🇬🇧English 🇯🇵日本語 🇪🇸Español 🇫🇷Français 🇧🇷Português
Each learning has its own story.
Although people find it hard to understand why I learned Spanish in USA and started French in Chile, each language story makes sense to me. Here is my story on learning Portuguese, as well as some learning from the process of passing Portuguese Exam CAPLE C1 level.
🇬🇧English 🇯🇵日本語 🇪🇸Español 🇫🇷Français 🇧🇷Português
-One day, I will definitely go to this place-
More than 10 years ago, I saw a picture of Lençóis in Brazil, and I promised myself to see it in my eyes one day. It has been “one day” for long time as it was not easy to make it happen due to its limited season (June-Aug) and access (far from all the places I was based in).
This year, I had a chance to visit Chile in June, and despite remaining COVID-19 restriction, I decided to travel there. It was also for brushing up my language skill before landing at a new duty station (Mozambique, Portuguese speaking country just like Brazil). In this post, I would like to share my experience from traveler and language learner’s point of view.
English, Español, Français, 日本語
Language is one of the finest products of human beings, and because of the globalization, need to understand other languages is increasing more than ever.
This is a series of language learning entries, which tackles several languages I learned/am learning (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.). I will be sharing very lough characteristics and origin, reasons I learned, and how I learned/am learning.
Let me start off with the most useful one, English.
These days when I recommend this to others, I say as follows:
you have to talk a lot with this, because there are 2 “i” and 1 “talk”. It is “italki“.
From my observation, I think many people would somehow want to learn other language for different reasons, and this helps us to achieve this. Let me describe what it is, how I used and 10 reasons to use it.
5 years ago, I started learning French by myself. But it doesn’t mean that I always studied it, since I didn’t concentrate on it when I was busy and I never lived in French speaking country nor studied at school. This means I studied it more or less 2-3 years.
And voila! Finally I could see some progress: I passed DELF B1 and B2 at the same time.
Given that many articles helped me to prepare, I would like also to contribute myself to those who will try this test in the future. And also I can learn by reflecting on this theme.
The majority of us has some kind of goal, but the challenge is how to motivate yourself to achieve it.
In my previous blog entry “4 Conditions to Gain Any Skill“, I explained about the 4 conditions among which the motivation and actions are the most important ones. Also, in other entory “Long journey to the goal“, I highlighted that the action was the key to maintain or improve your skill.
Before action, however, we have to have strong motivation, about which I will talk in this entry. The more difficult the goal you want to achieve, the more efforts and time you will need, and the more you get to lose your initial motivation along the time. I think every one has the similar experience like this.
I took TOEFL test recently in Mongolia. This test is mainly used for a benchmark to enter English speaking country’s universities or to prove English skill for job recruitment.
I have taken this test quite many times to enter US grad school, but the test score is valid only for 2 years, which makes sense since language skills can be lost quickly if you don’t use. Thus I decided to take it again.
Although I graduated from US university and have been using English at my work, it doesn’t mean I am prepared for this TOEFL: Just like any other test, you need to know the characteristic of the test and study to the test. Also, some of my native English speaking friends even make some errors on this.
Given its complex characteristic, I will talk about some tips on TOEFL including some secret techniques.