Post reflection paper #2

[Nile Harris]

I have personally learned a lot about myself as a language learner and cultural explorer throughout the duration of the semester. I believe the most important thing is my discovery of my passion for language learning. Before taking this course, I never really knew the extent of my interest in language learning. As of now, I have only studied western romance languages, but now I have so much more interest in middle eastern languages which is why I am excited about learning Turkish next semester. If I have the opportunity in the future, I would also like to learn Arabic and Russian. This semester I chose to focus on Brazilian Portuguese. The biggest challenge that I continue to face is my auditory skills. It is very difficult to understand native Brazilian Portuguese speakers because of how fast and how they do not separate their words when they speak. This is the case because I am not a native Portuguese speaker, therefore it will take time for me to train my ear to understand native Portuguese speakers. Also, the phonetic inventory of Portuguese is slightly different than that of English and Spanish. As of now, the way I go about training my ear is by listening to a lot of Portuguese interviews. I am a big fan of MMA, and there are so many Brazilian MMA fighters who only speak Portuguese. I constantly listen to their interviews so that I become more familiar with their dialect. So far, I have really enjoyed the process of learning Portuguese because of my Spanish background. My old Portuguese teacher told me that if you know Spanish, then you already know about 65% of Portuguese which is very true. My reading and writing skills in Portuguese are almost as good as they are in Spanish because of my Spanish background. To continue my Portuguese studies, I will continue to study my textbook and listen to Portuguese interviews. Something that I currently do is practice speaking out loud to myself in Portuguese which somewhat helps me stay fresh. Also, I am very hopeful that I receive the critical language scholarship to study Portuguese in Florianopolis, Brazil. One of the most useful tools for me this semester was the speech accent archive. I absolutely loved listening to the different accents. It very much helps me with understanding the phonetic inventory of a language and how it differs from the English phonetic inventory. There was also another resource that we used in which you spoke into the computer in any language and it would tell you how accurate your pronunciation was. I forgot the name of this resource but I would love to use it in the future. I would just love to learn more about the different Portuguese dialects around the world and what makes them specific to that region. I would also like to learn about the different dialects of Brazil and how they differ from each other. My old Portuguese professor and I talked about how you can tell the difference between the northern region speakers and the southern region speakers. He also talked about how you can tell the difference between the speakers within one city. It is very interesting stuff.