I made my listening practice a habit. Repeat one action enough and your brain will ask you to stick to that practice. That’s what happened today: I really needed to listen to some Portuguese to kickstart my day.
Morning Routine: Listening Practice
First, let me say that I am really happy about how it went. I had no difficulty understanding Steve Kaufmann, aka TheLinguist, speaking Portuguese. This is partly due to the fact that he has a strong accent, mixes Spanish and sometimes even Italian and his vocabulary was not too complex. Yet, I think he’s around A2/B1 level and I can consider myself proud of being able to reach this level in merely 5 days. To set the record straight, I have to say that this only applies to my listening comprehension: understanding is one thing, creating the sentences yourself is another. I’ll need some more practice to get to his level.
Listening Practice pt. 2
However, since this video didn’t teach me any new words, except for <então>, that I had noticed before in other videos, my brain compelled me to listen to one more video.
Apparently, Not mixing Portuguese and Spanish is hard, even for a linguist! Therefore, the choice of my video was obvious. The level of the conversation here is much more advanced, nonetheless I was able to seize a good 70% of the information. As always, I had a notebook on which I took note of all the words I could recognise.
The title already shows us a valuable grammar rule: the imperative negative form. From what we can see, it is formed by saying <não> + verb, where the verb ends in <e>.
Before watching the video again, we should try to recollect all the words we heard in it without looking at the notes. In my case, 8 hours have passed, hence my memory is going to be put to the test once again.
… Eight words! Just eight! And in my notebook I had written down 20 more. I’ll proceed to writing those words down now, always checking the pronunciation and the orthograph.
Thanks to this work we now have 145 words in our Google Sheets vocabulary tab. By the end of the week we should be able to remember all those words along with their meaning.
Song corner
This morning I wanted to expiate my sins by sharing with you a better song, “Os Bravos” de Myrica Faya, a song I had discovered while watching a documentary about the Azores a few months ago. I wasn’t too surprised to see that there were no lyrics for it, so we should set ourselves this goal now: by the end of the challenge, we should be able to write down the lyrics for the song.
Adding a New Routine
Now that we start to have a solid Portuguese background, we have a new challenge to set forth: every night before sleeping, we should do a linguistic meditation, that is simply taking the time to think in the language we’re interested in learning and never switch to another language before the set time is over. It’s an excellent exercise that manages to maximise the effectiveness of our study by implementing a good habit to our daily routine. Furthermore it helps relaxing and offers a good night sleep.
Have a good night and see you tomorrow for day 7!