Massive, Entertaining, Comprehensible CONTENT

When learning a language you don’t want to fixate, bootstrap, or bore yourself to death.  What you really want is content.  Lots of it.  Entertaining and comprehensible.  Feed your brain.  That’s really what this blog is all about: archiving content.

It seems like ages ago.  2006: the year I looked to the internet to teach me language.  It was a wasteland.  The best stuff was pirated mp3′s and CD’s of software that luckily everyone’s forgotten.  I remember reviewing some Internet 1.0 websites with Portuguese travel phrases, sometimes with a WAV file (!!!) :/

So, yes, I pirated some material.  Loads of mp3′s.  I bought a phrase book.  I created new material in the form of side-by-side movie translations.  I found blogs meant for Brazilians learning English, printed them off at work, and read them at night (while highlighting and taking notes), sometimes read them while walking around town.  I listened to music and studied the lyrics.  When I ran out of things to listen to I recorded phrases from my phrasebook because I was annoyed by wasting time driving while not learning (!).  I downloaded podcasts.  I downloaded cartoons!  I exchanged emails with people (a primitive form of language exchange .  I went onto Orkut to find Brazilian friends and chatted with them on Skype (Hey Glinda!).  I used meetup.com to find Brazilians in my own city.  I looked at other language blogs to hear about the latest technology or website.  I read books on my Kindle while highlighting new words.  I now put every “new” thing into flashcards and review each day (takes less than 15 minutes and I have 1000+ inputs!).

In short, I added content.  Sometimes entertaining, often not very useful, but it’s what kept my brain happy.

So sometimes you need to find an interesting novel and read just for the sake of reading.  Don’t wait for some software or person to teach you, and don’t hold yourself back by becoming obsessed with grammar or looking up everything new word in the dictionary.  Interested people learn, seek, and absorb, uninterested people, ….well, they give up, or fool themselves that they’ll absorb information without caring.  How may Brazilians speak English?  Seriously, the only guy I know here in Brazil who speaks is the gatekeeper of my complex, yet everyone takes classes.

Advertisement