Portuguese on YouTube Resources

There are three YouTube channels I follow for learning Portuguese:

• Learn Portuguese with Dri and Lud
• Português com Marcia Macedo
• Street Smart Brazil

I know there are other good ones, but the above have appealed to me more.

Back and Sorry to Say...

UPDATE: 09/28/23

I just signed into my account and this post has been sitting in my drafts for the last five years! I'm publishing it, because why not. I'm also only focusing on Brazilian Portuguese. Yep, it beat out the other gazillion languages I was dabbling in. I want to get back to blogging about language learning again, so I guess this will be my reintroduction. :) Now back to that old draft, originally written in and waiting since 2018...

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted.  I've continued to be interested in languages, but fell away from learning regularly.  I recently moved back in with my parents for the time being, and had to box up most of my language books.  I did keep out my books for Bulgarian and Norwegian, since I had enough to make some progress in those two, but not so many resources that they would take up a lot of room on my small bookshelf.

I've been doing the Norwegian course on DuoLingo.  It's helped refresh my memory on pronunciation.  This means that obviously, I've decided to continue with that language, as well as the others listed in this post for now.  I'm also doing the Romanian Duolingo course.  

I think this program is a good stepping-stone into learning a language, and they offer a ton to choose from.  In reminds me somewhat of Pimsleur in that it jumps right in, so you learn things like pronuncation as you go.  I personally like this approach, especially when it comes to pronuncation.  It seems more natural to me.  I learned how to pronounce Spanish and Portugese (Brazilian) through music, before I ever thought of learning either of the two.  So, instead of a guide telling me approximate sounds, I made connections with the singing and lyrics.  Selena for Spanish, and Daniela Mercury for Portuguese were the two singers that got me into learning those respective languages.

Anyway, I got a little sidetracked.  The Duolingo app is great (I use the Android version.)  Here are the languages that are offered to English speakers...
~Chinese 
(I'm assuming this means Mandarin.)
~Dutch
~French
~German
~Hawaiian 
(I was gonna do this one, even though I'm not officially learning it.  I love Hawaiian music though, and can sing along pretty well if I have the lyrics.  Check out Robi Kahakalau.  I have her first three CDs, and they include both the Hawaiian lyrics + English translation, so it's interesting to see what's being said.)
~Irish
~Italian
(I may or may not try my hand at this one...I'm learning toward not the more I think about it, although I did purchase an old Hugo phrasebook from a thrift mall earlier this year.  I think I like the idea of speaking Italian more than actually learning it.)
~Japanese
~Korean
(Of the three popular East Asian languages, I like Korean, and did go through a couple lessons on Duolingo, but I decided not to continue - can't wrap my head around the characters.  I do like the look of Korean compared with Chinese and Japanese, and how the characters are put into little blocks.  A good Korean movie I watched recently is I Saw the Devil.  It's very violent and disturbing, so be warned.)
~Navajo
~Portuguese-Brazilian
~Russian
~Spanish
~Swedish
~Turkish

Pickles and Pizza

I'm hopeless.  Now I want to try to learn Korean again just from hearing them talk. 😂  

As for the pizza, New York style is my favorite.  I've never had Detroit style - reminded me of French bread pizza.  It's been forever since I've had Chicago style, so I have no opinion on that one.

They should've done St. Louis style too.  I'm not really from Missouri so I'm perfectly comfortable with saying, it's not that great but not terrible either (In Defense of St. Louis-Style Pizza - never thought of viewing it more as nachos but that is kind of true.)

I'm also perplexed about the pickle thing...   

Goodbye to Four

These are languages I'm dropping, because I will never get used to the whole pitch accent thing...

>Estonian

>Latvian

>Lithuanian

>Norwegian

Gotta downsize.  It's the only answer to my obsession. :D  

I'm planning on setting up a way to purchase the books I have thru PayPal.   Prices will be reasonable.  Most of the books I have were purchased used to begin with.  My hope and plan is to get that setup by Wednesday, so stay tuned if interested.

My Cringeworthy Bulgarian

Reading Bulgarian 

From yesterday: me reading the dialogue from lesson one in my Beginner's Bulgarian (Hippocrene) book.  Two couples are flying from New York to Sofia and are basically just getting to know each other: What do you do? Do you have any kids? blah blah blah, yada yada yada.  

I definitely got stuck here and there, and have no doubt my stress is wrong, pronunciation isn't great and who knows what else.  But hey, I tried.  In fact, I had to start over several times and finally just settled on this rendition.  I like the Bulgarian language though and want to get better at it, so any help is appreciated. :)

Shameless Plug

Three posts in one day!  Anyway, I wanted to promote my jewelry blog here, because well, why not?

Be sure to take a look at...
Kelly's Jewelry
My profile gives more info on my jewelry-making hobby (that I hope to turn into something of a career.)

As soon as it crossed my mind to post this, I was thinking of ways I could incorporate language into my jewelry.  Brainstorming session coming up... :)

Language Petals

I had originally left this blog to form a new one: LanguagePetals.  I guess my intention was for it to be a replacement language blog, but sort of became an everything blog for my interests.  Looks like my last post was Christmas 2015 - must've been the year I decided I was tired of blogging. ha!  

Anyway, if interested in seeing some of my language learning musings from that blog, just check out the CATEGORIES on the left sidebar.

I no longer update that blog. :)

Bulgarian Focus

I'm going to put my focus on Bulgarian over the next few days.  I downloaded several apps to my phone, so will start there.  I've been studying Bulgarian for several years and know a few things, but it's been a while.  Of course I have my Bulgarian language books too.  Those two TY books are pretty much identical, but I guess I felt the need to buy both.  I'll share what I learn and maybe you can learn a little български yourself. ;)

Language DeClutter

Last post, I said I was going to drop some languages.  I can never bring myself to actually do it, but the ones I'm considering (off the top of my head) are...

• Czech
• Hungarian
• Latvian
• Norwegian
• Romanian (One of my earliest, so I may keep this one.)
• Slovenian
• Ukrainian

I'm at least going to do the courses I have for each of these and from there, see if I want to continue.

My definite keepers are...

• Bulgarian
• Croatian/Serbian
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Greek (modern)
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Spanish

But who knows, maybe I'll find myself phasing out a couple of these too and really just focus hard on five or six.  

My can't decide either way...

• Russian

I'm becoming a jill of all trades and a master of none. I want to stop "collecting" languages and actually learn them. :)

I'm Back!

I decided to revive this blog last night.  I still love learning languages, but it's been a while since I've really concentrated on any of them.  I might drop a few, because I really am trying too many, but I'll talk about that in another post. :)

East Asian (Con)Fusion

A while back, I ordered a few books off of Etsy.  My primary aim was a Japanese-English Bible, but it also came with the following other two books, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to try my hand at Japanese.  Unfortunately, that didn't last too long.
  

For one thing, I got sidetracked when this Japanese stuff renewed my interest in Korean, so I added a bunch of Korean-learning apps to my tablet (added a bunch of Japanese too of course), and even spent some time learning Hangul, then I came to my senses - deleted those apps, tore out the sheet I had written the Hangul on and decided to calm down.  I'm already either learning or dabbling in so many other languages as it is - and many of them fairly difficult (several Slavic languages and Lithuanian, for instance) that it seemed silly to add more, especially ones as complex as Japanese and Korean.

My short stint in Japanese and Korean wasn't all in vain, because I did learn a few things.  The Korean alphabet is called Hangul in South Korea.  There's also Hanji, which are Chinese characters used in Korean, but apparantly you can get by without learning them, unlike in Japanese, where you have to learn kanji if you want to get past a child's level in the language.  In fact, I've heard that if you only stuck with hiragana and katakana (Japanese has three alphabets - or "scripts" to be more accurate), you'd pretty much be limited to things like children's books.  That would be fine with me.  I'd feel pretty accomplished if I could even just read children's books in Japanese + I'm sure Japanese children's books are pretty cute.

I can at least wrap my head around written Korean somewhat better than Japanese script.  The letters/characters are arranged in nice little boxes or blocks - never got around to figuring out how that works, but I do like the look of printed Korean better than Japanese.  Also helped that the Korean language pack on my computer actually worked, unlike the one for Japanese.

Japanese is definitely more phonetic, making it easier to pronounce than Korean.  When seeing Japanese transliterated into Latin letters (known as romanji), the connection between what's spoken and written is much clearer than in transliterated Korean.  It's obvious that more time must be spent learning Korean pronunciation, as well as the fact Korean words look to be a lot lengthier than Japanese.

I don't know about the grammar.  I've been under the impression that Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn (for pretty much anybody), but I've seen similar said about Korean.  I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume neither are exactly a breeze.  

Another thing I will always remember is that questions in Japanese end in desu ka?  I also like Japanese classical music (really Oriental classical music in general), some of which I added to my Spotify.  And who knows, maybe I will at least learn how to say certain phrases in Japanese and Korean.  Finally, a little over ten years ago, I had a gerbil who I gave the Japanese name Sumiko.  Her companion was named Antoinette. :)

Cracking Up

Thanks to my younger sister sending me an invite, I'm now addicted to Trivia Crack.  Most of the games I have going are in Portuguese + a few in Spanish and English.  I even tried one in German just to see if I could get very far, but no such luck.  It's a good way to think on your feet in the language(s) you're learning.  All those futebol questions are killing me though. ;)

Short and Sweet

For those learning Brazilian Portuguese, this is a great channel to subscribe to.  Enjoy.  :)

Like No Place on Earth

This video was filmed in the wonderful state of Wyoming (or perhaps they used images of WY and made it look like it was.) :)

My family and I lived in Gillette for 10 years from 1994-2004.  Both of my sisters went to the University of Wyoming in Laramie; my younger sister lived in Rock Springs (located just up the highway from Green River) for a while; and my older sister lived in Cheyenne - she now resides in Casper.

Wyoming isn't the smallest state, but it is the least populated.  I miss it a lot, wind and all.

To put more of a language emphasis on this post, look here and here for info on where the name "Wyoming" came from + the American Indian tribes of the state.

Bulgarian Videos for Learning

Even though I haven't been posting to my blog, I have been studying up on my Bulgarian...some.  Definitely not as much as I planned for being halfway through February.

One resource I've been using are these videos.  They're a good introduction to the language.  I figured I'd brush up on the basics.  I just finished watching this one about introductions.  

One More

I forgot another book I'm using for Bulgarian - well, a section of this book anyway.  Other languages featured: Polish; Czech; Slovak (really just a very brief extention of the Czech segment); Hungarian and Romanian.

Ritalinguistics

I seriously need to spend more time on the bajillion languages I'm learning instead of flitting around, reading about languages I'm not.  Is bajillion an actual number?  See how much time I waste?  I'm such a procrastinator, it's not even funny.

Anyway, I've spent the evening reading up on the Turkic languages of the -stans.  You know: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.  I would've included Tajikistan, but Tajik is an Indo-European language, related to Persian.  In Afghanistan, Tajik is known as Dari - or so I've been told.  Oh, and can't forget Azerbaijan, where they speak Azerbaijani (aka Azeri), which from what I understand, is highly similar to Turkish, if not nearly identical.

Romanian Reflections

I found this from 2005.  That was me asking to have a little bit of Romanian I had written corrected.  I haven't gotten my Romanian out in quite a while, but seeing stuff like that is motivating.  Although at the same time, it reminds me that over the course of eight years, I've made little progress in that language.

Lithuanian Listen

I had this in my links but last time I clicked, it led to nowhere, so deleted it.  It's the audio that goes with Beginner's Lithuanian (formerly Introduction to Modern Lithuanian.)  You can tell it's a little dated and the audio isn't always that great, but glad I re-found it.  The same recordings can also be found here once you scroll down.

Teach Yourself Slovene

I had ordered a used copy of Teach Yourself Slovene off Amazon a while back.  I'm not planning on going beyond what this book teaches, so should be interesting to see how far I get.  You could call this a side project.  :)
  
Slovenia used to be part of Yugoslavia, but the language is considered different enough not to be grouped with Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.  I'm still not clear on whether Bosnian is considered a separate language.  I do have a Bosnian dictionary, but it could probably just as easily have been labeled a Serbian or Croatian dictionary.

Of course like most language books, pronunciation is gone over first.  This part feels rushed.  For instance, they don't tell you how the letter C should sound.  I've been pronouncing it like "ts" just because that's how it's typically pronounced in other Slavic languages, but maybe Slovenian is different?  I don't have the recordings, so will have to look online to fill in the details.

Flipping through the book I could recognize some words, so having at least a limited knowledge of Serbian will be helpful to an extent.  One thing I've heard about that makes Slovenian stand out is the dual number thing.  They mention this in the introduction, like a heads up.  It sounds easy enough on the surface: one = singular; two = dual; three or more = plural.  I guess the hard part is just a matter of remembering to use dual when you instinctively want to use plural for two things or people, and of course learning an extra set of case endings.
  

This book didn't get very good reviews on Amazon, but there really aren't many resources for learning Slovenian, so it's better than nothing, at least to get started.  I did notice a typo right away in Unit 01. The dialogue has Izvoil! while the vocab list has Izvoli!  Anyway, it means "Here you are!" when being handed something.  

The book itself seems pretty thin.  Only 184 pages in all, and that includes the introduction, exercise key, appendix and word list.  I could be surprised to find it's actually packed with a lot more than it looks.  To confuse myself even further, maybe I'll tackle this together with my Teach Yourself Serbian and two copies of Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat.