https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QvL_WUH04NRjob-ydViI4m7B_aZWER-O/view?usp=sharing
Max Joynes's Posts (11)
Sort by
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rmf0Sye2-ivJM1NIJdh3FozRcKryN6Il/view?usp=sharing ;
For this last cultural post, I wanted to explore a traditional element of Portuguese culture and decided upon exploring music. My language partner had told me to see what I could find on folk music because he believed it was quite popular in the culture. Upon further research, it turns out that is exactly right. In Portugal, there’s a huge tradition of music called Fado music which essentially is comparable to longstanding folk music. Fado music roots back to stylistic music of previous working class and poor generations, and is best described as melodic and somewhat melancholy. The word fado translates specifically to “fate” or “destiny”, and really stresses mournful tunes and lyrics. Many common songs in the genre refer to the sea, and is linked to the concept of homesickness, longing, and nostalgia. Some say it is the genre of longing to be home. Within fado, two main genres exist: Lisbon style and Coimbra style. Lisbon style of Fado is much more popular within the country and is signified by audience engagement with clapping. On the other hand, Coimbra style Fado is much more refined as seen as a formal music style to show appreciation of something. This style dates back long ago and demonstrated its significance when Amália Rodrigues passed away, known around the country as the “Queen of Fado”, three days of national mourning were declared for everyone. This is something that’s been engrained in culture for a long time.
Accompanying the actual music, is the traditional dance and movements of Fado. The stylistic dances have differed greatly over time and really depending on the era it came from. Some typical styles include: energetic couple routines, single song and dance combined, and large crowd circles joining hands in dance. A lot of the dancing portion of Fado stems back to where Fado entertainers were from in the early nineteenth century. A lot of Fado singers or entertainers were from distinctly urban areas of the country. In these areas, tradition evolved over time to be both song and dance instead of just song unaccompanied by any movement. These entertainers then spread the tradition of dance across the country with their performances, and it became a typical phenomena for both to have its place in Fado.
Fado music has transcended typical Portuguese entertainment for generations and something that the country has tried to protect. If one visits portugal today, the visit is absolutely incomplete without listening to or seeing some Fado music be performed. The typical venue for this is now public squares around the country or private event type organizations putting on traditional folk performances. In addition, there even are Fado restaurants in some places throughout the country. This combines a unique interactive experience of song and dance with dining. Some of the most famous ones I found during my research were: Casa de Linhars and O Faia. Both are in Portugal and have continued to operate to this day.
In addition to this research, I’ve also linked some videos for reference to a traditional Fado type song.
Songs:
For this last language post, my partner and I decided to explore more into linguistic differences between Spanish and Portuguese. We had done this a little in the past and it’s helped to expand my understanding of the language when thinking about it in terms of how something would be done in Spanish. In the past we’ve discussed how ficar doesn’t exist in the language, how ão typically replaces the Spanish ending ion, and some other things. For this specific month, we wanted to continue building my basic understanding of the language, so one section of meetings were blocked off as review of some of the basics and vocabulary we’d already covered, and then the other half of meetings were strictly into this new exploration between the differences of Spanish and Portuguese. This was really helpful because the act of practice and retention is the best way for me to really learn anything. So, being forced into this recalling of what I learned previously has done wonders for me. On a side note, that learning process of constantly recalling information might be my biggest takeaway from this whole class and process. I never really understood the value and challenges of trying to remember something foreign, but you really have to work to commit things to memory through practice. However, with all that being said, this post will focus on my learning of the new material contrasting the Spanish and Portuguese languages.
One of our main learning focuses that we covered this month was the uses of the word “a gente”. Now a gente on its surface kind of is similar to the Spanish word of gente and similarly means “the people”, but it is actually much different. In Portuguese, a gente typically replaces the formal “nós” in Portuguese, which is nosotros in Spanish, and typically is used in everyday conversational conventions. Interestingly, one would never see a gente written in any formal texts or even in more formal conversations, but in everyday speech it’s almost completely expected. Nobody even thinks of it different, and it can be used very uniquely. For example, one in speech would say, “A gente sempre fala Português”, which means “We always speak Portuguese”. However, in written form or contextually this would be “Nós sempre falamos Portuguese”, which means exactly the same thing. It’s an interesting quirk of the language for sure and one that was super interesting to me. In Spanish, that would be “nosotros siempre hablamos Portuguese”, which is more similar to the second form with “nòs” for sure.
In addition to learning about a gente, we also touched upon the usage of you within Portuguese and Brazil specifically. In Brazil, for example, tu (you) began not being used in most of the country actually, and the word você became the standard. However, tu is still used in Portuguese, but it is used differently depending on the region where it is spokes. Outside of Brazil, in the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world, like in Europe, the difference between tu and você is rather similar to that of in Brazil and both are still used with their original connotation. Which essentially means that você is the formal form and tu is the informal form. Examples: Tu tá quieto, cara. Tá tudo bem?
Moving forward, our focus will be not to add any additional learning but try and keep up with what I already learned. I really learned a lot and look forward to the last two culminating assignments of the course.
For this month’s language learning we didn’t move as fast as other months because communication was a little harder over spring break. However, I felt like we made good progress for my standards especially with increasing my vocabulary more and just getting a better understanding of how some grammatical things work with certain verbs. I think that currently my biggest challenge is forming grammatically sound sentences and conjugating certain verbs in which I don’t have any recognition of, so that’s something my partner and I really wanted to try and focus on this month. Which is why I’ve been doing assigned practice HW (some) from the resource PracticePortuguese, but I should be doing more to really cement my learning between meetings.
To start, one of the main themes of vocabulary my partner and I worked with was around the house vocabulary. I had really wanted some more knowledge for everyday reference, and we thought that common household items and things which are used every day would be helpful. We started by simply learning some words and studying from a PowerPoint. Some common words included: concha, jarra, chaleira, peneira, vassoura, and avental. We worked with these words just in a basic sense and then did some picture association exercises where I’d fill in the blank of words based on their pictures. My favorite word by far was vassoura, or broom in English, because I have begun to use that word within my own kitchen now. The hardest word was escumadeira, or skimmer in English, because I was just unfamiliar with that in general. All in all these exercise just helped me to expand upon my knowledge of the language by getting exposed to new words, and helped to expand my vocabulary which I can further reinforce hopefully in daily activities.
The second component of this month’s learning was focusing on the main verbs of the language estar, ser, and ficar. This involved differentiating the differences between estar, ser, ficar in Portuguese and how to conjugate each of them in different scenarios. The key thing that stood out to me from the start because of my Spanish background is that I was familiar with ser and estar, but ficar was completely foreign to me. As it turns out, it’s actually extremely common to the Portuguese language. It can be used a lot informally to basically say anything from “staying”, “continuing”,“renting”,“combined, and more. For example, I could say “Fica conmigo”. This means Stay with me. Or, I could say “Onde fica a tua casa”. Which means where IS your house? The same word can be used to mean multiple things like keep, to be, become, stay, etc. This is very different from Spanish as ficar doesn’t really exist. Now, all three of these verbs are very similar and can take on overlap in meaning, but it’s important to try and distinguish when to use which. From my understanding, one uses ficar when it’s associated with change, and estar when talking about temporary traits or qualities. As for ser, you use it for describing inherent qualities, but ficar actually can’t be used for that and can only signify “becoming”. This still kind of confuses me, but I’m aiming to work more on it in the coming months. These 3 verbs are central to the language and forming conversations, so it will be more of a focus to come.
Overall, this month was the slowest of the months due to logistical issues, but I still feel my partner and I made great progress. I definitely learned a lot and continue to progress which is always a good thing. In the coming month I hope to become more conversational as my number one goal.
For this week’s cultural post, with the suggestion of my language partner, I will be taking a deep dive into the puzzling popularity of American TV show Everybody Hates Chris in Brazil. Everybody Hates Chris is an American TV show created by Chris Rock that is supposed to be based on memories from his teenage years. The show portrays “Chris” in his adolescent years and life within his African American community. The show was rather popular in the US but ultimately stopped running in 2009. Before it’s finale, the show was nominated for 3 Emmy’s and 1 Golden Globe. However, the popularity in America doesn’t come close to what’s seen in Brazil. To this day, the Brazilian population and community are avid watchers and fans of the show.
Before doing this post, I reached out to São Paolo native and Richmond student Pedro Alves de Lima to see if this phenomenon really exists. He confirmed that this is in fact a cultural thing in Brazil. He stated how the show offers something different than the normal telenovelas in Brazil and works to portray a different background of the people. This makes a lot of sense and can be clearly seen through my research. Actress Tichina Arnold, Rochelle on the show, is actually one of the most (if not the most) famous American Actress’s in the whole country. On numerous visits she’s been treated like royalty, drawing thousands of adoring Brazilian fans to come see her. This popularity isn’t just relegated to her on this one show, but the show Wife N Kids, where Tichina also stars, was voted as the second most popular show of its kind in Brazil recently. At any point in time, fans of the show can be seen repeating her famous lines as Chris’s Mom and her recognition is undeniable. Moreover, she’s mentioned her Brazilian following in multiple interviews within the US. It’s quite fascinating to see this popularity and it’s something the average consumer of the show would have no idea about. The same experience is true for actor Tyler James Williams (Chris) who has a huge following as well. On multiple occasions when he was creating his Instagram, he actually deleted his profile because his comment section was overflooded with Portuguese and he wasn’t quite sure what to do. It’s something the whole cast is mostly on record being surprised and appreciative about, but why did the show get so big in Brazil is the main question still?
In Brazil, one of the main forms of entertainment are long-form serial narratives, or better known as telenovelas. The shows draw in millions of domestic viewers and people across the globe in more than 120 countries worldwide. A lot of Brazilian culture and imagery comes from these types of entertainment, and the series have served as a primary source for what it means to be Brazilian globally. The main issue with them, however, is that have shown that the country’s most important television genre of shows has historically underrepresented Brazilians of color. In addition, many also maintain that the telenovelas worked to produce a symbolic good that emphasizes whiteness as the ideal social marker. This works to explain the differentiation of Everybody Hates Chris. It offers the people of Brazil a show that prominently features a culture they don’t often get to see in the manner of comedy. It’s take on the normal American family, mixed in with comedic factors, and its focus on the colored community, all drive to boost the popularity of the show in Brazil.
Overall, this was extremely interesting to learn about and something I would’ve never known without researching. It’s amazing how cultures can differ and what becomes popular within certain places. I’ve included some sources below and some social media posts of fans from Brazil.
Sources:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26744312?seq=1
https://www.flowjournal.org/2013/03/everybody-hates-chris/
Social Media:
https://twitter.com/ajclassic/status/1328033103202414594
https://twitter.com/ajclassic/status/1328038268592590849?s=20&t=0RKMt-Ov9npvV7QQyYKmVA
https://twitter.com/ajclassic/status/1328046792294998021?s=20&t=0RKMt-Ov9npvV7QQyYKmVA
For this second language journal, I will be focusing on what my partner and I have accomplished in the month of February. After getting set up with my partner towards the end of last month, we’ve really been making good progress every week. This is my first time taking a language course where it is self-paced and I think that’s a huge benefit for myself and my aspirations. However, what I’ve found is that these weekly meetings are incredibly helpful to hold me accountable for my learning. It’s very easy to try and put this on the back burner, but by having weekly meetings and assignments from my partner, it’s made me much more focused than I otherwise might have been. With that being said, where we left off last month with my first post was just with very basic materials. I was being introduced to the language on a broad scale and really working through things like common words, the alphabet, and numbers 1-40. For this month, we’ve been trying to focus in more on the intricacies of beginning to speak the language of Portuguese, but of course only on a base level. However, it did take me a little longer than hoped to grasp the introductory things we started weeks ago. One thing that was really giving me a hard time was trying to shake some Spanish tendencies of mine. For example, we were trying to read some simple sentences and words, but I kept failing to really recognize when the ão in the portuguese language was used. That combination stayed very foreign to me for a long time when trying to recognize words. However, I have now learned that the Spanish ending of ion is more or less an equivalent to that of ão. Take the word administración in Spanish, that becomes administracão in Portuguese. Tips like this have been really helpful for me starting to learn how to read and speak things. In addition to this, I learned that the typical io/a diphthong in Spanish is not common to the Portuguese language at all. Instead, it would just relatively be an o/a for Portuguese. For example, espacio (spanish) vs. espaço. Those are just some interesting differences I’ve picked up and my language partner has done a great job trying to leverage my Spanish into our learning.
As for the new areas we’ve moved into this month, we’ve been trying to focus on speech regarding questions and answers. My language partner has been giving me a lot of assignments where you have to fill in blanks or open-ended responses to conversational questions. I’ve been sort of understanding this okay because a lot of the question words are super similar to Spanish. For example, quem, como, and quando are very similar. As for common responses, we’ve been trying to look at to be and have verbs. My favorite one I’ve learned so far is estou com inveja, which means I am jealous. Practice is the most integral part of these lessons for me because I really understand what we’re doing when in the meeting, but once I revisit it, I forget certain things about what I’ve learned. The weekly assignments have been super helpful, and I think that I’m moving in a really good direction. To couple with my weekly meetings, my partner suggested I watch the movie City of God in Portuguese with subtitles. This really helped reinforce a lot of dialogue that we’ve been working on in our meetings.
As for the future, there’s a few goals we have in mind. First, I would like to be rather conversational on a basic level and be able to fully understand these basic questions and phrases by next month’s post. In addition, I’d like to be able to identify different ways to respond to questions and how to ask the right ones within the language. For next month, my partner is going to show me the book pois não and see if it could help me transition from Spanish to Portuguese. However, we aren’t entirely sure if its the best resource for me, but we are going to try it soon. Third, we are hoping to set together some culmination of what I learned for me to practice and keep repeating so I don’t forget the foundation I’ve built. After that, I’m not entirely sure, but we definitely will keep progressing in the best way possible for me and my aspirations.
For this week’s cultural post, my language partner recommended I watch the movie City of God or known as “Cidade de Deus” in Portuguese, and take a dive into the controversy and cultural elements surrounding the film. The film was released in Brazil in 2002, then worldwide in 2003, and is supposedly set loosely on real events. It takes inspiration from the novel with the same name Cidade de Deus and is set in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. This movie fared well amongst critics and was nominated for four Academy awards, with one of them being Brazil’s entry into the category of best film in a foreign language. It’s clear that this movie is very popular and still gets talked about widely as one of the best movies of the 21st century. I personally can see why as I thought it was outstandingly done and was suspenseful enough to keep the audience engaged throughout. There also were many characters you identified with from the Favela and became immensely intrigued in their stories and decisions throughout.
In order to watch the film, I had to force myself to watch in Portuguese and have English subtitles on. This was pretty confusing at first and I had to rewind multiple times to re-watch various parts of the film. In addition, it’s also a rather long movie running over 2 hours but that’s a side point. With all that said, I was able to work through it and actually took a lot away from a dialogue and interaction perspective. It was intriguing to see normal conversations within the movie and then look to the translations to really try and understand how that relates. In my head I was constantly trying to pick out words I knew and seeing how they connected with the very unfamiliar utterances of the characters (which there were a lot). I was really looking for question phrases I know like: Tudo bem, Até amanhã, Eu estoum bem, and other common phrases. One word I seem to remember from the film is fraude which means fraud. Which just is another word to add to my vocabulary.
As for the actual plot, it deals with the growth in organized crime in the city while the main characters are set on two differing paths with one choosing to take part in drug dealing. The main controversy of the film is that many believe that this film was glorifying poverty and violence within favelas, which in turn reinforces many stereotypes about favelas and lower end living in Brazil. Many critics believe that the film doesn’t accurately portray the rich culture of Favela’s and just focuses more on crime/violence within the film. While I can see this argument, I definitely think it did a good job of portraying cultural aspects of favelas like food, music, and other instances of local life. Another big critique of the film was that it inspired a phenomenon called “favela tourism”. This is increased tourism is seen as not being ethical because in many cases it’s not uplifting the actual people or living conditions, but rather just seen as a way of making money.
The second biggest controversy of the film was while casting actual members of favela’s helped improve the authenticity of the film, they weren’t paid a fair wage for their work. It’s been shown that actors across the board, from main characters to supplemental roles, made anywhere from 5,000 - 10,000 reais when the film itself grossed over 100 million. This is quite sad, and many actors seen in the hit film are today still living in poverty within the same locales. This is definitely a big issue and one I was very surprised to learn about. Often times we assume that life is similar to that portrayed in these cultural films or television worlds, but in reality, it’s often far different.
Overall, this film really immersed me into the Portuguese language and cultural. I learned so much through the film, and in outside research, about Brazilian culture and overall life in the country. Major themes of violence, inequality, and others became a focal point within the film and my research. It was interesting to see how controversial such a hit film was and how that film related to actual life in where it’s set. I definitely learned a lot through this experience linguistically and culturally.
For this first learning journal, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve accomplished so far and my goals in the future. I have now finally got set up with my language partner Marco, and we have met twice now. We got going a little late with the process, but the meetings have already been super helpful. However, skipping out on 105 was really a hard decision for me and has left me searching a little as I never got the full time to craft a language plan. This is where I’ve been leaning heavily on my language partner who’s gone through the process. We talked about a real good foundational plan for me to meet my goals of being conversational by the end of the semester. To start, we have been discussing the different pieces of Portuguese I’ll be learning. Portuguese is a very diverse language as I’ve learned, and there are different accents and forms depending on the speaker or part of the world. In order to learn more about the distinctions in the language, my partner assigned me a few chapters in the book titled Portuguese for Dummies. This was an amazing introduction to the language, and although basic, really gave me a background to dialects, types, culture, amongst other things. One of the recurring themes of my learning so far has been the difference between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese and that was featured prominently again. Moreover, in Brazil, there’s actually numerous dialects within the country alone. Therefore, it’s been decided that I will be learning most akin to the São Paulo accent because it is the most neutral form of the language. In addition to this, I learned that the language is 89% lexically similar to Spanish. This means it’s been much easier for me to read so far, as I saw sort of within my cultural artifact post, than it will be for me to understand phonetically. One of the more interesting cultural things I learned from my reading is that in Brazil it’s very common and acceptable to just show up to people’s homes at any time. In the US, that really is not common practice at all, and a lot of times you must get permission before going to someone’s house.
Next, my learning shifted to actually focusing on the language. For the first parts of my learning, my partner wants me to focus on very basic things. I have been learning the alphabet, numbers, and other basic phrases from the language. These are my building blocks to hopefully move further along. The alphabet will obviously take some getting used to and real work, but the most interesting pronunciation for me so far has been the “g”. It is pronounced almost as “a’ga”. As for the phrases, it was interesting to me how the language was like Spanish but very different. Take the phrase “Bom dia” for example, it is like it’s half Spanish and half Portuguese, like my partner was trying to explain. This translates to good morning, and these types of typical phrases are what we focused on. My assignment for the first meeting of next week iis to be much more comfortable w these simple phrases we went over and the alphabet. We will still be dealing w similar topics but for now just getting a grasp on meaning and how to use the words is very important for me. So far what’s been working best for me is hearing the online version of the pronunciations and then the meaning after. I go from a visual aspect and then an auditory component, and it seems to be helping make it stick. My partner has emailed me these components with conversations, pronunciations, and other forms of practice.
Overall, I’m very excited to finally get started with my language partner. I know it will be a lot of work and I have a long way to go, but finally diving into the language and testing the waters has been great. In the coming month I hope to really have a good basic understanding of common phrases, numbers, familial terms, and things of that nature. As for my plan, I will continue to lean on my partner, but so far, we’ve set up a very logical progression that will move at the perfect pace for me. Practice and repetition are the keys moving forward.
For my first introduction into the language of Portuguese and the culture around it, my language partner and I thought it a good idea to start off basic. We have not had much time to meet to facilitate learning, so this first post was used as more of an introduction to the language and some cultural aspects we’d try to focus on. The first piece of media that I looked at was an article about the sports culture in the region of São Paulo, Brazil. This article immediately drew me in and was a great starting point because of my love for sports. The article starts out with very common knowledge to me: that in Brazil soccer is almost like a religion. Like many places across the world, in Brazil and Portugal, soccer reigns supreme. However, what was news to me was the growing influence of basketball in Brazil. The NBA has been making steady inroads in Brazilian culture, and in the first quarter of 2021, fandom of the league grew by 31% within the Portuguese speaking county. The statistics peg the large country of 213 million at about 45 million identifying as fans of the league. This is a notable number considering the league only first started outreaching to Brazil in 2004, and many locals have noticed the difference. They now see much more NBA memorabilia especially the jerseys of “jogador” Lebron “King” James. This whole article was super interesting and gave me an insight into the sports landscape of Brazil along with some first-hand accounts from São Paolo residents. Since most of this piece was in English, I didn’t struggle too much with picking up on anything linguistically, but one thing my language partner helped point out to me was the differences in types of Portuguese that are spoken around the world. There’s Brazilian Portuguese and then a European Portuguese which have slight, but noticeable differences between the two. This is something that we’ll be exploring more as we continue to work together.
The next piece of media for this post was a short soccer news update article from “Ojogo.pt”. Ojogo.pt is a major sports newspaper based out of Porto, Portugal. The article I chose was a short sports update on a soccer player contracting Covid-19. Upon first glance at this article, it looked almost impossible to tackle. The whole article is less than 3 paragraphs long and it was difficult to get started, but I eventually started to dissect it slowly. At closer look, it was actually shocking how similar the language is in some respects to Spanish. This is where I was able to leverage my previous knowledge of Spanish to muddle through the article. Certain words like “totalmente”, “finalizar”, “transferência”, and “arguardar” were recognizable. Eventually, with some help from my partner, I was able to work through the meaning. Brazilian league center-back Tiago Coser was supposed to fly in for his signing at the Portuguese soccer club of Benfica, but he tested positive for Covid-19 before his flight. He will now have to quarantine, and the transfer will have to wait. This article was a great piece to look at introductorily because it’s similar to something I’d consume daily if I were a native speaker or Portugal resident. I was genuinely surprised at how I was able to navigate through this article using contextual clues and words I could discern from my history of speaking Spanish. This really left me hopeful for what’s to come as I have more time to work with my partner.
Overall, these two pieces were great to introduce me to the language of Portuguese and a little bit of culture from where it’s spoken. I was really surprised to learn that there’s a difference between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, and I will look to explore that further in my learning. As for the language itself, I was surprised at my ability to navigate through a relatively short piece of content, but I definitely still have far to go. In this early stage of my learning, I am going to have to keep relying on my Spanish background and other things to navigate around all that I do not know.
Sources:
Learning a new language or language in general has always been challenging for me. It’s never been something that’s just clicked like other subjects, and I’ve always had to work hard at. In high school, I took Spanish for 4 years all the way up until my last year of AP Spanish. Although it was challenging, I actually really enjoyed it because of the learning process. That class was super interactive, we watched movies, sang songs, discussed interesting reading materials, and practiced conversational speaking a lot. I loved that aspect and the constant reinforcement of the material through different mediums and communication really helped me learn. From our surveys, I’m said to be a visual learner and from the fire model I’m tabbed as more factual and rational, which is why this probably appeals to me. When I can see the practical side of what I’m learning, I do much better. In addition, my results showed auditory learning as second highest of my learning styles. This makes sense because I really benefited from conversation, media, and other things where I could hear the language and try to imitate what I heard. What was challenging about my language learning in high school was the pace and some harder material. Like I’ve stated, I move a little slower than most with language for some reason, and in high school the pace of learning Spanish was so fast to get us prepared to take the AP exam. There were times I felt left behind, which is why I’m excited to move at my own pace in this class. As for the material, I learned a lot worse with dense readings. Not only was it challenging, but it just was not engaging to me in the slightest sometimes. This really detracted from me trying to learn the material and understand the language. Which is why the more applied learning from the class was much more suited for my learning. I found, especially with being in college not continuing to speak the language, that repetition and practice really are the best ways for me to learn. Even if it were small things, the more I just incorporated Spanish into my daily life, the better I remembered it.
With that being said, I think there really are some effective ways I could learn Portuguese if I approach it the right way. I think to start, I really need to spend time thinking about how to approach learning a language. This would be an expansion on my normal process of learning as I’ve never taken the time to think about it foundationally. A personal schedule and way to keep my own pace would also be something I’ve never had before. This would help me stay organized and allow for me to move at my own productive pace After that, I think that incorporating what learning activities have worked well in the past for me would be the best to pursue. Definitely a mix of visual, interactive, rational, and somewhat basic activities. I think videos, songs, movies, and other things I can just incorporate naturally into my life will work great for me. As well as simply writing and studying important Portuguese words. Another thing I really liked from our readings was the prospect of critical self-reflection and assessment. I think this is a must for my learning process because I need a way to keep myself guided and progressing. Whenever doing something that’s self-guided, it is easy to justify not trying or really no progress because you’re totally in control of the process. So, I’ll need to develop a measuring stick or milestones to keep myself on track. My aspirations aren’t too lofty because language learning is something that takes me a long time and a semester is only so long, but I am excited to hopefully acquire a basic and solid foundation of the language.
