without knowing every word, which made pure immersion feel less like progress and more like mild boredom — not because it was too easy, but because I didn’t feel like I was moving toward my actual goal. Different languages, and different people, need different approaches. There’s no single “correct” method that transfers automatically from one language — or one learner — to another.

What I’m Doing With Portuguese Now

Currently, my Portuguese routine is writing daily messages to Gemini about my life, in parallel with reading books I’ve already read in French — I started with the first Harry Potter, and I’m now on Memoirs of a Geisha. Reading them in Portuguese barely feels like studying, because I’m not trying to parse every grammatical form — I’m just following a story I already love. I’m deliberately not speaking out loud yet, because pronunciation is something I specifically want to build carefully this time, partly through shadowing exercises with native content.

None of this is more “correct” than a structured grammar course. It’s simply what I look forward to doing every day — and that, more than any method on paper, is what determines whether you’ll still be doing it in six months.

The Real Point

Language learning content online constantly promises the single best, most optimized method — the one polyglots supposedly don’t want you to know. Chasing that promise is exactly what led me to abandon Portuguese the first time: I optimized for speed and efficiency, and ended up with a method I didn’t enjoy, which I quickly stopped doing altogether.

Learning a language isn’t a sprint with a finish line; it’s closer to a long journey. If you don’t enjoy the day-to-day of how you’re studying, you won’t sustain it — no matter how theoretically efficient the method is on paper. A personalized, imperfect, occasionally “inefficient” approach that you actually want to return to every day will beat a perfectly optimized plan that bores you into quitting.

Conclusion

I didn’t reach my three-month Portuguese goal, and in hindsight, the deadline itself was part of the problem — it pushed me toward a method that prioritized speed over enjoyment. Whatever you’re learning, ask yourself honestly: do I look forward to this, or am I just following advice that worked for someone else? If it’s the latter, it might be worth abandoning the “optimal” method for one you’ll actually stick with.