Questões de Inglês

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After failing to learn a new language on five separate occasions, I taught myself to speak Spanish like a native in just six months by watching movies and TV shows, listening to music, and reading books and comics like Harry Potter and Garfield.
This simple, easy-to-learn technique, that even the most linguistically-challenged can master literally overnight, is used by many of the most respected and skilled polyglots and language teachers in the world, and it’s never really been laid out, explained, and demonstrated in full, point-by-point, step-by-step detail until now.

When characters in a movie or TV show are speaking the dialogue, unless it’s set in a previous period like the 1800s or something, they speak normal, everyday language. So if you wanted to learn Spanish, the type of normal everyday Spanish that native speakers use every day, aka “conversational Spanish”. . . Don’t you think that Spanish-language TV shows, movies, music, and books might be a good source to learn from. . . if only you knew how?
Not only that, but it would be fun, wouldn’t it? Far better than learning the language from some boring, dry textbook or workbook that, even worse, is teaching outdated, formal, “non-conversational” Spanish (look at the dialogue in one sometime: do people actually talk like that? No).
The basic technique is obvious: consume popular Spanish-language media and try to learn what they’re saying by looking up what you don’t understand. Sure. But the issue is twofold:
1) The problems you will inevitably run into (how do I apply what I’ve learned? how do I ensure I’m not misunderstanding the meaning and thereby learning something incorrect? where do I look things up? what if it’s not in the dictionary and Google Translate isn’t cutting it? etc.), and...
2) How do we do things as efficiently as possible? If you’re a beginner you’re going to have to sort out how to do this all on your own, how to solve any problems you might run into on your own, while probably doing many things less effectively and slower than is necessary. I’ve already learned all this stuff the hard way, I’ve made many of the mistakes you would if you went this alone, let me just save you a ton of time, trouble, and possibly money by teaching you what I already know from experience.
Has this basic technique been used for centuries by language students and teachers alike? Yes, there are records dating back to the 18th century of language teachers using popular media in the language they’re teaching to help their students learn it. I’m not claiming to have invented it. What I’ve done here is, after having used and refined the technique myself for several years, distilled it down to a system that’s easy to learn, and which is taught in a format that’s organized, easy to understand, and which takes advantage of all the latest technology, such as all the various resources available on the internet now.

Adaptado de: Andrew Tracey - author of The Telenovela Method www.amazon.com

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JAMES "SUPER CHIKAN"JOHNSON
This famed Delta blues musician crafts guitars from cigar boxes
By Terri Peterson Smith

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta of the 1950s, James “Super Chikan” Johnson learned to play from the blues greats who gathered to jam on his grandfather´s porch. “Everyone played,” he says, “but I couldn´t afford to buy instruments.” So he crafted them from materials at hand: oil cans, suitcases and especially cigar boxes. Gradually, this beloved bluesman has gained recognition for the visual artistry of the guitars he creates, as well as his music. “I´m a double artist,” he says, laughing. Part folk art, part musical instrument, his cigar box guitars are in the collections of fans such as Paul Simon, Caroline Kennedy and Morgan Freeman. Working from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Johnson acquires vintage wooden cigar boxes from friends or at collectors shows. He adds a neck, strings and a pickup for amplification, then paints and bejewels them. The result: slide guitars with a haunting electronic pickup blues-style twang that he plays in concerts around the world. “I enjoy it when people gather around after shows to ask about them,” he says, adding that each distinctive instrument “offers all the colors in my heart.”

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX
Spots in Delaware, Louisiana and New Mexico pay homage to the simple cigar box

The Winterthur Museum in Delaware has an extensive collection of the gorgeous lithographic art that has topped cigar boxes.

Each January, the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival celebrates the music of the home-made stringed instruments.

This frame is one of the impressive pieces of tramp art made from cigar boxes at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.
Adaptado de: SMITH, Terri Peterson. James “Super Chikan” Johnson. Delta Sky, June 2019, p.32. view.imirus.com

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JAMES "SUPER CHIKAN"JOHNSON
This famed Delta blues musician crafts guitars from cigar boxes
By Terri Peterson Smith

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta of the 1950s, James “Super Chikan” Johnson learned to play from the blues greats who gathered to jam on his grandfather´s porch. “Everyone played,” he says, “but I couldn´t afford to buy instruments.” So he crafted them from materials at hand: oil cans, suitcases and especially cigar boxes. Gradually, this beloved bluesman has gained recognition for the visual artistry of the guitars he creates, as well as his music. “I´m a double artist,” he says, laughing. Part folk art, part musical instrument, his cigar box guitars are in the collections of fans such as Paul Simon, Caroline Kennedy and Morgan Freeman. Working from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Johnson acquires vintage wooden cigar boxes from friends or at collectors shows. He adds a neck, strings and a pickup for amplification, then paints and bejewels them. The result: slide guitars with a haunting electronic pickup blues-style twang that he plays in concerts around the world. “I enjoy it when people gather around after shows to ask about them,” he says, adding that each distinctive instrument “offers all the colors in my heart.”

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX
Spots in Delaware, Louisiana and New Mexico pay homage to the simple cigar box

The Winterthur Museum in Delaware has an extensive collection of the gorgeous lithographic art that has topped cigar boxes.

Each January, the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival celebrates the music of the home-made stringed instruments.

This frame is one of the impressive pieces of tramp art made from cigar boxes at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.
Adaptado de: SMITH, Terri Peterson. James “Super Chikan” Johnson. Delta Sky, June 2019, p.32. view.imirus.com

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JAMES "SUPER CHIKAN"JOHNSON
This famed Delta blues musician crafts guitars from cigar boxes
By Terri Peterson Smith

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta of the 1950s, James “Super Chikan” Johnson learned to play from the blues greats who gathered to jam on his grandfather´s porch. “Everyone played,” he says, “but I couldn´t afford to buy instruments.” So he crafted them from materials at hand: oil cans, suitcases and especially cigar boxes. Gradually, this beloved bluesman has gained recognition for the visual artistry of the guitars he creates, as well as his music. “I´m a double artist,” he says, laughing. Part folk art, part musical instrument, his cigar box guitars are in the collections of fans such as Paul Simon, Caroline Kennedy and Morgan Freeman. Working from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Johnson acquires vintage wooden cigar boxes from friends or at collectors shows. He adds a neck, strings and a pickup for amplification, then paints and bejewels them. The result: slide guitars with a haunting electronic pickup blues-style twang that he plays in concerts around the world. “I enjoy it when people gather around after shows to ask about them,” he says, adding that each distinctive instrument “offers all the colors in my heart.”

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX
Spots in Delaware, Louisiana and New Mexico pay homage to the simple cigar box

The Winterthur Museum in Delaware has an extensive collection of the gorgeous lithographic art that has topped cigar boxes.

Each January, the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival celebrates the music of the home-made stringed instruments.

This frame is one of the impressive pieces of tramp art made from cigar boxes at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.
Adaptado de: SMITH, Terri Peterson. James “Super Chikan” Johnson. Delta Sky, June 2019, p.32. view.imirus.com

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Simpler spelling may be more relevant than ever

The complexity of English spellings has been bothering people for nearly as long as English has been written down. They argue that inconsistent spellings make English unnecessarily hard to learn. The English Spelling Society, a UK organisation pushing for easier spellings, even argues that there’s a link between difficult spelling and higher crime, with illiteracy pushing people into a life of illegality. While that argument might be a stretch, it’s clear that non-traditional spelling does create a bad impression.
Compared to the UK variants, US spellings are easier for non-native speakers to learn, being shorter and slightly more phonetic. These US spellings are a legacy of dictionary pioneer Noah Webster’s movement for simplified spelling. This movement sought to cleanse English of double and silent letters, as well as other inefficiencies related to orthography (the system of writing and spelling words).
There was a practical as well as a political element to this. Not only would learners find it easier to master simplified spellings, Webster reasoned, but humbler spellings were actually more democratic, and would help differentiate the Americans from their recent colonial masters across the pond.
Webster’s ideas led to the proliferation in the US of “labor” over “labour” and “center” over “centre”, even if not all his ideas have become the “fashon”. For one thing, English is such an irregular language that it’s impossible to iron out all the kinks. No form of English is written out completely phonetically, as anybody with a tough cough (tuf cawf?) will know. Any new spelling rules would need plenty of exceptions.
Overall, English’s erratic spellings bear witness to the many words it has absorbed from other languages. Like the wealth of accents among English speakers, this feature both enriches the language and poses a challenge to standardised simplified spellings.
English spellings and dyslexia
One group that might be helped by simpler spellings is people with dyslexia. In linguistic terms, English is opaque, meaning that there’s little correlation and consistency between its spoken and written forms. What you read and what you say can seem very different. Finnish and Spanish, in contrast, are more transparent. So “kids learn to read English slower than kids who learned transparent languages like Spanish, Italian, Czech, German”, says Liory Fern-Pollak, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.

As dyslexia has a neurological basis, an affected person would have dyslexia regardless of whether they were born in Finland or England. But Fern-Pollak explains that it would be easier to diagnose them in England, as they grapple with the idiosyncratic spellings of English.
English in the internet age

Webster’s ideas are perhaps newly relevant, as the language of IT and the internet increasingly influences how English is written. Globally, Google returns more results for US spellings. In computing, “program” is generally accepted over “programme”. Shorter words are more versatile in text messages and social media posts, and search engine optimisation often favours US spellings. The Googlelisation (or “Googlization”) of the internet is one reason that Thai learners, for instance, prefer American spellings.

But the internet is also exposing people to a large variety of spellings. So “people are representing their spoken dialects more through spelling in spaces like Twitter and Instagram”, says Lauren Squires, a linguist at Ohio State University. She believes that “people are becoming more comfortable with spelling variation”, even though there’s a strong and enduring idea that only one spelling can be correct.

RO, Christine. Simpler spelling may be more relevant than ever. BBC Worklife. 13th June 2019.

Leia o texto a seguir e responda a questão

Simpler spelling may be more relevant than ever

The complexity of English spellings has been bothering people for nearly as long as English has been written down. They argue that inconsistent spellings make English unnecessarily hard to learn. The English Spelling Society, a UK organisation pushing for easier spellings, even argues that there’s a link between difficult spelling and higher crime, with illiteracy pushing people into a life of illegality. While that argument might be a stretch, it’s clear that non-traditional spelling does create a bad impression.
Compared to the UK variants, US spellings are easier for non-native speakers to learn, being shorter and slightly more phonetic. These US spellings are a legacy of dictionary pioneer Noah Webster’s movement for simplified spelling. This movement sought to cleanse English of double and silent letters, as well as other inefficiencies related to orthography (the system of writing and spelling words).
There was a practical as well as a political element to this. Not only would learners find it easier to master simplified spellings, Webster reasoned, but humbler spellings were actually more democratic, and would help differentiate the Americans from their recent colonial masters across the pond.
Webster’s ideas led to the proliferation in the US of “labor” over “labour” and “center” over “centre”, even if not all his ideas have become the “fashon”. For one thing, English is such an irregular language that it’s impossible to iron out all the kinks. No form of English is written out completely phonetically, as anybody with a tough cough (tuf cawf?) will know. Any new spelling rules would need plenty of exceptions.
Overall, English’s erratic spellings bear witness to the many words it has absorbed from other languages. Like the wealth of accents among English speakers, this feature both enriches the language and poses a challenge to standardised simplified spellings.
English spellings and dyslexia
One group that might be helped by simpler spellings is people with dyslexia. In linguistic terms, English is opaque, meaning that there’s little correlation and consistency between its spoken and written forms. What you read and what you say can seem very different. Finnish and Spanish, in contrast, are more transparent. So “kids learn to read English slower than kids who learned transparent languages like Spanish, Italian, Czech, German”, says Liory Fern-Pollak, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.

As dyslexia has a neurological basis, an affected person would have dyslexia regardless of whether they were born in Finland or England. But Fern-Pollak explains that it would be easier to diagnose them in England, as they grapple with the idiosyncratic spellings of English.
English in the internet age

Webster’s ideas are perhaps newly relevant, as the language of IT and the internet increasingly influences how English is written. Globally, Google returns more results for US spellings. In computing, “program” is generally accepted over “programme”. Shorter words are more versatile in text messages and social media posts, and search engine optimisation often favours US spellings. The Googlelisation (or “Googlization”) of the internet is one reason that Thai learners, for instance, prefer American spellings.

But the internet is also exposing people to a large variety of spellings. So “people are representing their spoken dialects more through spelling in spaces like Twitter and Instagram”, says Lauren Squires, a linguist at Ohio State University. She believes that “people are becoming more comfortable with spelling variation”, even though there’s a strong and enduring idea that only one spelling can be correct.

RO, Christine. Simpler spelling may be more relevant than ever. BBC Worklife. 13th June 2019.