Voce fala o Portugues?
Tags: Software General
Last year I started to learn Portuguese (don't worry - this ties into computers.) Before that my only foreign language experience was highschool French, which has been less than useful. But it's the new millenium, there's lots of new technology, and I'm more motivated now. I started by finding various websites with lessons, some better than others. Some of the better ones even has short recordings so I could hear what the words were supposed to sound like (oddly, nothing at all like how they sounded when I tried them!)
Eventually I moved on to Rosetta Stone, which is one of the better known (and very expensive) programs available for learning a foreign language. You can find Rosetta Stone kiosks in many malls or download a sample lesson from the website and give it a try. The interesting thing about Rosetta Stone is that you don't learn to translate. Instead, it's all done with pictures. So instead of learning that "cachorro" means "dog" you see a picture of a dog and learn to associate it with "cachorro." Rosetta Stone has many different types of lessons and drills so you learn to read, write, listen, and speak.
But it wasn't quite fast enough for me. I had just a few months to prepare for a trip to Brazil and was hoping to attain at least enough basic Portuguese to follow a bit of conversation. So I turned to Pimsleur. This audio-only course was a very different approach, but it worked better for me and my immediate goals. I ripped the CDs to MP3 files and put them on my iPod so I could listen in the car or wherever I happened to be. With Pimsleur, you listen to 2 native speakers, a man and a woman, and repeat what they're saying after a teacher explains in English. The lessons are 30 minutes each and repeate a lot from previous lessons. They suggest doing no more than 1 lesson per day and moving on when you get about 80% correct. That meant that some days I'd listen to the same lesson 3 or 4 times.
The Pimsleur method works, to a degree. You very quickly learn important phrases with proper pronounciation, with none of the problems with looking at written words and trying to sound them out like an American would think they should sound. By the third lesson I had learned some of the most important phrases - how to order a beer and ask where the bathroom is. The most interesting part was when I realized that I had learned to conjugate regular verbs without even realizing it. This is similar to how kids learn to speak - by hearing and repeating phrases. Kids don't learn how to conjugate verbs - they learn it organically. The conversations that I learned were mostly relevant to what I would be hearing and talking about so they were much more interesting than going through Rosetta or taking highschool French.
So how did the trip turn out in the end? Well, thankfully my wife is bilingual and I didn't stray far from her! But I'm still working on it, and I hope that when we go back in December I won't again be the only one in the room not laughing when someone tells a joke. What has worked for you to learn a foreign language?
Last year I started to learn Portuguese (don't worry - this ties into computers.) Before that my only foreign language experience was highschool French, which has been less than useful. But it's the new millenium, there's lots of new technology, and I'm more motivated now. I started by finding various websites with lessons, some better than others. Some of the better ones even has short recordings so I could hear what the words were supposed to sound like (oddly, nothing at all like how they sounded when I tried them!)
Eventually I moved on to Rosetta Stone, which is one of the better known (and very expensive) programs available for learning a foreign language. You can find Rosetta Stone kiosks in many malls or download a sample lesson from the website and give it a try. The interesting thing about Rosetta Stone is that you don't learn to translate. Instead, it's all done with pictures. So instead of learning that "cachorro" means "dog" you see a picture of a dog and learn to associate it with "cachorro." Rosetta Stone has many different types of lessons and drills so you learn to read, write, listen, and speak.
But it wasn't quite fast enough for me. I had just a few months to prepare for a trip to Brazil and was hoping to attain at least enough basic Portuguese to follow a bit of conversation. So I turned to Pimsleur. This audio-only course was a very different approach, but it worked better for me and my immediate goals. I ripped the CDs to MP3 files and put them on my iPod so I could listen in the car or wherever I happened to be. With Pimsleur, you listen to 2 native speakers, a man and a woman, and repeat what they're saying after a teacher explains in English. The lessons are 30 minutes each and repeate a lot from previous lessons. They suggest doing no more than 1 lesson per day and moving on when you get about 80% correct. That meant that some days I'd listen to the same lesson 3 or 4 times.
The Pimsleur method works, to a degree. You very quickly learn important phrases with proper pronounciation, with none of the problems with looking at written words and trying to sound them out like an American would think they should sound. By the third lesson I had learned some of the most important phrases - how to order a beer and ask where the bathroom is. The most interesting part was when I realized that I had learned to conjugate regular verbs without even realizing it. This is similar to how kids learn to speak - by hearing and repeating phrases. Kids don't learn how to conjugate verbs - they learn it organically. The conversations that I learned were mostly relevant to what I would be hearing and talking about so they were much more interesting than going through Rosetta or taking highschool French.
So how did the trip turn out in the end? Well, thankfully my wife is bilingual and I didn't stray far from her! But I'm still working on it, and I hope that when we go back in December I won't again be the only one in the room not laughing when someone tells a joke. What has worked for you to learn a foreign language?
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