# A language learner’s notebook — grammar, phrases and the mistakes you keep making

Recipe No. 13, Study and exams. From The know.sh Cookbook: https://know.sh/cookbook/language-notebook

- For: an adult learning European Portuguese before moving to Lisbon
- You bring: notes from a weekly class or tutor, the corrections people give you, a list of situations you will face in the first month, and a keyboard that can type ã and ç
- You get: a notebook in three documents (Grammar, Phrases by situation and My mistakes), a glossary you search with Look up, and typed-answer quizzes that check every accent
- Time: twenty minutes after each lesson, and a quiz on the commute a few times a week
- Keep it: private; never on a public link

Learning European Portuguese as an adult means learning it in pieces: a rule from class on Tuesday, a phrase from a video, a correction from a shopkeeper who heard *Me chamo* and knew at once you had learned from a Brazilian app. The pieces end up in a paper notebook, three apps and your phone's notes, and the mistake you made in June is the one you make again in September.

This recipe keeps them in one place, in three documents. *Grammar* holds each rule in your own words. *Phrases by situation* holds what to say at the café, the pharmacy and the Loja do Cidadão. *My mistakes* holds every error someone corrected twice, with what you should have said and why. After each lesson your AI assistant, whichever one you use, files the new material into the right document; you fix it up in the editor, and the assistant writes typed-answer quizzes from all three, and the answer must match exactly, so a missing tilde is a wrong answer, as it would be in a written test.

The listening and speaking happen elsewhere: with your tutor, on podcasts, and in Lisbon. know.sh has no audio, and a notebook cannot teach you how *Lisboa* sounds.

## What you will use

- **Your AI assistant**: Claude, ChatGPT or a local model, connected to know.sh: it files each lesson’s notes into the three documents, explains a rule from your findings, and writes typed-answer quizzes.
- **The editor**: Where you rewrite each rule in your own words, check every accent, and strike out anything that is Brazilian.
- **Research document**: Three documents: *Grammar*, *Phrases by situation* and *My mistakes*.
- **Finding**: A finding per rule, per situation and per recurring mistake; mistakes filed as *Problem*, the ones still happening marked **Key**.
- **Quiz**: Typed-answer quizzes where you write the Portuguese and it must match exactly, accents and hyphens included.
- **The A–Z index**: The index gathers the names that recur (Lisboa, Inês, Loja); look words up with ⌘K.
- **The iOS app**: The iOS app, in TestFlight beta, where long-pressing a vowel gives you its accents.

## Method

### 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

## Prompts to try

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, make a quiz of eight typed-answer questions from the document “My mistakes” on my “Portuguese for Lisbon” shelf. Give the English and ask for the European Portuguese. Each answer must have exactly one correct form: short, lower case unless a name, no punctuation at the end. Cite the finding each comes from.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> Using know.sh, read the document “Grammar” on my “Portuguese for Lisbon” shelf and list any example sentence that looks like Brazilian rather than European Portuguese, or that has a missing accent. Quote the sentence, say what you would expect in Lisbon and how sure you are. Change nothing.

Your assistant, connected to know.sh (Claude, ChatGPT or a local model):

> I am viewing a flat on Saturday. Using know.sh, search my “Portuguese for Lisbon” shelf and list the phrases I already have for asking about the rent, the deposit, the guarantor and the contract, and tell me which of those four I have nothing for yet. Do not add new phrases; I will ask my tutor.

## Variations

- Keep the same three documents for any language; the typed-answer drills matter most in languages with accents, tones written as marks, or a script of their own.
- Once you are in Lisbon, add a fourth document, *Heard today*, for phrases you overheard and looked up, and move the useful ones into *Phrases by situation* each week.
- Planning the move itself? A [group trip guide](/cookbook/trip-guide) shows how to keep bookings and local picks on one link, and the notebook can link to it.

## Where it falls short

- There is no audio. You cannot record yourself, add a native speaker’s recording or hear a word; pronunciation stays with your tutor, podcasts and conversation.
- Typed answers must match exactly, with no allowance for a second correct form. A question with two right answers will mark one of them wrong, so keep drill answers short.
- The index is not a dictionary. It holds only names that recur in titles and first lines; ordinary words, however often you use them, are found with Look up.
- A smaller local model calls know.sh’s tools less reliably and may file a phrase in the wrong document; check what it wrote in Revisions.
- Quizzes return on a 3, 7 or 21-day rule by score; this is not spaced repetition, and a vocabulary deck in a flashcard app will track single words better.

## A note on classes, exams and an assistant’s Portuguese

If you study with a school or a tutor, check their policy on AI tools and say how you are using them where they ask. If you later sit an official exam such as the CIPLE, study from your own notes and the published sample materials, never from questions recalled from the exam itself.

Write the grammar in your own words, and summarise your course book rather than copying its pages; its explanations and exercises belong to its authors.

Any AI assistant can make mistakes, and in Portuguese the commonest is quietly using Brazilian forms. Check anything important with your tutor or a reference grammar of European Portuguese.

Indexed under: European Portuguese, Grammar notes, Phrasebooks, Mistakes log, Accents, Personal glossary.