Alphabetically speaking, Portuguese uses 26 Latin letters (which is easier to learn than a lot of languages with their own alphabets), with k, w, and y being foreign letters that are hardly used in Portuguese. In terms of pronunciation, apart from the trill r that you can't escape from Latin languages and the nha, lha consonants that some people may have some difficulty with, there are few barriers to learning the English International Phonetic Alphabet, and the vowels that you see with strange hats on top of them are just a bluff, and the differences aren't that great. (Perfectionists can disregard this one, because a vowel in Portuguese sounds the same as a vowel in English, and it can be pronounced differently depending on the situation. It can be pronounced differently depending on the situation). In terms of sentence structure, except for a few special cases, it is almost always SVO (subject-verb-object) format, which is much simpler than Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other sticky languages. Grammar, although the tense inflection may be a bit complicated for English or Nordic speakers, but there is no Slavic languages in a variety of inverted grams, the word yin and yang is also very good to distinguish (German out of the beatings), it can be said that the Portuguese language in the world, for the English speakers is considered to be very friendly, which can be widely circulated by the coefficient of difficulty of the graph to support, here will not be long-winded.

Even compared to other Latin languages, Portuguese is one of the best.

I. Brazilian Portuguese uses você instead of tu, and the inflected verb form-1:

To put it plainly, the Brazilians use one pronoun for both "you" and "your", which may not make much sense to English speakers. This may not bother English speakers because it's all "you", but in Latin, which is known for its complexity, the loss of one person is equivalent to reducing the difficulty of the whole verb part by one sixth!

Two: a gente can be used instead of nos, and the conjugated verb form is -1:

Nos is the personal pronoun for "we", but it can be replaced by a gente in the third person singular, which is one less form of conjugation we need to remember if we're going to be lazy. Intuitively, the Portuguese part of the irregular verb conjugation is as follows:

But if you use Brazilian Portuguese, the lines for tu and nos are just crossed out and not memorized, doesn't it smell good? Spanish and Italian learners don't have such a benefit, they have to memorize whatever appears on the conjugation table, forlornly and miserably.

Three, compared to Italian and Romanian in the east, Portugal and the United Kingdom have a long history of exchanges, geographically closer, and therefore more influenced by the English language, the following are some examples of Portuguese words directly copied from the English language, and these have Italian translations in the Italian language.

1. beef - bife 2. team - time 3. volleyball - voleibol

There are many more examples, so I won't try to give them all. Compared to fellow Latin speakers France Spain Italy, the Portuguese probably have the best English penetration and average.

Then there is the question of how long it takes to reach a level where you can complete daily life and conversation. The answer to this question, which varies from person to person, can be broken down into three areas.

I. Individual language base and ability

Generally speaking, as long as you are used to using the Latin alphabet, whether it is English or the Hungarian language of the other world, it is advantageous to learn Portuguese for the reasons mentioned above, Portuguese is relatively simple, besides, unlike the Germanic German next door, English has borrowed many words with Latin roots from French, thus leading to the fact that English-speaking people have a much easier time learning Portuguese. This makes it easier for English speakers to learn Portuguese. But as far as native Latin speakers are concerned, this advantage expands dramatically as you get deeper into your studies, just like Chinese people learning Japanese, the more advanced you get the more kanji you have, the more pronounced your advantage over Europeans and Americans becomes.

For Spanish (Castilian) speakers, Portuguese is more like the dialect of a small town a hundred kilometers from home. According to the YouTube channel langfocus, 89% of the vocabulary in the two languages is interchangeable (there's no guarantee that the words that are interchangeable are commonly used; for example, the Portuguese word for "think" is more often used as achar than the Spanish etymology of pensar, which has no Spanish equivalent, hallar. False friends is also an important point to keep in mind, as the two words are spelled almost exactly the same way, but their meanings are very different: in Spanish, una cena exquisita is a good dinner, while in Portuguese, uma cena esquisita looks the same at first glance. The Spanish word una cena exquisita is a delicious dinner, while the Portuguese word uma cena esquisita looks the same at first glance, but means "a strange scene". Apart from these points of confusion and some minor grammatical differences, Spanish and Portuguese are like twin sisters, with different acquired habits and preferences that may be found in the **** same environment of origin.

Native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can communicate without the need to use each other's language, but speakers of French and Italian, which are similar, need to learn it carefully. It's true that the Latin family is like the Wu dialects; learn one and you'll be able to integrate the others, and even if the pronunciation gap is so big that you can't understand it at all, write it down and you'll understand it all, so it should be a very fast learning experience. But the reality is that Italians are not a minority of good French and Spanish speakers (not enough Portuguese learners), but the time it takes to reach fluency feels no less than Chinese students majoring in small languages - which brings us to the last two factors, especially the first one.

The individual's approach to learning, goals, and level of effort (intrinsic to the learning process)

No matter what field you're in, the motivation to learn is always the most important thing. People who learn for the love of it are generally the most advanced, because they can devote all their free time to learning as a hobby. It's even faster if you also have a basic knowledge of Latin languages, I myself was able to read the news in a month without any problems (learning Spanish is actually straightforward, but there are some common words that can be difficult to understand and can be ambiguous) and to the point where I was able to communicate with Brazilians on a day-to-day basis. Portuguese majors/classes with only a basic knowledge of English may take a little longer, but the foundation is much stronger with systematic practice, as you can see in the other replies. Like ordinary Italians, who rely on the closeness of their mother tongue and other languages of the Latin family, they use Italian whenever they can in their life, and they can change their language every day to brag a little bit, even if they've practiced, plus the training courses here in Milan are usually held once a week, and there is a big possibility of water (everyone has their own main business, and when they get tired during the class, they will start to natter on their family's life in Italian). So the progress really depends on how the individual performs in their spare time.

Third, how many Portuguese resources can be used to learn (external factors in the learning process)

According to the 2019 data survey, Brazilian Internet users spend an average of 3 hours and 45 minutes a day on social media, which can be said to be the domestic 996 office workers and junior high and high school students struggling in the sea of questions do not dare to think about it, and so it is possible to discover and be on the same line with a Brazilian Internet user is probably easier than to find an article in Portuguese. And because of its status as a minor language in the world, Brazilians are often enthusiastic about teaching Portuguese learners, which has led to a much wider circulation of Brazilian Portuguese than Portuguese in Portugal.

With limited resources for Portuguese as a minor language and unable to leave the house due to the Italian epidemic, my personal learning is almost entirely tied to a few mobile apps. I've detailed some of them before in another reply, so I'll pick a few pivotal ones and share them briefly here.

1, Mr. Deer Speaks Foreign Languages/Lingodeer

As an introductory Portuguese app, Mr. Deer solved the problem of me not wanting to spend money on a pdf textbook, because its functions are too comprehensive, and it is able to improve my ability in all four directions: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Listening: The app is in Brazilian Portuguese, and the recordings of every sentence in every unit are basically done by Brazilians, and read aloud with sound and pictures.

Speaking: After each unit there is a function to dub the video. By constantly comparing your own recordings with the original videos, you can find and correct your own pronunciation, and naturally overcome your shyness about speaking a foreign language.

Reading: The curriculum covers almost everything from 0 to b2, and the unit summaries at the beginning of each lesson can be used as a grammar book, so you can practice immediately.

Writing: Translation and conjugation questions together make up a significant portion of the unit, but the app has its own limitations, and you'll have to get your writing corrected by a teacher or native speaker if you want to practice it properly.

Because of the app's ability to accurately count the amount of time you spend studying Portuguese, I learned that it took me 20 hours to get through the entire course (which would have taken much longer if you didn't have a basic knowledge of Spanish), so I'm going to make good use of the app and other resources to do a good job of reviewing.

2, Easy Portuguese (Youtube channel)

Easy languages series can be said to be the most recommended language learning channel on YouTube. Each episode has a theme, and the host extends the topic as much as possible by interviewing passers-by on the street, so that viewers can learn more vocabulary and expressions, learn a lot of colloquialisms that can't be learned in textbooks, and get to know more about the customs of Portuguese-speaking countries. Now Easy Brazilian Portuguese has done 56 episodes, it's a must watch channel every time you click on youtube~ Easy Portuguese from Portugal is also there, but only did 3 episodes before it was stopped due to the epidemic.

3, Telecine

Glob's website for watching movies and catching up with dramas, similar to the Brazilian version of Netflix, offers a 30-day free trial period to watch all the content, after which it costs about 50 yuan a month, and you can cancel the subscription at any time. The problem is that there are only Brazilian dramas, so I don't know which ones are worth watching. If you want to watch dramas from other countries at the same time, you can subscribe to Netflix or use daily motion (free, some Brazilian dramas are available, but individual episodes may be incomplete).

As for employment prospects, as a non-lusophone student I have no qualifications to offer advice, nor do I have any friends around me who have taken a Portuguese language certificate. Most of the Portuguese jobs seen on the domestic recruitment and job search sites require a degree in Portuguese, and if it is purely based on the hobby of Portuguese as a second foreign language, it may be possible to stay in the country to find relevant work or more difficult, after all, the Portuguese and Brazilian economy is not very prosperous, ready for long-term expatriate Brazil or Africa. Lastly, Chinese language education in Brazil is becoming more popular, and in the future there may be Brazilians who speak fluent Mandarin competing for Portuguese speaking positions.

Lastly, I hope it will be helpful to you, and I wish you all to find your goal soon!