De volta à ativa

Olá pessoal!!

Não posso nem pedir desculpas pelo sumiço pois eu simplesmente abandonei o blog por anos.
Percebi o quão difícil é manter um blog por anos e continuar escrevendo tópicos relevantes e interessantes. Porém, em relação a línguas finalmente consegui me organizar a fim de estudar vários idiomas numa mesma plataforma.

No momento estou estudando 5 idiomas ao mesmo tempo: chinês, coreano, sueco, francês e holandês...


Se conseguir disciplina o suficiente para continuar escrevendo estarei compartilhando...

Até a próxima!!

Hey folksl! 여러분 안녕 하십니까?

As you can see I just can't study ONLY one language at a time.
Specially when it comes to Korean I think it's a good idea to start studying again since I first started learning this interesting language back in 1998.

Since I know Japanese, which also belongs to the ALTAIC languages along with Korean, things get much easier because I'm already used to the SOV (Subject + object + verb) structure and also due to the fact that Chinese characters aren't used in Korean (at least one doesn't have to know 2000 characters to learn the language well as it is the case with Japanese).

In order to illustrate things better here comes the Korean alphabet:



14 consonants:

ㄱ(k,g) ㄴ(n) ㄷ(t,d) ㄹ(r,l) ㅁ(m) ㅂ(p,b) ㅅ(s) ㅇ(ng, vowel marker) ㅈ(j) ㅊ(ch) ㅋ(aspirated k ) ㅌ(aspirated t ) ㅍ(aspirated p) ㅎ(h)

10 vowels:

ㅏ(a) ㅑ(ya) ㅓ(ɔ) ㅕ(iɔ) ㅗ(o) ㅛ(io) ㅜ(u) ㅠ(yu) ㅡ(ɯ) ㅣ(i)


The simple fact of knowing these letters will help you reading a lot of things in Korean. As far as I know I only say Chinese characters when I went to Pusan, which is written like 釜山 but can also be written like 부산.


I also take this opportunity to introduce you books that helped me learning Korean.






Cheers!! 감사합니다!

Taking French to the next level

Ça va? How are you?
As you might already know I'm working on my French in order to make it fluent so that I can work using it but lack motivation since I live in Japan and have nobody to talk in French. Due to that I decided to prepare myself for the DELF certificate, which will certify my French isn't just "ok", rather that it is accepted internationally.

The book I'm using right now is as follows:



It's an excellent book for consolidating one's grammatical knowledge in French and has the keys for all exercises, which will allow you to check your progress.


Au revoir!!

Studying Chinese?

大家好！Hi everyone!! These days I've been really motivated to study Chinese and have heard Chinese Pod almost everyday but feel like I need some grammar background to consolidate what I have learned. Having said that I'd like to introduce you to books I've studied recently:



After studying Chinese for 2 full years (1 year in 1993 and another in 1998) I realized I had difficulties forming basic sentences and needed an extra boost to understand the structure better. This grammar book has clear explanations and tons of examples that help the student to take his Chinese to the next level!!!


Since speaking a language can't be based ONLY on the knowledge of grammar, one must also develop his/her listening skills and this book helped me raise the bar when it comes to listening. However, since it has a vast vocabulary per lesson it would be advisable to read the book more than once, which I intend to do soon!!!

再见 (zaijian)! See ya!!

Material suggestions for studying Dutch

Hoe gaat het met u? (How are you? in Dutch)
I don't know if I have already posted about this but I'm working hard on My Dutch in order to read Anne Frank's diary in Dutch since I first read it in German.

I first studied Dutch in 1998 before I entered the graduate school of Osaka University and used the following book:


It's a very concise textbook with a good explanation of the grammar in addition to tons of examples and texts. I'm done more than half of the book and could already risk reading some book in Dutch.



However, studying a language without a good dictionary is like running without warming up first. In other words, you will stop in the middle of your practise. This dictionary is pretty reliable and is Dutch-English English-Dutch so it will help you get to a level where you will be able to use a monolingual Dutch dictionary.

Anyway, in the next posting I'll be sharing about books for studying Chinese!!

Dank u wel en tot ziens!!! Thanks and catch you later!!!

Sorry for the absence

Hey folks!! I really apologize for not posting for a long time but life in Japan can be really busy. Also, I have decided I'll stop being greedy and will dedicate to only 3 languages (French, Dutch and Chinese) until I can get a satisfactory result.
From these 3 I have only studied 2 (Chinese and Dutch) because I have 2 goals for this year:
1) To be able to pass a certificate in Chinese, which can be the HSK （汉语水平考试）or any other certificate offered in Japan.
2) To read Anne Frank's diary (Het AchterHuis), which was the main motivation for me to start studying Dutch back in 1998.
As for French, after listening to it for many hours on the train on my way to work I'm capable of listening well and conversing to people but still lots of things to work on the written part. Well, as the Japanese proverb says: If you want to get the baby tiger, you should enter the tiger's den!!「虎穴に入らずんば、虎児を得ず」.
Oh yes, about studying Chinese I'm getting some good results from listening to Chinese Pod, which has been boosting my listening skills in addition to help me remembering what I started learning in 1993 and then again in 1998. I believe that CONSISTENCY leads to fluency and must therefore concentrate as much as I can.
Anyway, it's almost 3 am and I think I'd better take a nap!!!

Tot ziens 再见 Au revoir おやすみなさい　

I started studying Russian again!!

Last week I said I had started studying Polish, Swedish and Finnish but yesterday I felt an unbearable DRIVE to study Russian again as I saw my book collection from the publisher 白水社 (Hakusuisha), which publishes language manuals in languages as rare as Vietnamese, Icelandic, Ainu (Native Japanese language) and Croatian.

In addition to the Japanese textbook I also found the book "Russian in exercises":


and "Oxford Russian Dictionary":

I also found my Russian-Japanese dictionary (русско-японский словарь), which has about 260.000 words and TONS of examples. I guess I won't need a Russian dictionary for a while.

Well, after almost ten years without studying Russian I got lots of catch up to do so
до свидониа!

Swedish compared vocabulary #2

Hej!!

Today I had some fun learning Swedish and was amazed at how similar the Germanic languages can be.

I've made a list of words I've learned today as follows:

Ligga - Liegen(DE) → Be located
Knacka- Knock(EN)
Dörr - Door (EN)
Lyssna - Listen(EN)
Fönster - Fenster(DE) →Window
Gå - Gehen(DE)→Go
Lyfta - Lift(EN)
Säga - Sagen(DE)→Say
Öppna - Öffnen(DE)→Open

The list will continue as my studies progress.

Tack bra och Heydå!

Using a linguistic approach to learn

Hej! Cześć!
Today I realized something cool on the train as I went through my Polish and Swedish books of the エキスプレス (Express) series for learning languages.
Since I speak fluent German and have also studied some Russian I realized that there was some important info from these languages that could help me learn faster.

As I studied Swedish today I bumped into some words I had already learned (Or Similar) in German such as Väder(Wetter in German) for weather, Ungefär (Ungefähr) for approximately, båda (Beide in German) for both, riktigt (Richtig in German) for correct, Kök (Küche in German) for kitcheb, Stol (Stuhl in German) for chair, Stan (Stadt in German) for city, Möbel (Exact spell in German) for furniture to name a few. In addition to that I also learned få (Which reminded me of FEW). That's only what happens in terms of vocabulary. I could also look at grammar but that's a topic for another episode. It is no wonder that the Swedes learn German or English much better and faster than speakers of Latin languages, for example.

Next let's try Polish that belongs to the slavic languages along with Russian and another couple of languages.

I was surprised the word used for asking for permission "można" when Russian uses МÓЖНО, I also learned PRAVDA (Truth) which is ПРÁВДА in Russian, JĘZYK (Language) which is ЯЗЫК in Russian. I am sure that more similar words will come to the surface since the Slavic languages are said to have many similarities in vocabulary, something that's not a reality when it comes to Latin languages. As a Portuguese speaker I'm still struggling to improve my vocabulary in Spanish, Italian and French because words with a similar spelling might have meanings which are as different as language from different linguistics families. I remember I tried to say FUNNY in Italian and use the Portuguese DIVERTIDO, which means funny in Portuguese but in Italian that meant "FAT" and the word for funny is DIVERTENTE. I'm not sure about the Italian spelling, though...

In Portuguese PASSA might mean GET OU OF HERE when in Spanish one invites his/her guest to come in by saying the same word.

French is so different from Portuguese that I learned German much faster by comparing it with English.

When it comes to asian language like Japanese, Chinese and Korean, these are so different that one feels like learning a new language. However, Korean and Japanese share a lot of grammatical similarities (The so called Altaic languages) which are said to diminish the more one researches in older forms of these languages. Chinese was easier for me to study because of the characters that help me learn vocabulary faster but I still had to learn (Still struggle) the tones...

Well, that's all for now and I'm looking forward to your comments and/or corrections.

Tack så mycket, Dziękuję

Oops, I forgot the Polish fonts!

As I tested the fonts installed on the mac I realized that I could also use the following Polish fonts:
ą, ę,ł
In order to do that one must press alt before a, e and l.

Now I can properly write the name of Poland's former President Mr. Lech Wałęsa.

Do widzenia!

Using a macintosh to go multilingual

G'day mate!!
Sorry for the Australian greeting, which I happened to hear in "Ravenshoe" when I visited Australia in 2003 even though I hear that this isn't used often.
After having studied Russian, Korean, Chinese, French, Italian and having restarted studying Polish, Finnish and Swedish there's something that always comes to my mind: How am I supposed to write in all of these languages that use some tricky letters?
Well, after I bought my new Macintosh with Leopard installed my problems are over because I can find fonts for all the aforesaid languages and there's something COOL about writing in traditional Chinese (繁体字）, Korean and Russian , which required one to learn a different keyboard setting in order to write in the Panther OS days. In the case of the traditional Chinese, one had to know the so called POMOFOin order to write anything.
Now I can write stuff just like I type to write in English or other language that uses an alphabet.
Let me give you some examples writing my name using my name JULIO.
Simplified Chinese （Zhulio）:朱礼欧
Traditional Chinese (Zhulio): 朱禮歐
Russian: йулио(If I type exactly JULIO) but the correct would be жулио
Korean: 주료
Japanese: ジュリオ
Hebrew: חוליו,which would be cool if my name were pronounced like in Spanish but since I'm Julio (joo lee oh) גיוליו would sound better.
Greek: ιθλιο but this is somewhat different in my opinion. I guess ιονλιο would sound better...
If I knew how to use Arabic and the Devanagari alphabet I could also try to write my name in Arabic and Hindi but I'd better not.

After struggling with fonts installation and crazy keyboard settings I decided to use the MAC for multilingual writing and study. I wonder how everybody is doing to write.

Cheers!!

I started studying Polish, Finnish and Swedish again

After a while without posting due to lack of ideas about what I should write I felt motivated to study Polish again because of a program running on a TV in Japan and Finnish because I met some people at my church. Swedish has been in my list since 2004 because my pastor was from Sweden at that time. It is really interesting to study language that are totally different from the latin languages specially Finnish, which is said to be an Asian language. It has structures that remind me of the Japanese language such as the pospositions and vocalic harmony. From these 3 languages Polish might be tough to learn due to the small number of vowels in words. The "perfective" and Imperfective" verb thingy is also complicated in addition to the change in a word radical. Swedish is the easiest to learn because I speak German, which is also a Germanic language. Sometimes I feel I'm just learning to speak another Germanic dialect.
Tschüß, Heydå, Do widzenia, Näkemiin

English as my first language

I left Brazil for the first time in 1993 as when I was granted a prize from the Japan Foundation and used English on a daily basis for the first time. I had never imagined using more English than my native language and have to express everything I wanted as though I was speaking Portuguese. At this time I had the opportunity to meet people from dozens of countries and listen to several English accents. Unfortunately this experience only lasted 2 weeks but it was a wonderful experience to visit Japan for the first time after started studying Japanese in 1991 at Rio de Janeiro Federal University. During this trip I was able to see famous places in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima.

From read to spoken English

As I entered Rio de Janeiro Federal University in 1991 I had contact with spoken English for the first time at the age of 17. Before that I only read magazines (Speak up, Newsweek and Time) and listened to music in English. It was nice to meet foreign students who came to Brazil to learn Portuguese and communicate in English. What attracted more in studying English was the possibility of communicating with people I’d never talk if English wasn’t the lingua franca. Also, English gave me access to language-related materials or any book that I wanted to read, whether it was a novel or a technical book.
Back to college, I was able to read André Martinét and Saussure for my linguistics classes, which gave me a glimpse of what I could do if I mastered English.

Movies and music

After being introduced to the world of music I kept on curious to learn more about my favorite songs, which was rewarding sometimes due to being able to understand many songs I liked but, on the other hand, showed that many songs I loved were simply pathetic compared to the image I had them. But things got more interesting when I started learning English so I'd never read subtitles again. The reason for that is that I didn't want to waste my time reading subtitles and not be able to enjoy the movie. Also, jokes and pun can only be understood in the original language, which motivated me to learn more English.
Besides that I hated dubbed movies because they not only took the movies' characteristics (Just imagine Shrek without Eddie Murphy), but also because I tended to associate a certain voice actor to a certain character and that would take my motivation of watching a movie.

Me and the English language

The year is 1984 and I had my first English lesson in junior high. I must confess it was intimidating to learn different words, grammar and have to write in a total different language. However, I felt I had what it takes to overcome that wall called language. I was able to learn all grammar and vocabulary without much effort. In 1986 I had the pleasure to understand a song in English for the first time: “Say you, say me” from Lionel Ritchie. That was a boost to my passion for English and spurred me to try different things thereafter

Welcome to the Language-Freak show!

A while ago I was talking to a friend, who said I HAD TO start writing if I wanted to reach people and share my experiences SO I decided to start writing on how I became multilingual (Besides native Portuguese I speak and write in Japanese, English and German) and keep on studying languages on my own (At the moment I’m studying Spanish for the DELE certificate, French for the DELF certificate and Hebrew in order to read the old testament) and hope to study Chinese, Korean and Italian again, after having studied them for over 1 year in 1998.