A language learner’s notebookgrammar, phrases and the mistakes you keep making

Method

1. 1

   Have your assistant set up the shelf

   Connect your assistant to know.sh following the support page, and ask it to make a shelf called Portuguese for Lisbon with this line: “European Portuguese, as spoken in Lisbon. Not Brazilian.” The line is for the assistant as much as for you; most learning material online is Brazilian, and so is much of what a language model has read.

   Ask for three documents on it: Grammar, Phrases by situation and My mistakes. Three is deliberate. A notebook split into forty topics is one you stop opening; three documents with many findings each is one you keep up.

2. 2

   After each lesson, let it file your notes

   Give your assistant the lesson: type up your notes, or attach a photo of the page in Claude or ChatGPT, along with the corrections your tutor made. Ask it to file each rule as a finding in Grammar, titled with the rule’s name and one example, “Pronoun after the verb (Chamo-me)”, “Estar a plus infinitive for what is happening now”, because titles are what Look up shows first; each new phrase under its situation; and each repeated correction in My mistakes.

   Where European and Brazilian Portuguese differ, ask it to add a small table: the Lisbon form, the Brazilian one, and the English. It is the fastest way to stop mixing them.

3. 3

   Make the grammar yours in the editor

   Open Grammar, press Edit, and rewrite each new rule as you would explain it to a friend, then add five examples of your own. The assistant’s wording is a draft; the rule you remember is the one you phrased. Check every accent and hyphen against your notes, and strike out any example that reads as Brazilian.

   Drag the rules into the order you learned them, and mark the ones you still trip over as Key. Every change the assistant made is in Revisions, marked as an assistant’s, so you can see what it filed.

4. 4

   File phrases by situation, not by grammar

   In Phrases by situation, make a finding per place you will need to talk: at the café, at the pharmacy, at the Loja do Cidadão, viewing a flat, on the phone with the landlord. Under each, the phrases as a list with the English beside them, and a line on register: with the landlord it is o senhor or a senhora, not você, which can sound curt in Lisbon.

   Some words are simply different in Portugal, and belong in a table near the top:

   Lisbon	Brazil	English
   pequeno-almoço	café da manhã	breakfast
   autocarro	ônibus	bus
   comboio	trem	train
   telemóvel	celular	mobile phone

5. 5

   Log every mistake someone corrects twice

   The most useful document is My mistakes. When your tutor or anyone else corrects the same thing twice, make a finding titled with the wrong and right forms, “Me chamo → Chamo-me”, and file it as a Problem. In the body: what you said, what you should have said, why, and a link to the rule in Grammar (paste the finding’s address).

   Highlight the part you keep getting wrong. Mark the mistakes still happening as Key, and once a month read the list from the top. When one has not come back for a while, unmark it.

6. 6

   Ask your assistant to explain a rule, and check the answer

   When a rule does not make sense, ask your assistant, naming the finding: “Using know.sh, read Pronoun after the verb (Chamo-me) in Grammar on my Portuguese for Lisbon shelf. Why is it Não me chamo but Chamo-me? European Portuguese only.” It answers from your findings, and can add what it said to the finding if you ask.

   Check anything that matters with your tutor or a reference grammar. Assistants can slip into Brazilian usage without saying so, and smaller local models more often than most; a confident wrong explanation is worse than none. If an explanation is good, rewrite it in your own words in the editor.

7. 7

   Drill with typed answers, accents and all

   Ask your assistant for typed-answer quizzes: “Using know.sh, make a quiz of eight typed-answer questions from My mistakes on my Portuguese for Lisbon shelf. Give the English and ask for the European Portuguese, with only one correct answer to each, and no punctuation at the end.” It writes the quiz with know.sh’s quiz tools, and you take it in know.sh or the iOS app. The answer must match exactly: every accent, tilde, cedilla and hyphen, every capital letter, and every space, including one left at the end. pequeno-almoco is wrong.

   That strictness is the point, but it cuts both ways. Ask for short answers with one right form; a sentence with two correct word orders will mark one of them wrong. On a Mac, Option-e then a vowel gives an acute accent, Option-n then a gives ã, and Option-c gives ç. On an iPhone, hold the letter down.

8. 8

   Use Look up as your glossary

   Your glossary is Look up. Press ⌘K and type autocarro: Look up searches every finding, titles and bodies alike, and lists each one that uses the word. For a word you want to find first, put it in the finding’s title or first line: “Vocabulary for viewing a flat: senhorio, fiador, caução”.

   The index holds only recurring names, such as Lisboa, Inês or Loja, the people and places that come up again and again; highlighted findings print in bold under them. Quizzes come back under Revisit after 3, 7 or 21 days, depending on your score, and do the rest.