Portuguese belongs to the Indo-European Romance language family. Specifically Western Ibero-Romance. There are a lot of words that show contact with the Arabic world. Words such as Sofá (Al-Suffat) (couch), Bairro (Al-Barri) (neighborhood), Álcool (Al-Kuhul) (alcohol), etc. This is the case because of expansion and trade during the early ages and also because of how close Morocco is to the Iberian peninsula. Portuguese also has vocabulary from germanic, celtic, and slavic origins. These different word origins show the encounters this region has faced over time with other cultures. This is also shows how languages change over time. Through conquest and trade, more and more vocabulary from other languages are perpetually being added to help the language evolve. Linguists track these changes over time by looking at the similarities between different languages, especially those under the same Indo-European umbrella. They also use historical events such as war, conquest, empires, and trade to track the evolution of a language.
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Brazil is sometimes known for being a laid-back country with much more laid-back and open people compared to a place like the United States. For my last cultural post I tried learning more about Brazilian culture and how they live their day to day lives. Interestingly enough, I found out that Brazilians have a term that can be used to describe their cultural tendencies and behavior. Brazilians call it “O Jeitinho Brasileiro” which can translate to “The Brazilian Way of Living”. Reading Brazilian blogs about the topic, others described it as finding creative or kind solutions to solve everyday problems that arise. This description has led to Brazilians being thought of as some of the happiest people, who are always carefree, welcoming, and thoroughly enjoying themselves.
While this “Brazilian Way” can certainly be positive, it also comes with a few negative aspects. For one, when I asked my Brazilian language partner to state what “O Jeitinho Brasileiro” means to her, she said “Well I grew up hearing it was always something bad, but then I realized that for rich people it can be more about trickery, corruption and deception, but for the poor it can be about enjoying life and figuring out a way to get by when a problem arises”. This comment was super interesting because it brings the topic of class and wealth to the forefront while recognizing the “Brazilian Way” has both positive and negative connotations and implications for the real world.
With regard to negative connotations, I found that the “Brazilian Way” was associated with corruption, lack of education, and lack of civility. The image below highlights an example of this negative Brazilian lifestyle, where one coworker asks another colleague if he is going to participate in the movement against corruption and the colleague’s response is “How much money am I going to earn?”. A more practical example that I read about would be an individual cutting others in a large line at a bank because he is only going to ask a quick question, while the correct thing to do would be to wait in line just like everyone else. However, through “o jeitinho brasileiro” he found a quick way to avoid waiting in line at the disdain of others waiting in line.
At the same time, a lot of what I read about the “Brazilian Way” was largely positive and is considered to be one of the best characteristics that Brazilians have. The people of Brazil are often well known for being cheerful and relaxed even in the most stressful situations. In terms of positive connotations, the “Brazilian Way” is associated with a light, creative, flexible and optimistic way of leading life and solving situations.
I enjoyed being able to learn a little more about this cultural aspect of Brazil while being able to have my language partner as someone to almost verify the information I was reading and learning about. It certainly appears that Brazilians appreciate their more casual and laid-back approach to life. I also believe it can sometimes be the opposite of an American lifestyle that emphasizes a fast-paced work/life environment with very little time to relax or deal with problems and stressful situations in a lighthearted manner.
If I had received a research grant to study Portuguese, I would first hire a Brazilian language partner with whom I can speak with daily. For me, the hardest part of learning a new language is speaking it which is what I need to practice the most. The first thing I would want to learn is conversational Portuguese. How greet, how to ask for things, etc. I will then keep leveling up. I already know how to read in Portuguese so the next thing I will attack is listening to Portuguese and understanding the accent. This is also where my language partner helps a lot. By practicing speaking and listening with my language partner, I will continue to level up. The last thing I will conquer is my writing. I currently have the idea of keeping a daily journal in Portuguese to practice writing everyday.
Writing in Portuguese has been pretty easy with my Spanish background. The syntax between the two languages is pretty much identical. I would definitely say that I prefer writing over typing. It is much easier to write the diacritical marks than having to search and use the ALT codes. I definitely can not remember all of the ALT codes. Because I am using Spanish as my base language for learning Portuguese, I am noticing and comparing the patterns in Portuguese to those that I already have learned in Spanish. One of the first patterns that I have noticed is the affixes. For example, if a word in Spanish ends "ión", in Portuguese it will end in "ão" (generalización = generalização). I tend to keep a daily journal in Portuguese of things that happened that day in order to better my writing abilities.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s2WGqtg6sL9WujTUPDRF6T9YJ1FgCNHF/view?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TVdUCoRtdozoW4M8AJZnJwFbae1TEJ9wUWWOdP6CYuM/edit?usp=sharing
This is my final biweekly blog post of the semester and I am happy to say I have made a lot of progress based on my lesson plan and what I hoped to accomplish. I have decided to stick with just my diary entries that I do twice per week and rewrite with corrections afterwards. I have done this in writing via iPad and sending it back and forth through and app that I can save the progress and have my tutor Rachel correct and this has improved my spelling and grammar. We also go over during lessons the common errors she has noticed in my entries and other collection of difficult diphthongs and common spelling mistakes that are made in Korean and that has proven to be useful. Sometimes I feel frustrated when I realize how many spelling mistakes and grammar errors there are in a single entry, which aren’t small, but rather couple of paragraphs so they are sizable and many corrections needed to be made, but as I progressed and throughout the semester, the number of corrections have gone down in number. There are still a lot of errors as I try to incorporate newer and difficult words and grammar, but I also try to include older words that I have messed up before so that I can practice spelling and using those words and the different grammar forms. This helped in my daily life such as writing and texting my family and friends in Korean. I have become more confident in writing and even if I make a mistake I like to think of it as a learning opportunity. I had a moment in November and until today in keeping up with my diary entries due to health issues and being ill, but overall, I think I did my best in keeping up with the diary entries and my penmanship has greatly improved as well as a result of writing by hand and I recommend anyone who is learning a language that has written form to practice writing it in hand and it helps to commit the mistakes and corrections to memory a lot better and also helps penmanship in that language. I learned that penmanship in different languages are also at a different level. I am proficient in penmanship in English as I am used to the stroke movements in English, but in Korean I have poor handwriting because the strokes and movements are unfamiliar to my hand, but I have been improving since the start of this semester! So this is a side effect of my lessons and practice that I didn’t expect, but am extremely happy with. My family had commented my progress and improvement in texting and writing and I am happy to say my lessons and practice have paid off. I think later when I continue to learn and continue my progress in learning Korean, I will choose to practice daily, in smaller increments in an efficient way instead of cumbersome multiple long sessions of practicing and learning. I learned that smaller and frequent practices and in depth is better than trying to bite off more than I can chew. Also, making a conscious effort to challenge myself in that time period I am practicing like I did with repeating words I have gotten wrong before or grammar and also trying newer words and grammar forms are a good way to always learn new things and get better all the time. And so the journey does not stop there!
Hello again!
I have been doing well in my lessons and have kept up doing the diary entries twice a week and sometimes I forget to do an entry or two but so far I have been doing well in doing my entire and corrections, most importantly, since as I stated in a previous blog post that the corrections is what truly helps me to remember my mistakes and to prevent me from making the same mistakes. I have learned that the activity sheet booklet proved to be inefficient since most of which contained content I was very well versed in and had simple fill in the blank grammar and vocabulary and to be honest, the diary entries worked better by itself since I wasn’t hard pressed to complete my tasks and rush anything and thus get subpar quality in writing or not enough. I decided to focus just on my diary entries and corrections and I noticed I make a lot of vowel errors and diphthongs in Korean and I decided to use words that contain that more often so that I am more exposed to making errors and thus make corrections to them and then learn from my mistakes. I confuse the different “e” sounds in Korean and it is confusing for me sometimes and it is something that one has to memorize when they learn Korean, but thankfully I am slowly getting the hang of things, but like I said, diphthongs are difficult for me to “sound out” thus I try to use new ones every entry and think of more words like them to write out and try my hand in spelling it correctly. Thus far everything has been working well and I am happy with the progress that I made!
I’ve been continuing the diary entries (twice a week) and then having it corrected and rewriting the corrections to commit them to memory still. It has proven to be a useful way to learn for me and especially the rewriting part. I noticed that not rewriting the corrections don’t help and it doesn’t commit the errors and corrections to memory if I don’t do that. As I have predicted, I dropped doing the vocabulary and I picked up doing activities to help my penmanship in Korean such as writing by hand and retracing the alphabet and my penmanship has gotten better and more legible. I have started doing activity sheets on top of that as well and I want to see how well I manage to keep this up. I might have to reduce the load of how much I do, because it is a lot. But I will continue to do my diary entries so I predict that the activity sheets might have to come to a halt or at least reduce the number of pages I do. It has been gratifying to see my progress and my recognition in corrections that were made before and prevent me from making the same mistake again. I hope to be able to continue doing so and so far I am happy with the progress I have made.
I decided to come with a plan for learning written Korean better and I decided with my language partner Rachel and who is also my tutor to write diary entries twice a week and then have it corrected and then rewrite it corrected and then write new diary entries as well the following week. It has been working well and I have learned spelling and grammar a lot better now than before and common errors and being fixed. I have also been doing vocabulary tests and memorization, but I think next time I post I might have dropped that lesson because my Korean vocabulary is pretty sporadic and random and I know certain difficult words and don’t know some simply vocabulary, so it is inefficient to try memorize and paw through all the vocabulary that I might not know. I’ve been excited in writing Korean and I write it by hand since I have to truly know the spelling without spellcheck. I feel like the spellcheck makes it easier to not remember the spelling of the Korean words so I try to write by hand on my iPad and then send it to Rachel and have her correct my entries and then I rewrite the entire thing. Hopefully, this strategy continues to be successful!
Hi there,
Attached below is the link for the SDLAP 110 podcast with my language partner, Somyung Kim.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L58JexuiOxzmf5nHINWTz1OZhKrNO2B_MNlAeUTKWDA/edit?usp=sharing
My cultural artifact for this week consisted of watching mukbang videos. I am an avid mukbang watcher mainly because I love food. After coming to Richmond, I think I started to watch a lot more mukbang videos than before because my food options were now significantly limited. Back at home, I would cook and bake myself everything I wanted to eat, however, that is a luxury I do not have, so I fill that void by watching mukbang videos of my favorite YouTubers eating the foods that I miss the most. In a way, I also use mukbang videos as a way to track the foods I want to eat right away when I go home during break time. Additionally, I find it a good way to stay on top of the foods that are trending in Korea right now. For instance, I would have never known about mint chocolate flavor craze if I did not regularly watch mukbang videos.
As I was googling my favorite mukbangers, I discovered that many of them were involved in scandals regarding product placement and ads. I looked more deeply into it and I realized that many of them were in deep trouble because they were essentially advertising different food brands and companies to their viewers and “influencing” them without explicitly stating that the video was an AD or that it contained a gifted product. At first, I did not really see what the entire fuss was about since it was just food and the entire situation just seemed overscaled. However, as I dove more deep into the topic, I realized just how much power and influence these mukbangers have and it was wrong of them to use their platform in a deceitful manner. Therefore, many of the mukbangers uploaded an official apology video while also taking a break from YouTube for months. Apart from this entire AD controversy, the scandal that shocked me the most was about one of my favorite mukbanger named “Bokhee.” She was known to be a pretty, small-figure mukbanger who ate the biggest spoonful in a clean manner. Many people always wondered how she was able to stay so lean while eating such large amounts of food. Well, it turned out that she was involved in a scandal called “먹뱉" which translates to “eating and spitting out.” Many of her videos were not 1-take videos but were instead highly edited in between scenes. In one of her videos, it can be seen that she actually never swallows during the clips. Therefore, this caused a lot of controversies and this kind of cancel culture forced her to go incognito for 6 months until she recently made a comeback.
Ultimately, I love watching mukbang videos, but I am not too much of a fan of the psychological effects it has on the viewers. Moreover, since South Korea has a society that is very much focused on the “perfect” shape and body, and is very geared towards outer beauty, having a mukbang culture like this just does not sit right with me.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OBVLr7h10WI5VyKdrJMGe0RhLhxe1rcioazCiU_zR0M/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nMvSmTtlq70VJEYk_EyzmO7PFrW_Z5oI0cANZpDVNe4/edit?usp=sharing
