Maria Brasileira, como você aprendeu Inglês? – com áudio

Oi, pessoal!  Espero que vocês estejam gostando das entrevistas com os Experts. Hoje a convidada é minha amiga virtual Maria Brasileira, ela já escreveu algumas dicas aqui no blog, entre elas a série o caminho mais longo para se dominar o Inglês.

Maria é professora de inglês (CPE Certified) e lecionou nas seguintes escolas: Yázigi, Brasas, CLC/CEPUERJ, Wisdom, CNA, FISK e em cursos de Inglês in-company, de 1991 a 2004. Apesar de atualmente estar envolvida na área jurídica, ela tem o inglês na ponta da língua. Ouça o áudio:

Seguem abaixo algumas informações interessantes contidas no depoimento:

• Eu comecei a estudar inglês bem jovem, meu pai decidiu me matricular em um curso de idiomas, porque eu era uma garota muita levada e ele queria me manter por um tempo fora de casa, caso contrário eu ia enlouquecer minha mãe;
• Concluí o curso de inglês aos 14 anos e no ano seguinte eu fiz o teste CPE (Cambridge Proficiency Examination). Infelizmente eu não consegui na primeira vez, porém obtive sucesso no ano seguinte;
• Eu praticava inglês ouvindo músicas e tentando transcrevê-las. Eu ouvia a mesma música milhares de vezes;
• Eu aproveitava todas as oportunidades para praticar, inclusive com os missionários mórmons que vinham pregar em meu bairro;
• Se você está estudando um idioma, seja persistente, não desista. O seu esforço será recompensado.

Ouça o áudio completo

Download do áudio

Transcrição do Podcast

Hi everyone who’s listening to this podcast, my name is Maria. I’m supposed to talk about how I learn English. I don’t know if you can hear the backgorund, it’s a soccer game.

I started really young, I was about six. And my dad decided to enroll me at an English course, because I was very active kid, I was probably driving my mom crazy. You know, just running around the house. So, he decided to keep me as busy as he could, outside the house. And that’s it. I started taking English lessons, you know, when you’re a kid, they don’t teach you like, a lot, they just make you color things and learn, you know, loose words, animals, colors, numbers, stuff like that, so, that’s how I started.

And then I took the whole course, eight years, I guess. So I probably finished it when I was fourteen years old. Yeah, I guess it’s pretty much it.

And next year, when I was fifteen years old, I took the CPE (Cambridge Proficiency Examination) which I failed the first time and I was really devastated and had to take it again next year. So, when I was sixteen, I took the CPE again and this time I passed.

It was the 80s then, so the method was structural like, drills and substitution drills and, you know, drills, and drills, and drills and more drills! And a little bit of roleplay, once in a while. We did a lot of reading, writing exercises, lots of compositions. But, I missed more listening and speaking practice and, you know, things were a little bit different then, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have these many resources. So you kinda, just have to be creative.

I tried to understand lyrics and write them down so it was like, can you imagine that? That just, you know, playing songs all over and over and over and tried to write down the lyrics. Again, I almost drove my parents crazy doing this, because imagine you have to listen to the same song over and over and over again, like, a thousand times.

I had this notebook, with a  whole collection of lyrics and all indexed, all alphabetized, you know. It was crazy. And for speaking practice I would try to make conversation to, like, everyone I could get hold of I would even make conversation with the Mormon missionaries that came to my neighborhood to preach.

I used to put some tape on the TV screen to watch movies with no subtitles on, because, you know, no SAP yet, no second audio, no those better max videos, ugh, terrible quality. You know, some people used to sell those movies with subtitles in English, but those were really expensive and I definitely couldn’t afford that.

And then I realized that action movies were great for beginners, because they have less dialogs, the dialogs are less elaborate. Then I would watch those movies when I was a beginner, and later, lower-intermediate. And I watch movies that I’d seen before in the theater, cause then I would know the plot already and I could concetrate on the dialogs, so much easier.

Later, when I was about seventeen, I guess, I would go to touristic spots here in Rio. Yeah, living in a  touristic city sure does help a lot. And I would follow the tourists around, helped them buy stuff, go to places, make reservations, you know, buy tickets. It was okay, because I could get a lot of practice and make some bucks on the way.

Does hooking up with an exchange student count as practice? I should not be telling that…

Later, I decided to take language a little bit seriously, you know. I took up English and Portuguese at university. I learned Applied Linguistics there, eventually, led me to teaching, which I did from 1991 to 2004 – which was my last group. And I graduated from university in 1998, yeah, that’s it.

I’m trying to remember these dates as I go along, I guess that’s it.

I worked at several schools. I tested several different methods, you know, some are better than others. Having a good teacher, I mean, a trained teacher, not just someone whose lived abroad for a while and think they can teach, no, a trained teacher really helps a lot.

But, you know, in the end it is really the student’s motivation that makes all the difference. And if you are learning a language, the only thing I can tell you is be persistent, don’t give up, it is not always fun, it’s a lot of hard work, but it does pay off in the end.

Well guys, that’s it. Bye-bye!

Maria, obrigado por compartilhar conosco a sua experiência no aprendizado de idiomas.

All the best!