Pronunciation

This week (actually during these last weeks) I´ve been much worried about pronunciation.

Grammar has never been a problem to me. Although I certainly can´t say that I master its concepts, it never brought any real difficulty to me. Reading and listening have always been intersting. Sometimes they´re tricky but with some patience and with the aid of a dictionary or even simply reading (or listening) the context I´ve been able to handle it.

Doing my workbook exercises made me realize that I shouldn´t have quitted Phonetix discipline (although I had no other choice). I´ve always been confident while apeaking but nowadays I wonder whether is clear or not to a native English-speaker that his language is not my mother language. I know that many different accents exist in English but I want mine not only to be comunicative but to be clear and authentic as well. Sometimes I wish I were in someone´s else head just to hear me speaking in English. I tried to tape me and listen after, but it didn´t feel as authentic as I expected, I´ll keep trying to see if it comes off right.

So, that´s my next goal: to improve my pronunciation and to help my colleagues to improve theirs either.

English Learning Through Movies

Movies always had such a great importance in my english learning. I´d rather use them than books because with them I´m able to improve my listening and reading skills (using subtitles in English) and still, as in books, I can upgrade my vocabulary and learn a lot of new words. It´s easier to learn, and most times we don´t even need translation, because the visual images and the screenplay help us to comprehend almost everything.

My first all-in-English movie was seen when I was fifteen years old. My English wasn´t so good back then and I had never seen a movie about oriental culture, but even so it was an unforgettable and pleasant experience to watch "Ana and the King". After this one, every movie I rented was watched completly in English, first with subtitles on (in English) and then a second time without subtitles at all, just listening and comprehending.
Beyond all this kind of learning that movies provides us we still have to admite that it is the second best way to get in touch with any foreign culture and the real living habits of their people. That´s why we´re able to understand much better the dialogues, analyzing them ourselves rather them just rely on translations that many times sacrifices a lot of good things in order to make a more general group of people to understand it .
For these and some more other reasons (we can´t forget the entertainment and the pleasant times movies give us), I consider watching movies a great way of learning.

What I learned this week!

This week, in terms of English learning, I didn’t stop to study as I always plan and like; I just did the workbook and wrote a little bit in the blog. Weeks like this used to make me feel so unfounded, because it seemed that I was losing the control of my time, my organization, etc. But something has changed. I will write a little more about this my “transformation” or “change of point of view”, and how it has contributed to my learning process.
Last weekend I had a kind of “insight or inspiration” that made me to think about the courses I do, about my time, my life style, my whishes, and so on. I “woke up” to see that there are a lot of things in life that I value so much but I couldn’t live them. Mainly, thinking about the courses, I didn’t have time to read! I mean, we read all the time (texts from university; I’ve written a journal about it already), but I need to read much, much more and, mainly, things I’ve wanted to read since a long time ago; I look to the books on my desk; they expecting the time I will read them, and vice versa.
So, I decided that I don’t want to live only for universities anymore, because it is what I was doing; they don’t deserve it. I gave up some disciplines at UEPB, I only have two classes there now. I’m going to begin Yoga next week; I will finish some books that I’ve begun on vacation but given up; I will begin others; I will have time to watch films…and, meanly, I’ll have time to dedicate myself for everything I’m doing at the moment, without fill my weekends of studies… In terms of learning, I think I’m beginning to change my bigger trouble. I’m feeling more free and calm to plan/organize my time and studies. I hope things work better now; and, finally, I will be able to contribute much more for our English learning

Las Meninas, Picasso

"Não é a pintura menos figurativa que tem maior probabilidade de mudar a nossa visão de mundo"?

(Paul Ricouer, Tempo e Narrativa, tomo 3, p. 304)

Reading...

I’ve been noticing, at this phase of my English learning, how reading has helped me lot. Now it’s different because I can understand contexts easier and I don’t feel myself so lost as before. At this moment, the reading of texts, articles, pages of books, etc., has been necessary ingredients to improve my all skills: writing, speaking, listening and, of course, reading (the more we read the better reader we become). I’m feeling really, really fine at this my actual phase, because I can say now that I’m learning again. My vocabulary has improved faster and it’s made my reading much more a pleasure than a big challenge. The only trouble about all this is that the studies from university, its lot of activities, exercises, etc., have not taken me the liberty (time) to read what I need and what I want. It really makes me sad and tiresome.

Practice for fluency

#5

When I started to study in an English course, many teachers told my parents I had talent for foreign languages and that if I continued studying there, I’d probably be hired as a teacher. I was very proud of myself, because I could see other people in classes didn’t get it as easily as I did, and I really enjoyed studying English, had many learning opportunities with songs and in the regular school.

But when I was older and wasn’t in the course anymore, I begun to lost the fluency and the vocabulary I had when I was younger. That was shocking, ‘cause I still wanted to be a teacher someday, and specially, after graduating, to be a translator. I’d like to be able to watch movies without subtitles (so I could see the ones we don’t have in Brazil) and to read books in their original language (for me to read more books and to observe their real qualities, like rhymes and rhythm in poetry, and puns in prose).

That was when I decided to have conversation classes, because I needed to practice. I have to tell you those classes weren’t quite boring in the beginning, because I only cared about English and English and English, but, after some months, observing how stupid sounded the topics annoyed me. The teacher always brought mystical stuff like “do you believe in premonitions/ghosts/destiny?”, and for me the answer was always short, like, “yes” or “no”, didn’t feel comfortable to discuss for 2 hours. I never sub estimated my classmates before, but those classes seemed to bring the most “so last season” subjects of talking and seeing everybody doing children’s activities - Jesus gimme patience!

For me, our current classes have been so pleasant, because we can talk, as we’d talk in our mother language, about real situations, about our lives, experiences, tastes and even the class itself, the grammar etc. When we used that hazard waste wheel, for example, it was interesting, and the same to listen about the ‘hurricane area way of life’. I mean, that would be a normal conversation, with no need to push. So I guess the best way to practice a real English is to have real material, like reading news, interviews, discussing the day-by-day… it will normally occur us constructions we probably won’t be able to make yet so we’ll check them, and then we’ll have learning opportunities, discovering what we’d genuinely say in such a occasion, etc.

Previously, on our dialogue journal...

I'd like you to make a post like this and publish the texts we had produced before the blog was done. Here go mines.

#1
School times: My timeline beggining

My first experience in English learning was in the fourth year, at school. It was a small school of the neighborhood, and they tried to teach us the numbers from one to ten, some colors and the verb to be. It was really non-sense, that time, not to go further, but the next year, at another school, I began to have real classes.

In the school, we adopted a book from an English course which was developed specially for schools, but it was very similar to the course’s one. We had two books, one with texts and one with homework. The second one brought a “mask” for us to cover the answers, which were in the same page, and probably most of the students didn’t use. I did, and in fact what I didn’t like about that was just to hold the mask, instead of writing freely.

My teacher, that time, was someone who is special for my English learning still nowadays. I don’t know if it was because of her fame of scary or because I was too young and wanted to impress her, and specially, I really liked studying that time, and really wanted to speak English fluently with the classes I was supposed to have until the last year of high school… the fact was that I really learned with her. The teacher was kind of demanding and asked us to copy some lists, with about a hundred words, and check their meaning in the dictionary – and if we couldn’t write, we should repeat that word like 50 times! Of course I never did it, repeating, but I could pay attention to the words I wrote wrong once and try not to repeat the mistake.

What I most liked her was that she read the lessons and made us repeat in group, and later, individually. So I could practice reading it to myself while somebody else was being corrected – I repeated each phrase at least four times, once each student in class had to tell a line.

In fact, I asked myself how could students not to learn with her. When I was in the 7^th year and an English course finally appeared in our town, all the students in my class were from the 8^th year of the same school I studied. Everybody was really impressed with how fast I could get all that information and use it, they thought I had something special in that area. But I remember one of them said to the others “You see, that’s what we should learn at school. We don’t learn a real English which we can speak. I wish we had seen this at school, so it would be easier now.” And I said “But it is in our book, we just saw it at school, that’s why I can get it so fast, because it isn’t the first I see it.” And they just couldn’t remember.

Later, when I moved to another city and continued in the same English course, but with a new teacher and an old subject, I gave up of studying English. But that is in a future page of the diary.

#2
Answering Sergio's answer

See, I don’t think she was really severe, just a little demanding, and as we were too young we were kind of afraid of her. I, nowadays, agree with some of her methods. I mean, the problems was that she asked us to make activities, but in all subjects they had activities too. And, as I said, I did NOT obey her suggestion of rewriting the same word to fill a page. What I thought it was interesting is that she made us speak a little in classes, something I didn’t had in the last years of school, for example.

Because of PSS, the only thing we made at school was to read texts and answer questions about it. At that time, even being young and in the beginning of the English course, I was able to understand, if not the whole vocabulary, the essence of the text and do the job in few minutes. In fact, most of the students were in the same situation, so English classes, at school, became a talking time. And we didn’t study or made homework, because we didn’t like the teacher so we didn’t really respect him…

You told me you couldn’t learn with teachers you didn’t like, and neither can I, I guess. I fact, the reason I gave up of the English course was that I moved to another city and I wasn’t able to find friends the course. I mean, I am too shy and I used to study with my sister, and she used to make friends and, as I was always with her, it seemed to be enough. When, because of health problems, she had to abandon the course and because of school weekly “news”, I was always changing my schedule and was never with the same people for a whole semester. In fact, in one semester I’ve changed of class four times! And I was always able to get, for four semesters, the same teacher – whom I didn’t like – in different days and turns of the week. See, without company I could not face that, it was boring and I gave up.

#3
Feeling lost

Something that annoys me when I study English is that it seems like it was much easier before, I mean, I wanted to learn every word I could, and I felt able to, nowadays it is like a new content wouldn’t be absorbed… I never feel like I already know all English I need but it is like I already knew enough not to learn more. New words don’t stay in my memory, even if I write them down probably won’t take a look later, I don’t know… it is as I am demotivated, but in fact I would like very much to improve my English, I’d like to speak with the proper words instead of the describing their meanings, I would like to go further with my phrases, to speak about any subject I want, and I feel it is not possible now and it won’t be in future if I don’t do something now to change this situation. I would like to recover the enthusiasm I had before, for songs, for grammar, and not to think they are “repeated” anymore. I would like to think: hey, we are going further on that subject!

"Las Meninas" de Diego Velazquez, 1656

About time...

Today, I decided to write a little about time. Reflecting about time as also an way to find solutions to my learning. We know that we live, nowadays, in a world that requires us time and velocity, but we “don’t have time anymore” and we are always complaining about it. Something has changed with everyone: people walk fast, speak fast, eat fast; don’t find time to visit friends, to talk, to read a book; we are running to be more and more qualified and our studies and jobs busy almost our whole day and life.
I am an example of this “modern being”, but I don’t want to be for a long time. I know that everything I do now (things I like, for sure) is important for my future. So, how can I find time to study English? How can I make good use of the time I have? Why sometimes do I think I’m losing time, I’m not learning? What are the priorities? How can I do my best? Maybe, we could discuss it today.

Anna Karenina.

Today I woke up with a different feeling...

#4

These days, I decided to change a little my thinking about studying English. I had already had a change of my point of view with that Kaleidoscope profile, but it seems I had forgotten what the optimistic questionnaire made me deduce. In my profile, I had already written that I “needed to find natural contexts where I can use English”, that “had to collect words I find out and look at now and then, making a decision to use them in the next possible situation” and that it was “necessary to look at me as a student again and not to feel unable to learn more, to improve, just because I have been ‘stopped’ for a long time. Once I was able to acquired my little background, I'm able to go further”, but those were not my real attitudes, and I was still looking only at the problem.

As the professor was always asking us about our last-days contacts with English, I noticed I was kind of running away of written practice: didn’t read any English link I found in blogs I read, didn’t access English language sites, didn’t practice reading English subtitles if it wasn’t with the clear purpose of studying English – not ever by pleasure, just for obligation. And I also noticed Anna Karenina was doing exactly the opposite: she was reading original English/American book texts and writing a vocabulary notebook, and that gave me a little motivation, because I knew those people in my classroom were in the same situation as I was, but looking for solutions.

I guess I already complained, when I answered to Anna’s journal, that songs weren’t really useful anymore because they didn’t really bring us new stuff. I mean, texts in general used to bring a new word, but once it was able to get their meaning in the context, I didn’t pay attention to it. So it demotivated me: it seemed that I already had the English I needed, except for some vocabulary, now and than, which wouldn’t be missed. But when I was looking for a song to take to the classroom, I decided not to choose the ones I knew better, but to look for lyrics which had a reason to be seeing in the classroom, and I felt like when I was beginning to study English: I found out lyrics I didn’t know half of what they said! And I had to translate or take a look in the dictionary for almost all words. I felt great, I could finally start my vocabulary notebook with words I would be able to remember (because I would only have to memorize the lyrics).

I am now looking for texts, in English, that interest me, like interviews with celebrities I like, so it will seem more natural for me than reading only to practice English. Once I now also started with English literature subjects, I am reading a quite different English, which is more formal and sounds strange, but I guess it is much better that way, because I need to understand it precisely, so I’ll have to make effort…

My English Learning Timeline

Since I was a child I´ve been in touch with English words. I can still remember that I used to look the whole package of every toy I won and because of that I soon realized that "batteries not included" was a terrible thing. This was probably the first English sentence I´ve ever understood.
During the rest of my childhood the English language was there everyday. I saw it on videogames, on movies and cartoons and mostly on those romantic songs that my parents where always listening.
My first "formal" contact with this foreign language took place when I was eleven, in 1997. It was nice to be there on a English school, with different classmates and with that lovely teacher (Sandra), who enjoyed teaching us in a very funny way, drawing nice pictures on the whiteboard to explain us what was a windows, a pencil and so on, and telling us not to be afraid of using that words we´re seeing for the very first tim. "Look at the camera" (This was the first expression that we learned in Fisk´s book).
I didn´t have bad moments in Fisk during the learning process. Being there was like being in a city on USA, mostly because of the pictures and every kind of paper in their walls that were always in English, and for everyone there being always talking in that language either.

The passion for the games of the NBA started in 1998 and it helped me a lot to improve not only my English reading but also my understanding of numbers, height and weights unities of the USA.

It was 2000 already when I felt confident enought to keep and all-in-English conversation on with an american-native teacher called David. After him I had some others foreign friends: Bob (2002); Elizabeth (2005) and another Elizabeth in 2006.

Songs and books also had a great influence in my learning. I believe that after 2001 I was already able to understand most part of them, but always using a dictionary, of course. My favorite is Sir Elton John, I´m afraid I still don´t have a favorite writer.

Finishing this learning journey and to arrive where I am I must say that the Language Course that I decided to study in UFPB is great and it helps me a lot to develop a real good English. I´m amazed with the super-qualified professors I´ve been meeting until now.