Some things I’ve noticed during these 10 days of studying:
🤍Passive immersion is OP. Passive immersion all waking hours of the day is a fast track to feeling sick, and thus I haven’t been doing that.
However, at the end of one day where I had done a decent amount of hours of immersion, my head was automatically playing Portuguese by sleep time. The language even popped up in some dreams.
The next day, though I barely listened to any Portuguese, I still had little phrases and words popping up in my head as I drifted into sleep.
🤍LIBRAS (Portuguese sign language) is great for helping to learn verb forms and break down complicated forms into simple nouns.
I’ve also been finding it extremely fun to incorporate it into my language learning. The only downside is that learning LIBRAS and Portuguese at the same time is extremely time consuming. It takes much more time to find good resources and interpret sign when you don’t understand what’s going on in a video.
Most of the good LIBRAS videos lack audio (for obvious reasons) This makes it very difficult to decode what’s going on in the video and not very helpful for study purposes. If I don’t have audio to work with I won’t know how to speak or understand from listening. To learn how to speak, audio input is necessary.
The most helpful thing I’ve found so far when it comes to LIBRAS is learning the signs for past, now/today, and future (passado, agora/hoje, futuro.)
While listening to a verb form and going over it in my head I sign the corresponding word that would go with the LIBRAS style sentence.
For example, estudando means “I am studying” which is a present tense verb, and thus I can use the “agora” sign to match it. The LIBRAS style sentence would be “Agora Estudar.”
🤍I’m struggling with finding a fast way to make anki cards. It’s easy to make quality anki cards, but it takes me far longer than I had expected.
🤍Another struggle is that I often end up seeing vocabulary and sentences written out in my head when searching for what to say. Doing this makes it really easy to mispronounce things since I end up accidently using English pronunciation to read out the sentences I form in my mind.
🤍I have been becoming more aware of particles in Portuguese, noticing which ones are related to each other and searching up articles like this one when the inspiration and curiosity strikes.
The next ten days I plan on:
🤍 Finding a faster way to make anki cards (I still want to challenge myself to try and focus on audio based cards.)
🤍Organize and figure out the corresponding LIBRAS signs for all verb forms and practice.
🤍Come up with a Super Blocking Method for particle and adjective/verb linkage mastery. (The challenge again here is making this audio-based. Blocking out sentences is easy on paper, but how do you create a visual blocking without writing the sentence out? It’s possible if you base things on syllables…but I need to figure this out.
One thing I’m convinced will improve comprehension and speed up learning is if I figure out how words are related and linked to each other within a sentence.
🤍Figure out syllables in Portuguese.
🤍Fixing my morning schedule and being more disciplined in the rest of my life so I have more mental clarity. My emotional health hasn’t been great and I think a big part of this is my struggle in getting out of bed and scheduling/reflecting on how I’ve been spending my time as well as the thoughts I’ve been thinking. I’m sure working on this will positively effect my Portuguese learning efforts as well.
I’ll post a short audio clip of my Portuguese speaking here. I don’t know enough to form sentences, but I can repeat simple phrases I’ve memorized and super simple sentences. So this is more of a…pronunciation check? I think a better test would be trying to hold a 5 minute convo with somebody, and that’s what I’ll do at the end of the 20 days.
My audio recorder is unfortunately limited to 30 seconds for the trial version and I don’t currently have Adobe Audition installed. So pardon my randomness 😂