Learning and Teaching languages

Google Translate Portuguese Version

A promise is a promise

Today’s topic is about languages.

In this post I will simply share some personal opinions about ways to learn and teach a language. I am by no means an expert but I’ve both been a student and a teacher (for a short time) giving me the opportunity to observe. Furthermore, living outside my home country most of my life, has enabled me to meet students who were trying to learn the local language and hearing some of their comments.

Learning

Learning a new language is always very pleasant in the beginning. It is an occasion to learn a new culture, eat new kinds of food, discover a new type of humor :) and traditions.

People want to learn a new language for a series of different reasons. When I found myself in Swedish classes, it was common to ask around why did someone opt for that language in particular. The typical answers were :

• A family member is from that country
• The lover is from that country
• Want to study or work there

Personally I just had a good image of the country (not only the women), which sparked my curiosity.

I should inform the reader that at this moment I’m still learning Swedish but on my own. This is an important point I want to talk about. I find that it is necessary to go to a language class in order to master the basics, plus the teacher is there to help you out with pronunciation. After you’ve acquired some vocabulary, I think it is a waste of time to continue going to classes as you’ll be learning some stuff that is not used on your typical daily conversation. When one is taking his first steps in a new language, everything you learn is amazing, you feel proud. Once you acquire the basics, frustration comes along as you want to communicate more complex ideas but the correct form is missing and translating from your mother tongue is not easy; ideas are not expressed in the same way.

So what can I do ? Read !

It depends from individual to individual; some love grammar drills, I don’t ! So the solution I came up with was reading; since it worked for me when learning English. Reading about interesting topics boosts my confidence little by little. The more I read, the more I store expressions in my brain so that in some situations I do not rely on my grammar knowledge (basically non-existent) but more on sentences that I’ve already come across in a book, newspaper or movie.

After becoming (over?) confident, oral conversation comes naturally. Others will instead start speaking and save reading/writing for last; the Pimsleur and Assimil tape methods are such examples.

Tape methods consist of listening and then repeating sentences. It doesn’t work for me except for Spanish. Being similar to Portuguese, by using a tape method, it enables me to skip some boring basics and go straight to dialogs. Those methods normally have manuals, so listening and repeating plus writing down seems like a good plan.

Why am I a bit reticent about tape methods ? When I start learning a language I want to master it completely, be able to communicate efficiently and write properly. Usually, exchange students take language classes to learn some words and impress local people. It is a nice gesture but I would avoid this because it is time wasted; you are force to be somewhere at a time determined by someone else. Above all, you will forget the basics once you leave the country. I don’t mean that you should be in a country without knowing even a word of the local language(s) , it is kind of rude in my opinion, but at the same time, forcing yourself to spend hours in a class room is fruitless.

I don’t know (m)any success stories of exchange students going back home and later mastering the language, but the world is vast, so if the reader has a counterexample feel free to comment about it.

Teaching

My short teaching experienced took place in South Korea for a volunteering period of around 2,5 months.

I am by no means qualified to be a teacher, but it seems that I can write and speak decently , other than that it was an occasion for the children to have a first contact with foreigners.

I got in touch with a school teacher in Sweden to get some tips but the answer I got was : veni, vidi, vici . No need to stress about it, you improvise once you get there.

Indeed, I had to teach different groups  (size 4~5) of kids with varying ages. It was difficult to plan everything ahead. There were two other volunteers of Korean origin with me, so I was mostly in charge of English conversation, which the kids didn’t have enough practice with.

With the younger ones (8 years old), I worked with the abc’s and some vocabulary with the corresponding pictures. With the children who were a bit older, I used some books for reading and doing exercises, but also added some “fun” exercises of my own (guessing a number/object for example) and others that I experienced as a student of Swedish. Meanwhile with the eldest (15~16 years old), I was able converse a bit with them. I forced them to speak in English by putting them in different daily life situations like going to a restaurant, buying something, giving opinions, etc.. After a while they knew I would start the lesson by saying : “Imagine that …”.

From this experience I found out that it’s important to come up with fun ways to teach, bring new ideas to the table. At the same time, changing a lesson plan everyday is not a good idea either, it might confuse the students and end up being counterproductive. I’d say that coming up with something different from time to time is a good way to motivate students.

Recently, I finished reading a small Swedish manual, from which we can add some tips for teaching a language. The manual in question is titled “Invandrareleverna och Skrivprocessen” and written by Gunilla Fredriksson. It is mostly aimed at Swedish teachers who have young foreigners as students. The manual emphasizes on the writing process and aims at teaching Swedish while preserving the student’s mother tongue.

To summarize, the student starts by doing some pre-work in order to get ideas for a text, afterwards he spends a few minutes writing about anything. The interesting part is that while the student is writing, the teacher does the same, it seems like a good idea to participate in the activity instead of intimidating the pupils.

Following the first text version, comes a group discussion where the other students and the teacher make comments and ask questions about the text. Once this is done, a new text version is written and  re-worked a few times. Finally, the teacher will support the student by correcting the form, spelling and punctuation.  Note that the teacher does not make corrections constantly, it is left for the final stage; its role is to be a helper and not a dictator, thus letting the pupil express its ideas freely.

To top it off, the student writes the text on a computer, publishes and reads it to the classmates.

Other interesting comments are made in the manual. Normally a teacher recommends that a student writes about books that are classics, in this manual what matters is the content and the interest the student shows for a particular text. If the student is passionate about a certain book, he might go the extra mile to understand it. Of course, the level of the book should be within the pupil’s grasp and that’s where the teacher plays an important role when doing book recommendations.

To complement the lessons, a last advice is to speak the language outside the classroom; different settings create an opportunity for the student to acquire a whole new type of vocabulary.

That’s all, now go back to class !

Good news :)

Google Translate Portuguese Version

I’ve been a bit late to announce the good news; my work permit aka PVP (professional visitor pass) was approved last Thursday !

Now the sealed approval letter is travelling towards my home in Brussels. Afterwards I’ll have to bring that letter to the Malaysian embassy where I will finally obtain the visa stamp.

It was a long process but I’m really glad that it’s done and I believe it was worth waiting. I’ve now booked the flight, I’ll be arriving at Kuala Lumpur the 12th of this month

I’m really glad to move to a completely different environment, I need to leave Europe. Reading an interview, a writer says: “Não quero envelhecer na Europa. É um continente demasiado velho para envelhecer nele”. If we translate, he’s saying that he doesn’t want to grow old in Europe, it’s a too old of a continent to spend one’s old age. I subscribe these words, as I get the feeling that Europe is getting stagnant, there is a lack of energy, renewal, young people. I think that it is the opposite of what is happening in vibrant countries in Asia for example.

Though I cannot predict the future, I’m happy and confident with the choice (and opportunity) of doing an internship in Malaysia. I get to discover an exciting country that I wouldn’t otherwise; it’s now or never, I doubt I would go through this experience if I was older. To top it off, I discovered I had relatives in Malaysia and Singapore which I’ll get the chance to meet for the first time in my life.

As this plan of going to Malaysia seems to come to realization, I have a long list of things I want to do and learn while staying there, which are related to: eating, sports, exploring, languages, getting more qualified in my field of studies and writing

While waiting for the approval, I had the occasion to meet some old colleagues from University, drink better beer (sorry Sweden, though it seems they have a beer which is world champion), read, get back in touch with my Portuguese side, practice climbing, do some programming to prepare for the internship and start this blog.

When I was taking care of some papers necessary for the visa approval I saw an ad for a poetry slam competition. It caught my attention because prize money was announced , just being honest . Well, I decided to participate for fun and curiosity so I submitted my slam to the competition before writing this post. It was a fun experience to write my first poem in French and trying to avoid cheesy rhymes. The writing process wasn’t immediate, it takes time to come up with the ingredients for the poem and then deciding when the poem is really finalized.

Regarding my next post, it is possible to unveil to you the topic of discussion. During my free time in Belgium, not only did I read in Portuguese but also in Swedish; finished my first book and read a manual about how to teach Swedish to foreign children who come to Sweden. So I’ll be probably writing about languages, the learning process and ways of teaching it.

Time to sleep. Está na hora do Vitinho!

Not every post needs to be as long as a Fidel Castro speech

Google Translate Portuguese Version

You’re talking to someone, suddenly you hear a sentence and … you have an epiphany / new post on the blog !!!

Lately, I’ve heard a few times my mother saying that when I graduated, it felt to her as a weight had been lifted off her chest, because now I have “wings to fly”. Immediately, an image of a majestic eagle soaring high in the sky came to my mind. A brief moment later though, another image replaced the first one…

Since my professional life hasn’t really “taken off” yet, this is the most adequate image that can portray my current situation :  

A chicken jumping around, that’s what I came up with. Maybe because I used to be a lot in contact with chickens as a kid, who knows… Let the psychologists figure this one out.

El perro que lleva al dueño a dar un paseo

Google Translate Portuguese Version

Coming soon !!!

A post that will cause several revolutions across the globe !!!

********************************************************************************

And it finally came …

As promised to my fans but also to myself, today’s post has finally landed on the web.

Lately I’ve been accused by some (Tao you bastard !) of being “too serious” when writing. I agree that some of my previous posts might have been a bit critic, sarcastic. It’s a difficult exercise to write about something positive. As example lets take rap music; the lyrics don’t express joy most of the time. Take the news on TV; disasters, crimes, corruption occupy most of the program.

Quite often, if you ask someone to give his/her opinion about something, chances are they will point out the defects and not the good aspects. It’s almost a cultural thing. As I was writing these lines, I remembered the part “being positive is so uncool” from the song Cool to Hate by The Offspring.

Destroying is faster and easier than building. I confess I was the destroyer as a kid

It’s way more comfortable to take the easy way out and produce something crappy than producing something decent. Today’s topic was supposed to be about nivelar por baixo, whose equivalent in English would be “dumbing down”. I’m willing to make an effort and change the direction of this post.

I would have already killed myself several times if I was so negative all the time The good news is that if you meet me in real life you’ll notice that I’m the joyful kind of guy who likes to joke around a lot. I tend to express my positive side when I meet other people and keep the depressing things for the paper/word processor. Not a bad deal eh ?

So what do I really want to talk about and what is this title anyway ? Well, I just wanted to write about meaning(s).

As I was reading the book O Bom Inverno by João Tordo, I noticed a passage where one character says that it is only worth reading a novel when we have a question in our head for which we don’t have an answer or if we already have an answer but still need confirmation. In my case I found the confirmation for one of my opinions in this part of the book The same character of this novel also says that different people find answers in different places; some in life itself and some in … books (my interpretation).

One might be desperate at some point to find a meaning in their unstable life and thus grab a book (any book) and by magic happen to find their answer inside those pages. Whatever the story, the reader will twist it as necessary to choke an answer out of it or receive the confirmation he was hoping for.

Not everything has or needs to have a meaning. When I was volunteering in Sweden at a short film festival, some directors showed up to answer possible questions about their movies. After one of those short movies, a person in the audience asked the director : WHY ? What was your message, why did you do it ? The movie was strange indeed; inspired by the TV show “Survivor” but with actors doing crazy dance moves and taking up weird challenges. Everything the characters were doing and saying didn’t make any sense ! Finally the director answered something like : “What do you mean ? There was no meaning, I just wanted to make the spectator feel weird, doubt about the meaning of the movie.”

I guess that in the end the meaning of the movie was to have no meaning.

Unlike that director, I appreciate when things make sense, so I’ll reveal why the title The dog that takes the owner for a walk. I was walking in a forest and noticed a lot of people walking their dogs and wondered if the opposite was not happening; if those people didn’t have their dogs, would they have gone out of their homes ? Life can be stressful (especially in cities), people start worrying about an infinite number of things and give too much importance to worthless matters. One way to cope with it is to simply take a break and go outside to relax. So I wondered which one really needed that walk, the dog or …

 

 

1 månad i Bryssel, tid att reflektera

Google Translate Portuguese Version

Yep, it’s been around 1 month that I left Sweden and came to Brussels. It is time to make some reflections. Fazer o ponto da situação as we say in Portuguese.

Though you’ve noticed that I’ve been extremely worried about how to say Noodles in my mother tongue, other things have actually occupied my mind and so it wouldn’t be fair to simply summarize my stay in Belgium to climbing, drinking beer and checking the dictionary.

Disclaimer : Some of MY thoughts come from daily life observations and others were stolen

Picture taken from Tony Hisgett (http://www.flickr.com/people/hisgett). Stealing thoughts is enough, lets not go further for now

Looking at things upside-down

In a time of revolution in Tunisia, you all should know that Belgium hasn’t got a government in quite a while, it might even beat the record set by Irak for the country with no government for the longest period of time. While some are overthrowing their government, in Belgium people are doing the opposite.

Demonstrations have been held for the creation of a government, even though some people skip it due to the skiing season. As time passes by, it feels that more and more individuals realize that a missing government does not have any impact in their daily lives. It’s always funny to take a look at things from an upside-down perspective, thus when talking with someone, the suggestion was made that people should instead fight for NOT creating a government and keep the situation as it is. Why not ? It’s a neutral opinion, neither destroying nor creating, lets keep things the way they are, just to avoid making it worse…

Lets leave politics for now since it’s a topic I don’t like spending too much time with.

Settling down

A good part about dropping by Belgium, is the opportunity to meet some old acquaintances from the university that I attended here. Recently I was invited for dinner by a couple composed of two computer scientists. Yes, I’m reaching that age where people I knew are getting married or having kids . I was curious to closely observe that phenomenon, that I tend to avoid, called “settling down”. A drawer full of slippers and several hangers to be used by the guests, these are some of the things that I never had to consider so far. I could see that they were a happy couple, but for me, it is too soon to settle down; if I do it now what will I do for the remaining of my life ?

With the famous Steve Jobs being on the news for taking a medical leave from his job, I decided to look up some of his speeches and ended up finding one from 2005 on youtube. It was interesting to listen about Steve Jobs life and some of his advice, since it comes from someone who had an eventful life, rich of experiences. Related to the previous post about finding a job and also about the current discussion of settling down, one part of his speech spoke particularly to me :

I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.

As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

Uppsala vs Capitals

There are two aspects that I miss about the student city of Uppsala; the proximity of things and availability of people. It was easier to arrange something and meet friends in Uppsala than in Brussels. When planning to grab a drink with a few old friends, the date proposed was so far away (according to me) that I even had to double check it on the calendar; just to make sure. I guess some are busy with their personal stuff and reuniting a bunch of people with different schedules requires some skill. When living in the student dorm in Sweden, it was easier to meet someone from the corridor or barge into someone’s corridor nearby (Thanh, Guillermo I’m talking about your corridors) and going to a student nation for a beer or filling up the stomach at a buffet was only 15 min away. It is quite paradoxal to find that people are alone in more populated areas. My stay in Sweden changed me; I need to talk to people, I need to be on the move.

Impeccable dental hygiene

I’ve been taking care of some less fun things like renewing documents and doing medical check ups. The other day was my teeth’s turn. It was fun to go to the dental clinic and see all the lined up chairs with patients and the future to be dentists. I don’t know why but it gave me the impression of being in an automobile repair shop, where the used up cars were the patients and the mechanics were the dentists; the analogy can go even further if we consider how much money they charged. I guess this (repair shop) image came from the noisy drilling sound I could hear while sitting in the waiting room.

Conclusion : Learning that my teeth are perfect, is expensive.

Rules are flexible

Rules have caused me a great deal of interest lately as they are not always strict (ask any lawyer). I noticed that even though we live in a society where rules are implemented to standardize processes, in practice they are pretty flexible. It depends on the person enforcing the rules, the mood of that person and also how that person is approached by you.

Lets go through some examples :

• Go to a bank. Depending on the experience of the person working at the counter, there can be varying conditions for lets say, closing an account.
• Go to a municipality to take care of some papers. Be nice to the municipal employee; make yourself different from the others, take your time to say “hi” before asking for something. That person will remember you and be less bitchy when you’ll be back.
• Go to an immigration office in Sweden. After being told to go back home to fetch some missing paper, try another queue, talk to another immigration officer and just write on a paper that you have enough means for surviving in that country. Problem solved.

If none of the advice given above seems to help you, then resort to yelling and making a scene.

Novo Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa

I mentioned that a reform of the Portuguese language had recently occurred. Besides removing a bunch of C’s from words (remember, actual became atual), are there any huge changes that I should be aware of ?

Well… I happen to be lucky, as I got my hands on a book that describes those changes that must have given a lot of work to the people behind this reform.

Congratulations Portuguese alphabet ! You have now reached 26 letters ! “K”, “W” and “Y” have finally been added. No more complex of inferiority regarding other alphabets.

Besides removing C’s from  words, P’s are equally not that necessary anymore; Óptimo became Ótimo. I can now foresee a decrease of time needed to write a text in Portuguese.

LOWER CASE is the new king ! months of the year ? LOWER CASE ! cardinal points ? LOWER CASE !

Street Art

Google Translate Portuguese Version

Never in my life have I been interested in art as I am now. I visited some art exhibits in the past but couldn’t understand it nor appreciate it. How could people stare at Picasso’s paintings of pigeons for several minutes, why pretend to be knowledgeable about art, what’s the point ?

Going to South Korea in the summer of 2009, I started to observe art that I loved; Fernando Botero and its funny fat characters, be it human or animals, caught my attention for the first time. The same day that I discovered Botero, I checked another exhibit by some Korean artists and was amazed, even though everything looked so strange . Especially for me, with an IT background, I was glad to find a personal meaning for the importance of art; it creates ideas, pictures out of the ordinary, it breaks formats, it opens your mind, it makes you doubt. It does not always have to make sense (even if I’d prefer so )

After so long, I discovered another artist that blew my mind with a huge series of interesting work : Banksy. He’s a very mysterious fellow, whose identity remains unknown (probably to avoid fame). Some of the things he’s done : graffiti on the gaza wall, putting up his work in museums without the staff noticing it, creating fake bills with the image of princess Diana.

I recommend checking his outdoor activities, they are well drawn, he reverses situations, he delivers messages…

I immediately followed up by watching his documentary “Exit through the gift shop”. I appreciated it as I was able to discover other artists such as Shepard Fairey who I didn’t know, designed a famous Obama poster.

Street Art is out there for everyone to see and not hidden inside a museum. The ability to make an impact on people’s routine, that’s what draws me to Street Art.

Finding a job is tough nowadays

Google Translate Portuguese Version

I read an article in the magazine Visão, that talks about youngsters between 16 and 34 years old, who cannot enter adult life by obtaining a job, even though their qualifications are higher than their parents.

I wonder, who is so highly qualified at 16 ?

I also noticed that some of the people interviewed, studied law and psychology; it is considered a suicide to choose those studies if you live in Portugal. One of the interviewees even considered pursuing a Master in Law to have better chances of getting a job. My opinion is that it doesn’t generally help much to keep on studying (Phd is not the answer ), at least if you don’t plan to stay in academia.

David Hansson, creator of a web framework called Ruby on Rails, gives a presentation called “Unlearn your MBA”, where he mentions that he wasted his time by staying in college. I can understand his point :

• Sometimes academia gets too far away from reality and the way you communicate is not adapted for real life.
• Classes scheduled at different moments of the day really screw up your time.
• If you really want to do something, then just go for it, research what you need to research in order to achieve your goal. Attending theoretical classes won’t help you much.

Going back to the article, lets even up the game.

According to some, students nowadays are not qualified enough, they do not have the necessary experience (they just graduated!). Of course it’s easy for a student to work part-time during his studies, get top grades, speak 5 languages fluently, go on an international exchange and possess that perfect psychological profile that companies are looking for. But aren’t some companies pushing too much with their wish lists ? Even Santa would have a hard time fullfilling such requests.

There are different kinds of job ads but I took this one from a Swedish job site, regarding an IT position and observed a funny thing.

Of course, I edited the job ad, to just show the different areas of the ad. There is a clear size difference when comparing two text areas. The area where is it is described what the candidate has to offer is considerably larger than the one where the company describes what it can offer to the successful candidate. Why shouldn’t the two be even ? Unless, it is stated that the future employee will earn 1 million euros, then in that case, there is no need for much text

There are different kinds of companies and job advertisements but it is good for a candidate to not forget that he too should be able to make some demands. If companies are afraid to enter a commitment with the wrong candidate then things can also be looked at the other way around; why not read job ads saying “we need” instead of “we accept” ?

Before making my choice of doing an internship abroad with AIESEC, I had gone to some job interviews and realized that I was applying for companies where I would spend the rest of my life doing a boring job. The more I was learning about the job, the more depressed I was becoming. It was a deal; they were buying “my time”. In the end, I was thankful I didn’t get accepted.

I realized how important it is to be able to admit to oneself that your life plan was wrong and  be able to change your opinion. What I foresaw for my future job, turned out to be a nightmare for the current me.

Remuneration is important but happyness also has its weight. It is indeed important to do something that you like. You might hear this over and over but you don’t really give it any importance.

Obvious and easy lessons that you’ve learned are not fully learned until you experience it for yourself; just hearing it from others or reading about it in an article is not enough.