A week is not much but I think it was already enough for me to have an idea of what is going to be this year in Manchester. I'm very happy to see that the university is as good, if not better, as I was expecting. What I'm really enjoying about the course is that it is not grammar or theory, it is actually an amazing way to learn how to deal with the language. By that i mean that instead of focusing on the grammatical aspects i like that we are focusing in a more practical side of english way of speaking, and therefore in a deeper sense of organizing our thought. I'm quite sure that this will be of enormous help on your future studies.
First of all, on my personal feelings... I think that the presentation we had today about the cultural shock was VERY nice and help a lot with the understanding of everything we are living now. Sure everybody is still on the “honey moon”phase of that process and therefore we should enjoy this nice phase to keep speaking with different people and to prepare ourselves for the next, maybe not so pleasant, phase where we realize that the honey moon is over and that we start living some tough situation.
Secondly I'm happy to see that i'm having opportunities to speak english with native speakers and therefore really challenge my speak and listening. So far I've been happy enough with the second but, as it was with the other foreign languages i had learned, speaking for me is quite a difficult skill.Accent and phonetics are really a big challenge. However I think this is the skill that requires more time to get to a high level.
But even for the writing.... 30 minutes is not a long time Ed !!! I'm trying to do this text in 30 minutes so that i start to get used to think in English and not thinking in Portuguese ( or sometimes italian :) ) but as you can see i'm not able to write and then review very carefully in 30 minutes. What do you guys think ? Should we try to concentrate on writing a “gramaticaly perfect english” and therefore take a LOOOONNNNG time to write a small text like this one or should we just see how does it come and make only a quick review ?
Cheers to everybody
Tomás
ps. actually writing this took me a bit more then 30 minutes ;)
Hi Tomas
ReplyDeleteI think patience is important when tackling a task as vast and complicated as language learning. Indeed, you are far more succesful in this respect than i have ever been.
Accent and pronunciation are not the same, so worth making the distinction betwwen the two. Do you really want to speak with a Mancunian accent?