Having studied in English for my Bachelors and Masters degrees, I enrolled for a PhD in animal health 2 months back but am required to read it in Portuguese in a Portuguese-speaking country. After 6 months of language lessons, I will need to take coursework to earn credits. Thesis and defense shall also be in Portuguese. I am a beginner in the language and 2 months down the line, I feel like my progress is too slow. Can it be done? Has it been done? Any advice based on experience out there?

Is your first language a romance language (ie Spanish, Italian, French) or at least can you speak a romance language fluently? If so, I would say it can be done, with lots of effort though. I'm Spanish and I studied for 1 year in Italy, without having studied much Italian previously, and at the end of the year I managed to do my oral and written exams in Italian. If you can't speak any other romance languages - how much time do you have till you read your thesis? 3 years, which is the usual length of a British PhD, doesn't seem a lot of time to me - specially considering that you have to achieve a level of the language comparable to that of an educated native speaker of Portuguese.

Thanks Nimrod81. I shall have 3 years with a possible extension of an additional year. Most of the literature is in English, luckily, but I still need to get a good command of Portuguese. How did you go about studying Italian? Say how many hours per day? Alone or as part of a group? My first language isn't a romance language

I studied Modern Languages for my BA and it was only after my BA and school education that I was able to write critically in a foreign language. It will be difficult. Just take your time: mastering a foreign language whilst researching for a PhD will not be easy!

I'm doing second language acquisition for my PhD and I'm looking at the acquisition of verbal meaning in Romance from non-Romance first language learners.

Kerosen - I did a 4-month course of Italian as part of my degree before going to Italy, then in the months before moving there I tried to read a lot in Italian by myself - it was not difficult for me because the languages are so similar but it helped me in acquiring some vocabulary. Then in Italy I joined a course at University of 4 hours a week (in a large group) but I don´t think this was really useful, I only came to speak and write the language by practicing it every day. Hopefully your institution will organize Portuguese courses for foreign students for free or for a low fee, and also specific courses in academic writing in Portuguese when you've acquired a higher level. Good luck.