More inspiration from Khatz: a "learning journal."

Learning, and learning how to learning how to learn better is central, and has been central, to my life for a long time. And the principles I apply when learning one particular thing often apply, with slight modifications, to learning something else.

For example: today I copied and pasted a few Youtube comments on the movie I was watching in Portuguese. It's always good to see how native speakers speak, and to take these examples from a range of sources. So I read the newspaper, which is one kind of language, but Youtube comments are just as valuable. You see slang, spelling variations (e.g. "aaki" for "aqui"), and the natural way people speak. I'll take sentences from a good informal dictionary I use, from Twitter comments from Brazilians, songs, movies. The wider the range, the better. The more I see I a certain word, the more firmly it gets cemented in my mind, the more likely it is going to come out when I am writing or speaking the language, and the more likely my speech is going to sound natural.

For example, I was watching the Brazilian version of Disney's Tangled (Enrolados in Portuguese). There was a part where Rapunzel asks Flynn Rider if he understands, referring to something she has just told him, and he responds, "Tô começando" ("I'm starting to," referring to understanding [and falling in love with] her]). In Brazilian Portuguese, as in English, there are several ways to say, "to begin, to start." The obvious cognate (is that the right word?) for the Portuguese começar is our "commence." But we wouldn't say "I'm commencing," but in Brazilian Portuguese, "Tô começando," I can only assume, sounds perfectly natural. But I wouldn't really learn that from a dictionary, but only from listening to FUNBUN (for us natives, by us natives) material, like a Disney movie (even though the movie is originally in English, the dub is done by professionals, and is intended for native speakers). And the more I hear "Tô começando," the more I am likely to use this construction.