week 5

Week 5 Reflection

            In order to address the slight lack of Reading or Writing skills that I felt like I needed a boost on, I went back to the list of resources on the syllabus that I had compiled at the beginning of the class. I liked the idea of starting a book together that we could both follow along with, and a translation of Alice in Wonderland in Portuguese was available online through the website paralleltext.io. I had already read the original English text many years ago, and of course, almost everyone is familiar with the story of Alice and the Mad Hatter which helped a lot as I was going through it. I learned a new group of vocabulary words, such as “well”, “hedge”, “hole”, “tunnel”, “vest”, “pocket watch”, etc. The website also has a feature where it will read you a sentence if you click on it, which was a great complement to learning new vocabulary words. I then wrote a literary analysis on the chapters that we had read that week to submit on Thursdays, which I felt required more thought and effort on my part than reflecting on a topic we had talked about on Tuesday, so I was happy to be stepping things up in both departments.

            This new strategy, alongside weekly grammar lessons and exercises from the book, I feel really pulled together all of the goals that I had outlined in my conception of how I wanted to learn Portuguese this semester. I was able to talk about something creative, a work of art that I was familiar with and excited about reading but that was also slightly different than the tale that I knew and develop my language skills as a byproduct of discussing this engaging topic. This was the method that I had been inspired to do because of the way that Professor Abreu styled his Portuguese classes, and in many ways was the reason I found myself wanting to do a self-directed language study in Portuguese and go to Brazil in the first place.

            If I were to design this class for a group or for somebody else, I think this setup would be ideal. However, I probably would not use this particular website because it is definitely set up more for leisure and perhaps does not anticipate that the viewer really plans on getting through the whole book and would just like to do a bit of casual practice as you can only flip through one page at a time. I would probably find a side-by-side print book or online version to purchase, maybe of a famous Brazilian author. In any case, every part of this has been a learning experience and I am glad to have progressed to this point where I have found something that is working for me and if it would not work for someone else, how I would go about adapting it.

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  • I love that you read familiar books to improve your reading skills! I did this with Harry Potter (since I have every word of that whole series memorized) and found that it really expanded my vocabulary in the target language. I also discovered new grammar rules that were used more commonly in books than in every day speech, which I thought was fascinating. I'd love to know if you encountered the same differences in grammar while you were reading Alice and the Mad Hatter. 

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