My primary goal as an immigrant to Portugal in my first year is to become conversant in the language. This is the right thing to do both ethically and practically. However, as a middle-aged Anglophone person with only French and Ancient Greek at the A2 level, I'm finding understanding spoken Portuguese really hard. After three months, I can read most newspaper articles and get the general drift of radio presenters. Hearing Portuguese in everyday life (to say nothing of speaking it, which is oddly tricky for me) has proven nearly impossible.

To anyone who has successfully mastered conversational Portuguese as an English speaker, how did you train yourself to turn the sounds people make into words in your head? Even French was more comprehensible to me than Portuguese. The fact that it is a romance language makes the vocabulary (though not the grammar) pretty easy. Phonologically, however, it's been a nightmare for me. Anyone who has any practical advice, I'd genuinely appreciate it; I badly want to show this respect to the people of my new country.