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Kuji’s Krazy Log II

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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iguanamon
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Virgin Islands
Speaks: Ladino
Joined 5252 days ago

2241 posts - 6731 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)

 
 Message 41 of 706
04 December 2012 at 1:07pm | IP Logged 
kujichagulia wrote:
Ah, forgot something important about the usefulness of Portuguese: there is a large community of immigrants from Brazil in Japan. Of course, most of them are near Nagoya, not Osaka, but you never know when you might run into someone speaking Portuguese...


Welcome back, kuji! Good to see you're not giving up on Portuguese. I live on a small island in the Caribbean with only 50,000 people, Every few months I meet a Portuguese speaker, usually a tourist.

Still, I have a lot of friends on the internet. In your case, you can make friends on Orkut. It's like facebook for Brazilians (run by Google). There are groups for every interest including, obviously, futebol. There's even a small group for Brazilians in Osaka:Brasileiros em Osaka. I also found the Centro Internacional de Osaka em Português. They're looking for volunteers. There are a few Brazilian churches in the Osaka area too: Google search Igrejas Osaka. I did a search for Brazilian restaurants in Osaka and came up with a few:
Restaurantes Brasileiros em Osaka. You may indeed have opportunities to meet someone who speaks Portuguese, more opportunities than I do, though I am much closer to Brazil. I can't wait to go back.

As far as subs go, you don't have to be all that technical to use them. You can google many films and tv series with the term "subs" and download a small .srt file which you can open with your word processor (I use open office). You can even make your own bilingual text if you find the English. It takes a little time but the effort will pay off in having loads of natural language available to learn. There are plenty of Brazilian films uploaded on youtube. Subs could help you in both languages. Boa sorte com Japonês e Português, and again, welcome back.



Edited by iguanamon on 04 December 2012 at 1:13pm

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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 42 of 706
04 December 2012 at 1:09pm | IP Logged 
That sounds good, Brun Ugle. Thank you! I'll try that and see how it goes.
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 43 of 706
04 December 2012 at 1:16pm | IP Logged 
@iguanamon - Of course, the Osaka InternationalHouse! Why didn't I think of that? Anyway, you are da man! Thank you for the links . Those are really useful. If I can find a futebol group, then I'm all set
Using subtitles to make bilingual text.... that is fantastic! I was just thinking of a way to read some natural conversation instead of news articles and the like... that idea has some promise.
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 44 of 706
05 December 2012 at 3:06am | IP Logged 
Ugh... I went to check out the Brasileiros em Osaka Orkut group link that iguanamon gave me earlier, and as I went to sign in with my Google account, Orkut said that my profile had been deleted due to a "perceived violation of the Terms of Service." That's funny, considering I was about to log in to Orkut for the first time ever. Anyway, I reported it with Google, and hopefully they can fix whatever the problem is.

* * * *

Yesterday I did a little experiment. I posted a Japanese and a Portuguese journal entry on both Lang-8 and Italki, just to see which one is better. I recently became interested in italki, because it seems that you can list an infinite number of languages that you are learning at no cost. In Lang-8, however, you are limited to only two, unless you buy a premium account. That might be troublesome down the road if I become a polyglot. :)

Anyway, one day later, I had one correction each on both of my entries at Italki, but at Lang-8, I had three corrections each, plus some friendly comments from the correctors. (Is "corrector" a word? Yep... I'm an English teacher.) It seems that Lang-8 is the way to go.
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 45 of 706
10 December 2012 at 1:11am | IP Logged 
Uh-oh... I've done it now. I've went ahead and joined the Total Annihilation Challenge for 2013.

Uh-oh. What am I thinking?

I mean, I've hardly kept track of my TV watching for the Half Super Challenge that I am supposed to be doing. Granted, I still have a year left, but if I can't keep that on track, what makes TAC any better?

I guess for TAC, I can go at my own pace and set my own criteria, and follow that.

But I guess the challenge won't be the actual studying. Rather, it is keeping track of what I study, posting it here, and following up on everyone else on my teams and encouraging them. Certainly, I can post weekly updates here. I just need to be disciplined and consistent. I'm not a Nike man, but... Just Do It.
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 46 of 706
11 December 2012 at 4:20am | IP Logged 
KUJI'S WEEK IN REVIEW: 3 December - 9 December 2012

JAPANESE
This past week I...
* ...finished Chapter 5 of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. That included doing all of the workbook exercises and taking the example sentences from the grammar section and putting them into Anki for review.

* ...did Anki reviews. Speaking of which... I used to generate both recognition and recall (cloze deletion) sentence cards. But I seem to be able to recall Japanese words much better than I can recognize the kanji. This was the format I had:

FRONT:
私は[...bored; nothing to do]です。

BACK:
私はです。

I would ace these cards, pressing "Good" or even "Easy" every time. Compare that to my recognition cards, in which I often forget a word in a sentence, or simply its yomikata, and have to press "Soon" or "Hard". If recall is that easy for me, why bother? I should work on what's giving me the most trouble. So I deleted all cloze deletion cards this past week. It certainly makes my Anki workload easier. :)

* ...did some active listening with a podcast called HOTCAST. This is my active listening method: I listen to about a minute or so of a podcast, listen for words I don't know, look them up in a dictionary, and learn them. Then I review the minute of the podcast I just listened to for reinforcement. Why a minute? Because it gets old quickly. I still have too many words that I don't know. Once I get a sizeable vocabulary, I will increase this to two minutes or even more.
By the way, HOTCAST is a nice podcast, geared toward native speakers, but they talk about fun topics, like for example, Doubutsu no Mori, which is a popular Nintendo DS game in Japan, and not just for children. The hosts are somewhat easy to understand. I think the URL is http://radio.hotcast.jp if anyone is interested.

PORTUGUESE
This past week I...
*...switched back (!) to DLI Portuguese Basic Course. (One thing you will quickly learn about me is that I am terribly indecisive. I, however, am determined to stick with the decision this time around.) DLI goes so much faster with new grammar and vocabulary, while FSI Portuguese Programmatic focuses more on pronunciation, and you don't get as much vocabulary. Anyway, I started on Unit 4, but I haven't finished yet.

*...listened to podcasts: the News for Brazil from Radio France International and NHK's Portuguese News podcast.

*...listened to ESPN Estadao live radio online.

*...looked for Brazilian shows at Viki.com (preferably with Portuguese subtitles), but didn't find any. There is a drama from Portugal, however.
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FireViN
Diglot
Senior Member
Brazil
missaoitaliano.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5219 days ago

196 posts - 292 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC2
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 47 of 706
11 December 2012 at 11:57am | IP Logged 
kujichagulia wrote:
*...looked for Brazilian shows at Viki.com (preferably with Portuguese subtitles), but didn't find any. There is a drama from Portugal, however.


We listed some Brazilian TV shows in this thread, you should take a look :)
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4837 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 48 of 706
11 December 2012 at 2:03pm | IP Logged 
@FireViN - This is great! I'll look through these links later. Thank you!


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