I disagree. If you're learning a language from a different family group altogether, there are no cognates to rely on - it's basically just rote in the beginning, at least until you get to about around 2000 words, and a better feel for the language's structure. 

I think the formula is patience + passion + practice and if you have that, you shouldn't have any problems. 

I'm lost. You've pointed out that there are similarities between certain languages, but won't people figure that out immediately when they start to learn the languages? Why write an article about it? At the very best, this is just a low level encouragement article.

Alexandre, the trick is to recognize what sounds get "converted" from Portuguese to Spanish. You just need to memorize the rules for those words, and continually apply them through practice. Some examples of "conversion" rules are:

-ação -> -ción

-dade -> -dad

-gem -> -je (words in Portuguese that end in -gem are often feminine and in Spanish, the equivalent words end in -je but are masculine. Ex. a viagem -> el viaje.)

I guess the first priority for you to speed up the learning a new language is to have a thorough, comprehensive and appropriate scheme. Do not focus on too abstruse words or phrases and try to apply all words or phrases as much as you can.

There seems no shortcut to master a language but remember do not concentrate on trivials.   

A great article. Now, my main focus is English, but I'm trying to improve my Spanish too. Portuguese and Spanish are very similar and I can understand about 80% that I read or listen to, but I have difficult to speak. Sometimes I believe that my brain associate the word in Spanish with the word in Portuguese and doesn't memorize the word in Spanish.