Morning listening practice

Getting up in the morning has been a little difficult but I think it has been worth it.
Thus far I have been three out of four morning this week. The miss was due to the kids having a bad night and getting up at oh dark thirty, then oh dark forty five, followed by being up for the day at 6, so that day I cut myself some slack on not getting to the work book.
Which I have been making progress on. The oral part of the test consists of 5 short dialogues or monologues and then there are a few questions about each, or twenty questions in total. At this point I got a 13 out of 20 or 65% which is not quite enough to get a bom, but that is the difference of 2 questions. A couple of the questions I did not quite get but it is moving forward I think if I can move it up by three questions that is good enough.

Being at this intermediate stage that I am it is frustrating because of the pace of improvement has slowed. Learning 10 new words is at best 1% bump in my vocabulary, and learning about grammar at this point does not easily overcome the bad habits I have picked up.

However I should celebrate where I can, namely, I have been able to talk over the phone to people in Portuguese, without breaking into English. Was my Portuguese perfect? Probably not because the same day, mere hours later I was given a note by the teacher for my son’s daycare and the teacher asked if I could read it. Keep in mind that I have never asked for anything in English from her. In her defense we are obviously foreigners and my conversations have been limited in scope with her. One does not need much vocabulary to talk about dirty diapers, eating habits and the occasional  bump on the head. Still my ego was bruised by the whole thing.

The next day though, I had to manage my account with the local branch of the international IT provider here in Portugal. The problem involved calling them up and complaining about the registration process. Long story short there are two accounts in my name with them, one that is active and one that is cancelled. I was trying to set up the canceled account unfortunately the break down was when I tried to verify the account, I got the “this service is unavailable right now, try again later” and not “there is something wrong, please contact customer support (a not free call)”.

After the first phone call I got the response that “we will hook it up for you” followed by the second which was this account that I was asking about was canceled. However I thought this was odd as I have been paying them money and was currently using a service provided by them to both check the account management page and talk to them on the phone. It turned out that they were right and I will get new credentials sent to me. No problem.  The ego boost part comes from the fact that my name is Robert Richards, a name that is not Portuguese, even Portuguefiying my name would not work as Roberto is on the list but not very common and the surname, forget about it. Suffice to say, it is very very likely that the attendants on the phone spoke some level of English, and they had my name to tip them off to the fact but they KEPT speaking Portuguese to me, even when I had a problem, and I needed to confirm something (loosely translated it was “I don’t understand, are you going to send the information by text or by letter?)

So, ego boost, able to talk to people over the phone, over the internet (hello skype) without my opposite resorting to English. Yeah me, but there is still work to do.

So the next step is to keep the morning time and to research strategies for the listening part of the exam.

Until next week 

rituals

So I have been thinking a bit about directions for this blog and how to improve my learning.  This is a wonderful age to live in, there is, at the click of a button, a plethora of information about a language with products and services that span the gamut from free to quite expensive. However the reality is that the book, the audio tape, the computer program, the website, the tutor, the class, etc. are not important. They all serve to deliver information about the sounds to make the and the order to put them in.  At the end of the day, that is it, around sixty sounds (technically I am talking about phonemes and this is a judgement call) exist in English.  There are more that human vocal chords can make but not many more.

So the point is that the "best" tool is not the tool but the time you spend using and seeking out gaps in your knowledge of the language (commonly called "mistakes") and then addressing them.
For me the realization is that the time I spent has not been consistent, that I have not created a ritual around learning. Or let me say in these words, I have the application Anki on my phone.  I am to the point now that I have a relatively board vocabulary, just today I had a didactic moment was listing synonyms in Portuguese, but this not the challenge anymore. Once upon a time I needed vocabulary now I need to improve my syntax and grammar (and pronunciation at times). 

The meat of it is that I want the first thing I do in the morning is to work on Portuguese. The time I feel best able to do this before my children wake for the day, which means I need a bed time. I have the habit of putting off sleep and working late if pressed which means I am sleeping until a small child wakes me and then I am playing catch up the whole day.

I am curious to hear about other rituals that folks have used.

I will let you know how my experiment to go to bed by 11pm does. 

Cheers,
Rob

Wait what is DIPLE?

DIPLE is the B2 level in European Portuguese.  This is also called the business level and to borrow from the wikipedia page at person at the B2 level:

• Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialization.
• Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
• Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

This is below the "native" fluency and I would gauge it at about a good high school level competency in the language and C1 is basically native level while C2 is someone with an advanced degree, one can pick up a text dealing with a subject outside of your knowledge area and both understand and comment on it.

Also from the same article the B2 is about 500-600 hours of study in the language.

There are five areas of the test, each worth 20%

Reading a couple of passages and responding with multiple choice or true/false

Grammar which is a text with 30 blanks and then a text with 10 blanks and you have to pick the best word that fits of three choices.

Writing which is a short text of 160-180 words on a topic, usually a letter or general complaint and then the same amount words on one of three topics.

Then there is the listening portion which is two different audio pieces that are usually taken from the radio or television and one has to respond to multiple choice and true/false questions.

Lastly there is the conversational part. The candidate, working with a partner will have a 20 minute conversation with three parts:
1) General interaction with the other candidate and questioner, i.e. do you know what is going on in the conversation or do you look lost.
2) Talk about a daily activity, like organizing a dinner or resolving some issue
3) Given two different statements or a cartoon expound upon the theme as presented (agree, disagree and why)

So how to study?
Well for the first level reading I will ignore it. I have been reading through some YA novels translated into Portuguese, then highlighting words that I do not know (go go gadget e-reader) for later study. 

The listening I will look into podcasts, namely tsf.pt podcasts, but there is a website called Practice Portuguese which has videos, subtitles and quizzes. I find I am not really challenged by the podcasts, especially at the slow speed though.

The grammar I am not going to worry about.

The writing and speaking are more or less the same. I will write a 200 word post twice a week in Portuguese. Then post to be corrected on a language correcting site by native speakers. I use lang-8 but there are a number of them, or that is there are a number that use this feature. I like lang-8 because of the formatting options for the text. Then I will go over the corrections and get general corrections that I tend to miss in my writing (and likely speaking).

Then I will go over with a tutor the corrections and look to make grammar flashcards that illustrate the problem.  I will post my text, the corrections and a translation of the text into English, and a copy of the text that I will use to study in the Anki deck.

I also wanted to do some more fun things and this is the part where you, gentle reader, come in.

My first challenge I was thinking of going to the gyms near my house to interview them.  However I am always ready to hear what you think.