Frustration, Memory and Patterns

Of late, I have been frustrated with my level of progress with Portuguese. This has been odd, because the classes have gone really well, I have held my own in a few conversations (or, at least, held a conversation that flowed), and have seen signs of development in my written production. But, it can feel like a few steps forward and one back. Part of my problem is that because I am fluent in Spanish and because of its similarity to Portuguese, I seem to be stuck in a place where I see Portuguese only through a Spanish lens. This means that, currently for me, Portuguese is viewed as either like or unlike Spanish, rather than a thing in itself. I realise the problematic politics of that given the sometimes tense relationship there has been between the two countries over the centuries, but, I am coming from it as a learner who is eager to plot out patterns and relate them to prior learning rather than any reductive colonial or imperialistic intentions. 

As a method this is great for grammar and fine if you are thinking in terms of one or two words where you can see differences and similarities and remark upon them as helpful points of reference or curiosities. But, where you're trying to build up a whole sign system it becomes an edifice that can only be rickety. Let me explain. If word A is similar to word B in Portuguese, that's interesting and can be related in that file where that memory is stored. But, it is similar and not identical, so a further related fact must be stored with that. That's okay, if it's only one or two words and where there might a collection of words with related common patterns. For example, words ending in -tion and  -ción in English and Spanish, respectively, in general end in -ções in Portuguese. That's fine and simple. But, what of the words that are spelt similarly and mean different things? I then have to remember a kind of narrative around that word and remember that words C and D should be stored in separate but related files because they may look the same but they inhabit a different register or field. That means I am asking myself to remember the word and its difference, rather than figuring out the language on its own terms. 

This is exhausting and fruitless. I'm not sure how to get beyond this habit, because it is my (and many others) inclination to see patterns and to relate it to prior learning, hence the frustration. I think that I will have to find new modes of approaching the language and immersing myself in it in order to go beyond seeking out commonalities and allow it to inhabit its own archive in my memory bank. I think that, in part, I need to do it by stepping back from only looking at the language at a micro-level (i.e. word by word) and read, listen and watch more extended pieces. The issue with this is where to find material (you can only ask so much of a teacher) that suits my own particular needs and interests?

This brings me to curation, which I will discuss in a future post. In the meantime, I'm off to listen to a podcast and see where that brings me.

What's available online to practice your Portuguese verbs?

I have difficulty memorising the pretérito perfeito simples [preterite tense] irregular verbs. The regulars ones are not so bad, there's a pattern that's recognisable which is logical and straightforward. The irregulars, however, are not so easy. How does Trazer (to bring) become trouxe? or, fazer (to make) fiz? While the regular -er verb endings are -i, -este, -eu, -emos, -eram, trazer follows its own route to become: trouxe, trouxeste, trouxe, trouxemos, trouxeram and fazer is: fiz, fizeste, fez, fizemos, fizeram. There is some patterning, but mostly its a list that needs to be memorised fully. One of my preferred methods of memorising blocks of things like this is to use the voice memo feature on my phone and read them into it and then listen to it on a loop. This is not helped by the fact that I'm not sure how to pronounce trouxe (a crucial question for my teacher to help with).

So, I turn to the Internet for help. Of the seven (?) that result from my Google search term "practica portugues preterito" two are Spanish-related. There are flashcards such as: http://www.cram.com/tag/perfecto-portuguese-preterito/7 (this one turns up twice, another time under a different address). These are user generated and most seem to have several tenses at once. Therefore, it's useful for those revising, but not for those learning. There are a few that help figure out and practice the different usage of the imperfect and preterite: http://www.easyportuguese.com/Portuguese-Lessons/Imperfect.html and this one even has a cute frog: http://conjuguemos.com/activity.php?id=12&source=public&language=spanish. Again, these presuppose that you have memorised both. There's a wiki list:  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Portuguese/Contents/Preterite_tense_regular_verbs. Useful if you don't have the list to hand. Not a great return. The results for similar searches all lead to Spanish-learning websites.

I try an English search term "practice Portuguese preterite". It returns ten, none Spanish, some are the same or similar to the above: two that compare between the imperfect and preterite http://www.netplaces.com/brazilian-portuguese/verb-tenses-an-overview/the-preterite-versus-the-imperfect.htm and http://www.learn-portuguese-with-rafa.com/Learn_Portuguese_with_Rafa_Newsletter-preterite-vs-Imperfect-in-portuguese.html, a quick introduction to verbs and tenses that is handy for those unfamiliar with grammar: http://www.linguanaut.com/portuguese_verbs.htm, a language learner's forum entry: http://help.berberber.com/forum65/15674-past-tense-regular-verbs-1st-ending-ar.html and the conjuguemos, flashcards, and wikis above.

There is a curious one that gets you to translate 91 verbs from English against a clock that counts down from 11 minutes: http://www.sporcle.com/games/benjaminritsema/portuguese-irregular-verbs-conjugation-past-tense. Not for me, but might appeal to others.

This is exactly what I'm looking for: http://www.verbs-online.com/portuguese-verbs/portuguese-verbs.htm. It allows me to practice the tense and I have to write it out, which helps further. The only flaw is it supplies a series of letters with accents or cedillas, but there is no 'i' even though this is required to complete the exercises correctly.

I'm surprised that there isn't more out there. I may be missing things, but equivalent Spanish searches resulted in thousands of results (173,000), some of whom I am very familiar with and have used in the past with students. For now, I can only conclude that Portuguese language learning has a long way to go before it can be considered to be well served by the Internet but there are useful things to be found. I would love to know ones that others have encountered.

Back into the fray: teaching and learning

Over the last couple of years, I have let this blog go fallow and my endeavours to learn Portuguese have stalled. This was, in part, as a result of the paradigm shift that I wrote about previously. I set up this blog to try and work through what it means to me to learn a new language and to share these in order to see whether broader lessons could be teased out for language learning in general and for Portuguese learning in the UK and Ireland, more specifically.

Having recently taken up a new post at the University of Liverpool and moved back into a languages' department, I feel renewed motivation to learn Portuguese and to return to this project. Evidently, motivation is a complicated beast, which I have written about previously on many occasions, so I will not rehearse those again, here. But I have had a few realisations in the gap since last writing. A part of my desire to learn Portuguese is an intellectual endeavour, which compliments my own language teaching, as evidenced in my return to this now. Additionally, now that I have returned, I am reminded of the personal reasons for language learning as well as the simple fact of enjoying the process of connecting intellectually and emotionally with a new language and the cultural complexities it carries with it.

I had reached a kind of plateau with my learning because I was totally reliant on books, the Internet, apps and audio-visual media (dvds for learners, films, an old BBC series, and cds/downloads). These were good foundational tools, but lacked the need for spontaneous understanding or production. This has meant that I would learn a grammatical element/set of vocabulary, but then not use it regularly enough because I had done that chapter and the book and I had moved on to the next task, so I'd forget.  Most beginners' books do not have summative tests nor do they build on prior learning sufficiently. This became a frustrating cycle. I was feeling like I was getting through material and only able to measure my progress in terms of what tasks were completed. I lacked an easy way to test my own development as a learner. Also, there were several doubts I had or uncertainties (especially syntactical and grammatical) that the books did not sufficiently explain and I found myself blocked by these areas of miscomprehension. I felt I needed someone at hand who I could query about usage, would correct any errors or bad habits (false friends from Spanish, mis-pronunciations, mistaken verb endings, and so on), and with whom I could practice what I had learnt. In sum, I needed a teacher.

Therefore, a significant element in the change in my current circumstances is access to a Portuguese teacher. I have no plans here to name or review my teacher other than to say that she is a highly experienced professional native speaker who is patient and extremely helpful. The fact that she speaks Spanish is also proving very helpful. It is one-to-one and therefore is quite bespoke and quite unlike how it would be to learn in a group (there are advantages and disadvantages to both). In place of reviews of the teacher, I will continue to reflect on my progress and on the process of learning.

Already, having a teacher is helping me to keep my focus, not least because I have to prepare for classes each week, and also to motivate me to return to this blog as a reflective project.

I have had Daniel Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2009) in my bedside reading pile for a a few months now.  I have picked it up on those those days that I prefer to read fact rather than fiction before I sleep.  It's an easy read, but has made me pause and think a lot, which explains the slow pace, and the fact that there are several fiction books competing for my attention.  Tammet is an autistic savant, a term he uses to describe himself, which, in his case, means that he has an extraordinary memory.

The book is subtitled, "A tour across the horizons of the mind".  He is largely interested in exploring memory as a way of explaining his own skills, but also of exploring what others do.  The book is full of surveys of scientific literature regarding the mind, critical assessments of the most recent research, interesting insights into the strengths and weaknesses in the research carried out on other savants, and personal anecdotes.  He is largely concerned with language acquisition, but does explore other skills, such as mathematics and visual memory, and explores the dubious history behind IQ tests.

He explains that there are three major memory systems:

• "Episodic memory refers to recollection of particular episodes in one's life connected to times and places"
• "Semantic memory describes our ability to remember more general information such as words, facts and ideas," 
• Procedural memory involves our ability to learn skills and acquire habits" (62).

He then continues to discuss how subjective memory is, changing as we gain new experiences whereby our memory of an event becomes altered by our new experiences.  Thus, our present constantly changes our past.  Given that "there may be as many ways to remember a piece of information as there are rememberers" (67) we need to find multiple ways to remember.  As a result, "the single most important part of improving your ability to remember effectively is to encode a learning experience deeply by attending to its meaning" (67).  Helpfully, he provides an example.  If you want to learn the word 'spider' considering how it's spelt isn't useful, it "induces a shallow, non-semantic encoding" (67). Whereas, if you relate it to prior knowledge or reflect on its meaning by asking questions such as, "Is spider a type of animal?", "constitutes a deeper, semantic encoding" (67).  This then "produces high levels of memory performance - an elaborative encoding that allows the person to integrate new information with pre-existing knowledge" (68), and thus improving the recall for that word.  Therefore, sitting in front of that list of vocabulary, spelling the words, rhyming them off is pointless.  What you need to do is engage with their meaning, figure out how you can create an elaborative encoding that links it what you already know and thereby build it into your memory system.

Later on he talks about second language acquisition among adults, which he recognises as more difficult than for a child.  However, he is reassuring in his assertions that there are many ways to do so and to gain fluency.  Interestingly, he cites studies which maintain that early language acquisition is different because the brain treats all languages as one, whereas later learners store the information in separate parts of the brain, and, therefore, requires "different strategies" (110).  Alongside many recent studies that can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3739690.stm and here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/18/bilingual-alzheimers-brain-power-multitasking, which discuss the long term value of learning a language, Tammet tells us that "learning a second language is good for you" (111).  He goes on to describe the benefits for adult and child learners.

Knowing the benefits, he then gives some strategies that we need to employ to get beyond our weaknesses as (adult) learners.  One of these is explaining how to master sounds.  Problems are caused when we "transfer", that is the "interference by previously learned knowledge of new information we acquire" (113), or pronouncing the new language as if it were our first.  As he is not prescriptive, but descriptive, he is telling us what he does.  That is, to make up sentences that repeat the same sound in a sequence, listen to songs, analyse the rules and work them through logically, and parsing the words and combinations for their internal logic (113-4).  His advice is to tackle learning as a task that has to be engaged in logically and using a variety of techniques, which does not mean it cannot be done quickly and efficiently.  He gives multiple examples of how he has learned languages speedily.  It is nonetheless rigorous and demands much imagination, lateral thinking and multiple approaches.

Tammet gives useful examples and explores the area from multiple angles.  This book talks about more than just language acquisition, but for those wanting to learn a language it is very useful.  Additionally, it debunks the idea that a good memory is something that we either  have or don't have, and that his ability, while remarkable, is not superhuman.

Phatic language

danah boyd in her blog discusses a report from Pear Analytics, "They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news". She challenges the assumption that 'pointless babble' is actually a bad thing. It is actually the stuff of most of our interactions, "

"Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?".

For the fluent speaker of a language, these phatic utterances are fundamental to communication. To the language learner these are baffling and are an indicator of fluency. They are the puzzle which take extra effort to learn, after you learn all those simple formulaic communicative 'back and forths'.

Pulling faces

I'm over in Mexico at the moment on a research trip. My son is traveling with me and doing some volunteering. This is my fourth visit to Mexico City, so I'm familiar with the city. On arrival at the airport I bought a pre-paid taxi ride as is recommended (even by the airport authorities) and exited the building. Previously, the approved taxis were just outside the building so I approached a man who was wearing a company uniform. He told me that his was a different company and that I needed to walk up the way a little to get the taxi whose fair I had pre-paid. Tired after long hours of travel I responded with a puzzled expression. A man beside him started to translate in faltering English what the first had just said. When we walked away my son observed that it must feel strange having someone translate from one language I know to another I know. My 'interpreter' was acting out of kindness and it was a friendly gesture, reaching out to a stranger in a strange land, and I appreciate that. What it actually triggers in me is a reminder that I am very much other. It isn't my accent but my appearance that make me non-Mexican and that carries with it a whole load of cultural baggage and assumptions, which make me feel uncomfortable and an outsider.

I would not like my message to be that others should be discouraged from helping strangers to negotiate airports or other situations. This is more a reflection on my own reactions that I need to consider and own. What it does make me think about is how much performance goes into our everyday behavior and how much this can influence how others read us. I wonder whether we need to practice our reactions, pull a face that communicates what we want to say when words don't transmit our feelings/needs. I wonder, is there a face for "I don't understand" what you said, (as opposed to why do things have to change when I am tired, hungry and eager to get to my final destination)? Away from my own misgivings about otherness in Mexico this moment brings me to my thinking about learning Portuguese. Often, that trusted phrase "I don't understand, could you speak slower", that is very useful when you are starting to learn a language, and is a phrase that you may have practiced over and over at home fails you when faced with the confusion of miscomprehension in real life. When the phrase escapes you it needs to be substituted with a face, a pose that communicates a need. I think that my expressions often fail me. But, are these too complicated to determine? Can you learn a useful expression? Or, does looking foreign, the other person's assumptions irrespective of words (correctly pronounced or not) supersede whatever face you pull?

If a learnt expression is possible, what other faces should we learn to pull? Do we become actors moving inside a new language and its cultures needing to be conscious of the audience for whom we are performing? Do we need to think more about the physicality of a language and how we are read and observed? Should teachers and textbooks consider the body in language more, not just as anecdotal window dressing, but as a proper and integral part of learning a language?

Motivation from a business perspective

In my continuing figuring through I want to know how motivation works, in general and what mine is. So, I have come across this talk on drive from a business perspective. Purpose, mastery and being self-directed are the three key things that the speaker, Dan Pink, concludes are key motivators. Here he is talking about work and the how managers/companies can increase profits through better motivating staff. Money isn't what drives us once we are paid enough for it not to be a problem, unless it's tied to a mechanical task. Can these ideas be transferred to personal motivation and the acquisition of a skill that has a complicated reward.

Here's the video: