andre-nunes

I think that if you don't practice a language regularly you can lose some parts of the language. Even if it is your mother language, I've seen cases of emigrants that after 20 to 30 years away from their home country, they can struggle to speak the language, they certainly start speaking with an accent from their new country. But I don't think that in this case they forget the meaning of most words... they just lose fluency

In my second language? Merry Christmas because my second language is English. Feliz Natal! That's how you say it in Portuguese :grin:

From an objective standpoint I can tell that my mother language (Portuguese from Portugal) can be harder to learn than English, there's just so many concepts and complications about it, like gender for objects with no "logical" explanation to why an object is female or male. English looks like a failry straightfoward language, at least I found it very easy to learn but it depends from person to person due to background and cultural factors.

Wow I disagree completely, I think that English is the easier language to learn. At least to me it was... I guess that when you grow up watching Cartoons and playing video-games in English since a very young age that you pick up some vocabulary. After one year of learning English in school, not sure when but I could speak English pretty well. Even while being a native Portuguese speaker I can tell that Portuguese is a lot harder to learn, as we have some concepts strange to English speakers, like objects having gender for example.

I think that learning can have a therapeutic effect when you are going through some tough times, sometimes when I feel down I just read a book or practice a skill I'm learning to take my mind off the problem for a while. I know that running away from your problems is not the best approach but for those really hard times it's good to forget everything else and do something productive that you enjoy. When the study session is over, I'm motivated to tackle any problem. (at least for a while...) I call it a "learning high" :grin:

To be fair English is already the worlds' language, it's uses extend from political events, business meetings, video-games, movies, music and so on. English is the lingua franca for most worldwide events where participants do not share the same native language. Why this happened? Well, first the British empire was huge and present everywhere, this helped the language spread across the 5 continents as a language used mostly for trading and bargaining . More recently with the rise of the USA as a World Superpower almost every piece of culture or product or service is presented in English as the original language, which makes the language very valuable to learn. That's why it is taught in school on most of the world's developed countries.

Hello everyone, My name is André and I live in Portugal. At the moment I am learning German using an Android app, so far I'm enjoying myself but it can be a tough language at times, it's nothing like English in terms of difficulty. I think that it might be close to Portuguese it terms of difficulty but I was lucky to be born here and have that "asset" as native language I'm learning German because I think it might help me in the future if I emigrate to a different European country, due to the economic crisis living in Portugal might not be the best choice after graduating and German is spoken in many "rich" countries like Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and so on. I hope to help people learning Portuguese here and improve my other languages as well.

There's a new movie that came out this year which was a collaboration between Portugal and France, it's called "La cage dorée", "A Gaiola Dourada" in the Portuguese version. It was very successful here in Portugal and in France. It's a comedy. The name means THE GILDED CAGE in English. It tells the story of Portuguese emigrants living in France for 30 years and how they got rich enough to come back to Portugal. (which was their longtime dream). It's a funny story to which many emigrants can relate.

Well for the reasons you've mentioned, Brazil is rising to become a world power and it's just a matter of time until they start exporting services, movies, video games in Portuguese so it will be a good language to learn if you plan to work with them. This also means that the major companies in the world will have to give customer support in Portuguese as the buying power of the Brazilian increase. Don't forget that Brazil's population is 200 million people which is an attractive market to explore