What is a fantasy?

Just do one. That's it.

When I catch myself fretting, I try to bring myself out of that useless loop and bring myself to a task, no matter how small, that will get me closer to the goal I am fretting about. Of course not all the things I worry about in my life are that simple, but with language learning, it largely is. If I get bummed that I'm not at the place I want to be--fluent--then instead of fretting, I get out the SRS or something that I can do to get me closer. A much better use of my time and energy.

Here we are, just touching base. Sit with something, listen to it, let it teach you. That quote I read the other day really resonates with me--N ão fique bravo com a vida. Não é a vida que está frustrando você, é você  que não está escutando a vida.. Escutando a vida é de suma importância. A vida sempre está falando para mim, cada segundinho, mas esqueço isso (fiquei surpreso com a facilidade de escrever agora). O que a vida, minha vida em geral, está me dizendo? Quando estou falando demais e alto demais, ignorando a voz insistente e calada. E estas mensagens tão complexas têm muitas camadas--algumas são mais claras e óbvias do que outras. Mas sempre há mensagens, e algo para aprender. 

Back to my regular schedule, back to my groove. Back to searching for the blog. Just writing is enormously helpful, and I need to remember to not try to put my writing in a box--blog here, dream things here, etc. Let things bleed into each other.

Today I woke up feeling like I hadn't slept as well as I would have liked. I haven't been sleeping well the past few days. I fall asleep fine, but I either wake up several times during the night, or I wake up quite early and cannot get back to sleep (partly because I am so excited by my life right now). Maybe it'll help being back to my regular schedule.That felt really good this morning. Getting up, showering, turning on the music equipment, working until I got hungry, ate, went back to work until I felt like stopping. I left the Brazilian radio on while I was working, so any silence was filled with Portuguese. I liked that. And my apartment is coming together nicely. Keeping on with Café Brasil is awesome.

An image I noticed the other day: a young Latin American man making slow, wide circles in the crowded street on a bicycle.

Just keep going. The other night at Snowballs was ecstatic. Ecstasy, frenetic ecstasy is something I am very interested in expressing musically. Music that brings me, first of all, to that rainbow place, and that can bring others there. Music that acts as a vehicle, a reliable vehicle, to transport listeners to that place. Being brought, á la that quote from Tolstoy. Como transportar? Isso é a questão? I want to extend my listening, and find more musics that transport. The more I listen, and the more widely I listen, the better my taste becomes.

I try to have Portuguese input, either through ears or eyes, as much as possible. So if I feel like listening to music that is not in Portuguese, which is important to me, then I will try to read some Portuguese, do SRS, etc.

A lot has been going on in other spheres. Meditation and blogging have taken a back seat in the last couple of weeks, which is okay, I just won't let them die.

Here we are, just touching base. Exploring the new world, and slowly getting a sense of where I fit in it again, post-Allie. There are things I like about the curiosities blog, treating things that I find interesting. (Interesting, I was just writing in Portuguese, using the verb tratar, so it came out here as treating)

As you go along, sometimes you find that you no longer want what you originally thought you wanted, and sometimes you find that your desire has been specified or altered in some way. As you work towards the goal, the goal may shift in ways you could never expect.

Here we are. I've been really enjoying conversing with Luciana. Do what you would be doing in English anyway, as much as possible in Portuguese.

Remember, as Khatz points out, when you start learning a language you are a child in that language. So if something you are reading is boring you, remember that as a child you would read things that you found interesting at that time. And you probably don't read most of the things you read as a child anymore, because they no longer interest you with their lack of subtlety, etc. In L2, you may have to read simpler things like comics and children's books before you can get up to more difficult literature.

When you catch yourself brooding over how difficult the task is, notice what you are doing, and find something, no matter how small, to get you closer to the task's completion. I've only recently been able to do this consistently, but it always helps.

What are we to do? Just keep writing. I sit and think and brood, but when I am writing, at least I am writing. Free writing is an interesting exercise. Trying to keep the momentum going. Be insistent like Sebald, or Pavese. If you stare at something long enough, it will begin to glow.

What is one thing I noticed today? Even the smallest insight (or feeling of insight). Well, i did have a great time reading about psychoanalysis today in Portuguese. Also, it was thrilling to be able to sing some passages of Joao from memory, due to the amount of repeated his songs AND the fact that i have looked at the lyrics. I bet if i write down the lyrics they would get even more ingrained. Also, replacing the English running track of my mind with Portuguese feels so nice. Of course, my goal is to eventually have two tracks which I can switch between at will. Remember what you want.

Here we are. The key is sustaining. Now i have more tools that i can use to keep sustaining, especially when i don't feel like doing the work anymore. Small, frequent sessions of work. I've been noticing in myself a greater willingness to try things, instead of getting stuck in analysis paralysis. The more you try, the more you get it right. Cream comes from milk. I've noticed in my music work and my work with James, and with speaking to new people, including girls. I am enjoying this way of going about things, because more things end up getting done, and i don't feel as tyrannized by my analytical side.

Also it's interesting what James and I were talking about that evening, about the interesting effects of installing a new language within oneself. He noticed that after he had been reading Spanish for a good stretch, when he looked at the world he had a glimpse of things in themselves, without the tyrannical automatic labeling in English. For a brief time, the bottle of wine could just exist, because the two languages sort of cancelled each other out. Very interesting.

At least once a day. Thinking again about a blog about curiosities, things I'm interested in. That feels partly right, but it's not totally there. But as long as I don't stop moving on the blog, I will eventually find it. Sebald will be an influence on it.

This is so key: being able to make it from one oasis to another without giving up in the desert. How to do that? Pick the smallest amount of time possible that you can do right now. Chop it up small enough so that you don't collapse at the thought of the thing. As long as you keep moving, if it is minuscule, you will be moving.

Keep the stream of whatever interests you flowing in the L2. The beauty of the language more easily radiates when you are doing something you would be doing anyway in your native English. Playing videogames, reading novels, whatever.

One of the things I love most about learning another language is installing a second slant on the world within me. There are concepts that exist in certain languages that, like good art, reveal another dimension in your world. This is one of the reasons I would love to learn an East Asian language. Being able to experience a totally fresh world of beauty, like Chinese poetry and art.

Discipline as remembering what you want. How easy it is to forget! The SRS is a great tool to use for reminding myself to do what I want to do. It's funny how that works--you would think that it would be easy to remember what you really want to do...but there is just so much going on. Remembering.

It's good advice Khatz gives about taking a role model from a movie or something to provide your accent or way of speaking. I have always taken much of Will Smith's personality from Fresh Prince, and now I am doing the same in Portuguese. Fresh, natural speech na mean.

It's okay to keep attacking the language from different languages. As long as you are engaged and enjoying yourself, and working with native materials, you'll eventually reach the goal of fluency. Learning vocabulary helps you hear more, and hearing more introduces you to more vocabulary. When I am bored with one task, I move to another, and when I come back to the previous task I find I know more about that. It is one giant castle, there are just many ways to get in.

Don't drop. Just do one. One is enough. The flame can be low, just don't let it turn off.

Where are we? Constantly refreshing the supply of Portuguese media is important. Otherwise I get bored and I lose the ardor for learning. In order to sustain, I need to be kept interested. It is also helpful because the more I receive from Brazil, the more beautiful things I find, and the more I can appreciate the culture. Or something like that.

Making my way through the catalog of dubbed Tiny Toons on YouTube. I've been doubting whether I really want to learn Portuguese in the last few days, but I think some of that might have to do with Allie being gone now. I'll have to see how I feel with time.

When things start to turn dark and I feel like I'm failing, I find something so small to work on that I can just jump in and do it. Breaking things up into smaller pieces is such a powerful tool, and it works over and over. And it's flexible--if you break it into smaller pieces, and these pieces are still too big, break it down again.

Tip: Google phrases you are unsure about, to see how frequently it is used in the language. It's a good way to find out if a certain phrase sounds natural in the language. For example, if there are only 100 results for a phrase, then it might not be common or natural sounding.

When you don't feel like working, just do as little as you can. Just keep starting. As Khatz reminds me, 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. The flame can go to low, just don't let it turn off.

I am following the input method for learning Portuguese. I try to to input as much as possible everyday. If I feel like reading something in English, I will listen to Portuguese. The best is when I am both listening and reading. And if it is impossible to listen, like at work, I will at least try to read some.

Now that Allie is gone, the search for beauty begins again.

Trying to find more and more Brazilian music, entering deeper in the culture. I am setting up a home in this culture, creating a home that gets more and more comfortable every day. Had a great conversation about language learning last night with James. It's so special to be able to feel at home in two languages, in two networks, in two cultures. And it's so important, in order to be able to sustain the task of learning the language, to engage with it what you like to engage with. James is reading Bolano, whom he would  be reading anyway, and I am trying to find music that I love, and things to read that I love.

New year. Let's make this blog happen.

Instead of sitting thinking of something to write about, just start writing. The very process is helpful, I feel, even if nothing substantial appears to arise. But the writing itself is a form of putting in the time, and this is important. How to coordinate my interests? How to create something that will attract an audience? Just keep starting.

"Just guy with a good sense of style writing about things that interest him."

From Die! Workwear, one of my favorite blogs. This is a great insight: a good blog can simply be about things that interest one. Even Khatz has some of this--he has written about things that interested him in the Japanese-learning process. This I can definitely do, as something is always fascinating me.

For example, that Tristam Shandy volume Heath brought me.

Of course, it would help if there were some underlying theme: language, clothing, etc.

The SRS returns to you some of the power you lose in our society, where we are bombarded with information and messages, input, constantly. The SRS allows you to control a part of your input--it goes back to the idea i was working with, in Freud and Wilber, for example, that input builds structure.

It's interesting to note the process of building the language within my mind, with native speaker materials. A native speaker knows best the most natural way to say something, knows best the grooves of the language, and the more time i sepnd reading and listening to native language, the more these SAME grooves become engrained. Input builds structure, and if i want my structure to be as near native as possible, the input needs to be native. And i agree with Khatz, it's not rrally a creative process, not until youre already at native level. In this sense it is a lot different from artistic creation.

"Boredom, like poison, is a matter of dosage. Some things are fun for 3 seconds, some for 3 minutes, some for 3 hours, some for 3 days. Do not exceed the dosage. Stop when you’ve had enough. Move on. Switch it up. Come back for more later. Or not."

Using dictionaries:

-My preferred method is to look the word up in a monolingual dictionary. If I feel it is necessary, I will then verify with wordreference.com. If I'm not feeling too lazy, I will include a context sentence with the flashcard. Also, with certain nouns I will list on the flash card relevant verbs (e.g. forthcoming).
-Also, I'll look up words I already know (recommended by Khatz). There are bound to be synonyms or other words in the definition that I don't know, so this is an easy way to accumulate more synonyms. E.g. if I look up "inundação," which I already knows means "flood," I find this:

1. Invasão de águas; grande cheia; alagamento.

 

I now look up "alagamento" (I know all the other words in the definition), but I can already guess that it means flood as well.

Learning vocabulary:

It seems that it is better to learn vocabulary, after a certain point in studying, when one comes across it in native material.

http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2009/11/roberts-awesome-tricks-for-improving-your-vocabulary/

As mentioned in that article, someone learning a language very often does not have a sense of which words are more natural than others in the language. If you learn vocabulary as you come across it in native materials, you will naturally, over time, receive an impression, by simply frequency, of which words are used more frequently, and thus are more natural. Especially if you input from a variety of sources and from both reading and listening. Obviously, read and listen to what you want, as Khatz would support. This method seems better than just going through the dictionary or something (which has a certain appeal to me)--it is removed from the context of the real, living language.

As an artist/creator, I am working on the skill of being able to work when there is no public recognition, and when the product itself is not at the place I want it. Same here with the blog. It's certainly not where I want it--so when I am reminded that I need to post, and I feel the lack of motivation provided by its less-than-ideal state, I remind myself that the only it is going to get better is to keep writing. It seems so obvious, but this has only been a relatively recent realization on my part. My long-range game is improving. The next step is to find a source for books in Portuguese.