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
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
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