“And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” Genesis 2, 2
If you really thought this sentence was meant for you, dear language learner, you’re wrong! Stop thinking about getting some rest, because if you do, it means that you are seeing this learning process as a painful labour. Though what we are doing is work, it is not exploitation, because everything we do, we do it for us, to gift ourselves with the knowledge of a new language.
Today is the day in which we will study as hard as humanly possible, in order to sum up what we learnt, to consolidate it and to fill the grey zones of our knowledge.
Today’s tasks
- Sum up day 6’s linguistic meditation practice
- Morning routine listening practice
- Become a master in Portuguese orthography (yep, when you are passionate, everything is possible)
- Practice pronunciation by repeating sentences from a video
- Read a few paragraphs from a book out loud and understand the meaning
- Word recollection
- Written expression: starting day 1 of my Portuguese journal
Seven tasks. We’d better start!
Linguistic Meditation Briefing
As promised, I dedicated some time to some simple thoughts in full Portuguese. Since my goal was to train the syntax and not the vocabulary, I used Google Translate to help myself look for the words I couldn’t know. With this in mind, I started by using the vocabulary I had learnt during the day and, given that I love creative writing, I decided to create a character and taylor his story.
In order to give information about his appearance, I needed to look for the way to speak about colours and the adjectives to describe the body, as well as body parts.
Esta é a historia do Tim. Ele tem 30 anos e morava em Londres, mas um dia ele foi para os Açores. Ele tem olhos azuis e cabelo ruivo. Tim é instrutor de ioga e agora ele trabalha nos Açores em uma aldeia pequena.
And that’s where I fell asleep… I also can’t remember everything, since I was very tired in the end.
Listening Practice
This video’s guest was a Slovakian native speaker being able to fluently speak Portuguese among other languages. She has plenty of good advices and there doesn’t seem to be such a strong difference in accent compared to the host and she doesn’t mix other languages to fill in the holes. Moreover, her vocabulary is quite complex, despite her using some confort structures many times. My guess is that she’s at a B1/B2 level at least. Nevertheless, her using a comfort structure like “eu acho que…” was helpful for me to have it stuck in my mind and I am sure it will come in handy.
In addition to this video, I listened to some other dialogues and monologues I could find on youtube.
Orthography
Let’s move to our dear ally Wikipedia, which gives us a good overview of everything we should know.
What wasn’t clear yet was the meaning of those accents on the vowels, therefore it is of utmost importance to learn which phonemes correspond to each of them.
For example, we can notice that letters with an acute accent indicatea more open mouth, whereas circumflex accents indicate a more closed mouth. Finally, the tilde on a vowel indicates nasalisation.
Digraphs
This word comes from greek and it simply means two (di-) and signs (graph), so we’re going to see which combination of consonants have a specific reading:
As seen in the graph above, those digraphs are merely 7, hence we can relax, nothing too difficult to remember. For example, <lh> is like the Spanish <ll> and the Italian <gl>; <nh> is like the Spanish <> and the Italian <gn>; <ch> is like the English <sh>; <rr> is like the French <r>. As far as <qu> and <gu> are concerned, we can read them like in Spanish (without the /w/) or like in Italian (with the /w/). We still have to discover how to distinguish when to use one pronunciation and when to use the other though.
Pronunciation Practice
By using this very basic and straightforward video, we can train our pronunciation. It’s 12 minutes, but you can choose to train for only half of it if you don’t have enough time. Feel free to pause the video to give yourself the time to repeat each sentence out loud and don’t be afraid to rewind as many times as necessary in order to get that pronunciation as good as possible.
This video taught me quite a lot, since I could really hear all the pronunciation features of European Portuguese and I learnt many new words just by seeing what the speaker was talking about.
Reading practice
I confess, I couldn’t resist so I didn’t sto at “a few paragraphs”. As a matter of fact, I took a sincere pleasure in reading Portuguese out loud. Therefore I managed to read 8 pages of the book “O Alquimista” by Paulo Coelho without stopping. I could understand the overall meaning of those pages and my understanding was good, not just superficial. Thanks to this practice, I was able to learn by deduction many new words and the words that I needed to search on Google Translate were 20, which is a very good ratio for 8 pages of a bestselling book.
Given that the first step to improve ourselves is becoming aware of what we are able to do and – most importantly – what we are not able to do, I recorded myself reading the first page of the book. This will help me track my progression. Furthermore, one day I will be able to correct myself and on that day I will know that I have improved. Therefore you shouldn’t be ashamed of listening to your voice recorded, because if it sounds ugly to you, it means you are now able to improve it!
Words Recollection
As always, once we have done all the most important exercises of the day, it’s important to be able to recollect all the vocabulary we learn, without resorting to any dictionary or notes.
Surprisingly enough, my recollection ability was much better today, probably because I did a full immersion the whole day. Thus, looking at my notes, I was able to write down in my vocabulary list 38 words and I now have 184 words.
As a polyglot I have to admit that this is the first time I advance so fast, so we’ll have to see whether my study is solid enough with concrete results by the end of the month. Nonetheless, I truly have a good feeling about it and I am confident that I’m going the right way.
Written Expression
Hoje no foi no trabalho porque sou professor e a escola acabou. Por esto eu aprendei muitas coisas em portugues e escrivei na meu blog. Hoje lei “O alquimista” de Paulo Coelho e gostou muito ler em portugues. Eu acho que é um livro interessante, mas no seu se eu vou ler o livro inteiro. Sou feliz que posso já entender tantas coisas nesta língua.
The words in black are the one that I had to look up the dictionary. Unfortunately my time has run out and I cannot call for my inspiration, since I have some tasks to do. Hopefully tomorrow’s journal will be slightly more interesting, but for the moment, the goal is to do the first steps and not to shine of the writer’s brightness.
Keep the good efforts up and see you tomorrow for day 8!