Most of my students hit the same week somewhere around month four, when they find out that the language on the page and the language in the street are not quite the same thing.
Most of my students hit the same week somewhere around month four. They have been doing well up to that point, the homework comes back neat, they can read a menu and write me a paragraph about their weekend. Then they go to Portugal, and a man at a kiosk asks them something, and they hear nothing at all.
They usually come back to the next lesson a bit embarrassed, and they tell me their Portuguese is worse than they thought. However, what they have actually just discovered is that written Portuguese and spoken Portuguese are two rather different things, and they had only been practising one of them.
The page is a polite fiction
When you read Portugal on a page, you see three syllables sitting there patiently. When somebody from Lisbon says it out loud, the first vowel barely happens at all, and the word arrives compressed and front-loaded and finished before you were ready for it.
We do this to almost everything, because unstressed vowels in European Portuguese get squeezed until there is very little left of them. It is not laziness and it is not slang, it is simply how the language runs at speed.
So a student who learned from a book has a mental recording of each word, syllable by syllable, and then the real thing does not match it. They are not failing to understand, they are listening for something that was never going to be there in the first place.
Nobody warns you
I think this is the honest failure of most Portuguese courses, including some good ones. They teach you the written language and let you assume the spoken one will follow along behind it.
It does not follow. Spanish is generous this way, and Italian even more so (what you see is broadly what you say), but Portuguese is not generous at all, because Portuguese swallows things.
A student of mine once told me that Lisbon sounded like people talking with the sound turned halfway down.
The students who cope best are the ones who find this out early, while it is still interesting rather than demoralising. The ones who struggle are usually those who spent a year reading silently and built a private version of the language that nobody else in the country actually speaks.
What I do about it
I make people read out loud in the first lesson. Badly, usually, and that is completely fine.
There is a particular thing that happens when you say a Portuguese sentence aloud and hear it land wrong, because you cannot unhear it afterwards. That gap between what you meant and what came out is the most useful teaching moment in the language, and it only exists if you are speaking.
The other thing I do is refuse to slow down for too long. A little, at first, of course. But a learner who only ever hears careful Portuguese is being prepared for a conversation that will never happen, since nobody at the kiosk is going to slow down for you and they should not have to.
The week after
The good news is that the week after is usually the best one.
Once a student knows the vowels are being eaten, they start hearing the ones that survive. Once they know that an s at the end of a word turns into a sh, half of Lisbon stops sounding like noise. It is a small number of rules doing a very large amount of damage, and the damage undoes quickly.
I wrote the whole thing down, sound by sound, in a guide to European Portuguese pronunciation. It is the explanation I end up giving in person about twice a month.
If you would rather I just listened to you read a paragraph and told you what your mouth is doing, I'm here to help :)
Nuno