Week #9

After taking a week break from blog posting for the 4th of July holiday, I'm glad to be back to report my progress with learning Portuguese!! For the past two weeks, I have focused solely on watching Portuguese language learning podcasts on iTunes.  I have found this resource to be FANTASTIC.  I absolutely love the porguguese semantica podcasts that I have been listening to and have found them to be extremely beneficial. I am thankful that I started out with Duolingo in order to have a basis of the language, but the podcasts are much more practical in their use.  They provide a video conversation that one would face in the real world, and then it breaks it down and gives new vocabulary.  I watched each video several times until I felt that I had mastered it. These videos taught me how to introduce myself, how to order something at a restaurant, how to ask where something is, and many more very practical and useful things.  I will certainly incorporate this more into the 30 day challenge.  Furthermore, during the past few weeks I have come to the conclusion that it will be beneficial to create two versions of the 30 day challenge- an intensive challenge and an intro challenge for those that don't have a great amount of time each day to spend on it. This will be much more beneficial for those that aren't able to spend as much time as I allotted in the challenge each day.  Continually, I would like to start the challenge more intensive with flashcards and Duolingo, and then transition into movies, podcasts, and such.  This is the method that I have followed and I have found it to be very beneficial.  I can tell that I have made great strides on my understanding of the Portuguese language, though my ability to speak it is still coming along!