Welcome Back Listener!

It’s been a while! Last time we saw you, it was still 2012… Christmas trees were up, and you were still making your 2013 resolutions.

Now that the New Year has begun, the #1 question everyone’s asking is…

“How do I fulfill my resolution and make serious Portuguese progress?”

One: Stop thinking and start doing. Take on the challenge and jump in. Your progress starts NOW.

Two: Create a measurable and attainable Portuguese goal. (Master new 100 words in 2 weeks, listen to 5 Portuguese lessons a week, hold Portuguese a conversation for 5 minutes, etc.)

Three: Challenge yourself more each month. (Go for 10 minute conversations, move on to 200 words, etc.)

It’s as easy as that!

So this 2013, take the PortuguesePod101
12-Month Challenge!

Your progress starts now! Jump in and get 1 whole year of Premium Access for only $99 (that’s just $8.25/a month and 45% OFF the regular price) until January 18th, 2013!

Got your Portuguese goal ready? Good! With a 1-Year Premium Subscription, you’ll dive right into fun and effective Portuguese conversation lessons while our Dashboard tracks and measures your progress throughout the year. Seeing how far you’ve progressed will keep you motivated to keep on learning!

Reached your first goal? Congratulations! Now, challenge yourself even further! Move on to more advanced lessons and bigger word lists! With Premium, you get all lessons from Beginner level to Advanced and Premium tools including the 2000 core words list! Our giant library of lessons will keep you busy from January 1 to December 31st.

Need More Motivation? Get insider tips and tricks on how to master your Portuguese resolution this year. The Insider’s Circle Newsletter is an exclusive bonus gift when you use coupon code CHALLENGE to save 45% on 12-Month Premium!

Take The Challenge – Click To Get The Most Effective Portuguese Course For 1 Year!

What’s A Premium Subscription?
It’s the most popular plan among our users. Why? All the Portuguese lessons we’ve ever made (and will make), and all the handy lesson notes and Premium study tools are yours. Plus, you get to track your progress every step of the way.

Here’s how it works!
You learn real-life Portuguese directly from native speakers in every lesson. Our lesson hosts explain and simplify the language for you: conversation, grammar, vocabulary, culture – you learn it all and are ready to speak ASAP.

You also get printable lesson notes to help review and master everything presented in the lesson. And with exclusive Premium tools, you get Portuguese word lists, pronunciation practice and the study tools to master ‘em all fast.

Click Here To Get Unlimited PortuguesePod101 Access for 45% OFF!

Oh, and that’s not all!

Here’s what you get in more detail:

Ready to crush your 2013 Resolution? Take the PortuguesePod101 Challenge and get one whole year of non-stop Portuguese lessons, lesson notes and more! Hurry, the PortuguesePod101 challenge ends January 18th, 2013!

1-Year Premium is just $8.25 a month. Click Here To Start Learning Portuguese!

Rise and shine, listener!

You’re in a new year and you’ve made your Portuguese resolution!

Just one last thing left to do: start speaking some Portuguese with PortuguesePod101.

Whether you’re just starting out light with the basics, or going heavy…you’re about to add some serious Portuguese muscle this year. You’ll go from simple phrases to dominating conversations in Portuguese. Why? We’re guiding you every step of the way, that’s why!

And we’ve made it our New Year’s resolution to go heavy too. We’re pushing out all new series – all new lessons to get you learning the Portuguese language and culture inside-out with native speakers. Stay tuned because the first lessons start publishing on January 7, 2013!

Here’s a sneak peek of the PortuguesePod101 2013 schedule

Monday: Lower Beginner
Tuesday: Upper Intermediate
Thursday: Throwback Thursday
Friday: Portuguese in 3 minutes

Remember! All newly published PortuguesePod101 lessons are free for 3 weeks. With a Free Lifetime Account, you have 3 weeks worth of lessons at any given time and access to every new lesson published.

Click here to sign up for a Free Lifetime Account and get a head start on the Portuguese language!

Welcome to 2013!

P.S. Make 2013 your year! Take the 12-month Challenge and see how far your Portuguese goes!
Get a 1-Year Premium Subscription for only $99 until January 18th!

Click Here To Take The Challenge!

Hey there Listener!

Here’s a thought:

The world around you needs to have little Portuguese labels.
Anything you see, you’d know its Portuguese meaning immediately.

Office building? Check.
Train station and everything inside? Check.
The items in your kitchen? Check.

Learning Portuguese would take half the time!

With InnovativeLanguage.com’s Visual Dictionary Portuguese iBook, you can do just that. This Visual Dictionary is the first of its kind. Even iTunes has noticed!

Learn by Exploring the World in Portuguese!

Just tap and zoom through 26 different everyday scenarios. You see the word in its real-world context, read it and hear its pronunciation. From the city streets, to train stations, and right down to your own kitchen, you learn 550+ Portuguese vocabulary words for anything and everything you’d encounter along the way.

Each scenario comes with:

With Visual Dictionary Portuguese (Enhanced Version), you can:

Greetings from Team PortuguesePod101!

We’re stopping by the blog today to tell you about an exciting new feature we’re slowly rolling out on the website. A few select users have been chosen to test drive the new Dashboard feature.

Log in to your account today to see if you’re one of them!

The new Dashboard aims to help you track your Portuguese learning quickly and easily. We’ve produced a lot of lessons in our lifetime and while we pride ourselves on offering a wide variety of lessons to our users, we realized that it can been pretty overwhelming for some.

Where do I start? What level is best for me? What series do I move on to now?

These were common questions coming in from avid users like you, so we set out to solve these commonly asked questions, and the Dashboard was born!

We’ll of course continue to listen to our fans and tweak the Dashboard to provide the very best experience for everyone. If you have questions or feedback for us, send us an email here.

To help you get started, here are a few of the big changes:

• Your learning progress

• Recommended lesson alert

• Your learning profile

• Account information

• Quick links to useful tools

We hope you enjoy the brand new Dashboard! Stay tuned for more tweaks and updates to the site and head over to PortuguesePod101.com to test out the new Dashboard beta.

Hello Listener,

(For maximum impact, read in Old Spice Guy’s voice)

Look at our homepage. Now back to us.
Now back to our homepage. Now back to us.

Look different? It should! With the help of our wonderful users, like you, we’ve listened to your feedback and came up with this. Designing the homepage has been like watching a baby grow.

Our iTunes logo has also changed. You can see it on our Facebook and Twitter accounts!

So when you download our free audio lessons on iTunes and see a new logo… do not be alarmed. It’s still PortuguesePod101.

The New

We’ve decided it was time for a change here at PortuguesePod101.
Why the change? Well, We’re not just a podcast website – but a language learning system.

This design makeover is just one small step towards one giant leap to becoming a complete online learning system.

Thoughts on the design? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below.

But Wait!
What’s that? Look below. There’s a link.
To our 18% OFF Back To School Sale that you’ve always wanted. Look again!
It’s still there but only until August 26th. Sadly, schools don’t lower their costs and neither do student loans. However, we do.

18% OFF any premium subscription. Use Coupon 2COOL4SCHOOL and save!

If you’re taking Portuguese this semester, you’re more than prepared. Just don’t sleep in class, unless you’re dozing off to the sweet sounds of a PortuguesePod101 audio lesson.

And If you’re not in school (lucky!) – you’re still a student of Portuguese. Join in on the discount too!

Note: The Back to School Sale Ends in 48 hours. Save 18% OFF now because your school never does this.

Google is the world’s biggest Search Engine.
Apple is the world’s biggest smart phone maker.
The Blue whale is the world’s biggest animal.

And now, our little Innovative Language Learning family has become the world’s biggest language learning app maker! Apple verified this themselves. Surprised? Us too!

In about 5 years, we’ve made over 600 apps across 40 languages that available on the iTunes store for the iPhone and iPad alone. Not to mention, our Android and Mac desktop apps.

Can you imagine? That’s more language packed in one spot than a United Nations conference. Except you could learn them all. Or some. Mastering 600 apps is only for insane overachievers.

Some of our most popular mobile apps include Survival Phrases for brushing up on essential phrases when you visit Brazil, Gengo FlashCards for multi-sensory vocabulary learning, and the recently updated WordPower that gives you the core 2000 words and phrases necessary for daily conversation. The language is directly at your fingertips – you’re touching words and sentences as you learn them!

In fact, you can download some for free or unlock all features with our premium apps.

Head over to our Apps page for the complete list of apps and more information. You can also search the Android Market and iTunes store for “Innovative Language Learning.”

Try them risk free!

Let us know what you think. We update them regularly based on your feedback!

It seems to us that studying through rote memorization is the best method for retention. While it works (to an extent), unless you encounter what you’ve memorized on a constant basis, you will forget it. After all, how much do you remember after you took that last test at school?

Somehow, we’re under the impression that if we reread and repeat things enough times in our head, it will magically get stuck there. In a way, it’s the lazy and painful approach to studying. The difficulty lies in the fact that we’re introducing a new concept to our brain with nothing to relate it to.

Do logarithms make sense to you? (let the non-math lovers answer please)

The concept itself may have no relation to you or anything in your life. It’s too abstract and thus hard to remember. Think of it as placing a pebble into a big web – it will fall right through because it’s not connected to the web and has no relation to it.

So, what do we do?
We make the complex simple by associating it to something we already know.

In other words, we make the abstract more tangible, and thus easier to understand. While this takes a bit of creativity, the time you spend on making associations and remembering them will be significantly less than the time you spend memorizing and returning to it when you forget it.

1) Association is a fairly general term in terms of using it as a study method. There are many ways to utilize it, from using mind maps and acronyms, to drawing pictures and creating stories.

You’ve probably ran into some already without realizing it.

Take the acronym PEMDAS which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, and Addition and Subtraction. Remembering those mathematical terms would be more challenging had we nothing to associate with, but since we all know the letters P, E, M, D, A, and S – we can make a connection between something simple and something complex.

Mind you that this is a simple example that can be taken to complex concepts. You may need to stretch your imagination a bit to create a connection but as Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

2) The Loci Method, in a sense, is association in practice.

Say you have a list of 9 words to remember – first, think of a place you know well, such as your house, apartment, school, or work place. You know where all the rooms are in relation to each other. (Avoid using a place you’re not familiar with as it would be tough recall it.)

Once you’ve decided on a place, say your home, and can visualize it, go ahead and place those words in different rooms, but associate unusual images with them – the more bizarre it is, the better you’ll remember it.

If the word “orange” is on your list, replace the TV in your room with a big glowing orange. Once you’ve spread the words out across the rooms in specific places(it’s okay to place more than 1 word per room, as long as they’re in unique locations), imagine yourself going from word #1 to word#9 in that place.

For example: 9 random words to remember: muffin-blaster, croissant, hair-gel, zombie, platypus, logarithm, snowball, snack-a-holic, orange.

As I open the door to enter my apartment, there’s hairgel on the knob and it gets on my hand. I take off my croissant shaped shoes at the doorway, and proceed to the bathroom on the left. There’s a platypus surfing in my bathtub. I go to wash the gel off and in the mirror and see a zombie looking back at me! I walk out, towards the living room and there’s a big orange TV glowing in the center – my roommate must be home. I go to the kitchen and see that snack-a-holic raiding the fridge. There’s nothing left in the fridge except a snowball. As I walk out, I get hit in the head with a muffin – seem my roommate has gotten his hands on my muffin-blaster I ordered online. I enter my room, look out my window and there’s a tree log that has exceptional rhythm, dancing to salsa – a logarithm!

The fact that you turn it into a story, associate bizarre images with it, and place the words into a familiar location reinforces those words several times over making memorization a lot easier.

More so, the effectiveness lies in using a familiar location in which you organize the list of data. You know where your kitchen is in relation to your bedroom, bathroom, etc. and based on that you know which room contains which set of data.

Take some time out and research learning strategies! Tell us what works for you!

You were swimming, weren’t you!?

Don’t worry, just checking.

Summer’s here and we’re in the mood to celebrate this warm joyous season – and what better way to start summer off right than have a Summer Celebration Sale!

Why celebrate summer you ask? Excellent question. Because not only is the sun shining and the ice-cream plentiful, but we also have a lot of NEW things to release. We’re kicking off July with 6 brand NEW languages, NEW Premium Flashcards, NEW lessons AND a NEW discount of 22% OFF for Premium Subscribers.

Click here to get the discount and get all of our new features!

This Fourth of July, we welcome Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, Hindi, Hebrew and Indonesian to the Pod101 family! Also, our Premium Flashcards are faster, better, and stronger with spaced-repetition and progress tracking that will make you learn vocabulary faster and stronger too. Finally, we’re continuing with the 2nd half of our 2011 season with brand new lessons from your favorite energetic hosts.

But why 22% OFF on all Premium Subscriptions? Why not 17.3%? We’ve debated this extensively and while 17.3 is a fantastic number, we’re using 22% to mark our new total of 22 languages at Interactive Language Learning.

The only catch is that this sale doesn’t last all summer – sale ends July 15th!

Join the Summer Celebration Sale: New Languages, New Premium Flashcards, New Lessons, New 22% Discount, and A New Sunburn (not provided by us). Subscribe for 22% Less and get it all here!

Premium Members, your Premium Account just got a whole lot more powerful! My Flashcards now allows you to study the Portuguese words you want by importing lists from audio and video lessons, your My WordBank and the Portuguese Core Word Lists. Here’s a quick rundown of the new features:

My Flashcards Dashboard: My Flashcards have a brand new interface. Import words from any audio and video lesson, My WordBank and the Core Word Lists. Create, edit and delete as many decks as you want!

Create a New Deck: How you want to study is completely up to you! You control what displays on the front and back of cards. Create new decks out of the existing words in My Flashcards. Simple pick the words, name your deck and you’re ready to study.

Front of Card Display: The new My Flashcards load fast and are easy to use. Test yourself with native audio recordings. When you’re ready for the answer, simply click on the card to flip it over.

Back of Card Display: Learning sometimes isn’t as simple as just Right or Wrong. Our smart spaced repetition system will evaluate your progress from the three answer choices so you test more of what you need. Get extra review with sample sentences and audio.

My Stats: We track your progress in My Stats. Don’t just learn new words – master them! This chart will keep you motivated to master all the words in your deck!

My Flashcards is still in beta mode, which means, we’re still working out some kinks. If you’re a Premium Member, head over to My Flashcards under My Tools to try them out. These flashcards are part of your Premium Subscription. Something not working? Send us a message at contactus@portuguesepod101.com .

Not a Premium Member? For a limited time only, get 1-Month of Premium Access to PortuguesePod101.com for only $5 – that’s even cheaper than our regular priced Basic 1-Month Plan! Use coupon code FLASHCARDS at checkout to get Premium for $5.00. Hurry! This offer ends on June 30th, 2011!