As I work from Monday to Saturday afternoon, unfortunately, I don't have much free time to study, but whenever I can I try to study at home or even on the bus on the way to work or college.

When I'm at home, I like to study the content I saw in Progele, summarize and do practice exercises. However, as most of the time I'm not at home, I sometimes study on the bus, watching series, listening to music in English, doing exercises on websites or through apps.

Some apps I've been using lately to study English is Color Verbs, and Grammar Test. Color Verbs help me to memorize irregular verbs, and Grammar Test brings several grammar exercises to practice.




I know it's not much, but so far, studying this way is what has been possible for me. When I'm on vacation, I usually study more often.

 I have always been keen to take an English course, however, as I have lived for many years in farms and small towns, I had never had this opportunity. When I joined University and met Progele, I saw a great opportunity to finally learn English, and then I enrolled in the course. Even though it's only once a week, taking this course has been very good for me. Teachers always try to do a lot of written and oral activities and the classes are almost 100% in English, which is also very good. But if my goal is to really learn and be fluent, I can't just study in the course, I need to study at home as well and wherever possible.

In 2018 began the first semester of the Letters Course - Portuguese / English. At first, I wasn't sure what to expect from the course. I didn't think it would be like an English course, but I didn't know what it would be like either. When classes started I got scared. The teachers only spoke English for most classes and almost everyone in my class spoke English fluently. It meant to discourage me at first, I thought of quitting, but I chose to persist and study. Learning English was always something I wanted so badly, so when I entered the course I saw that I could no longer escape, that this was the time to really learn. So I started to study. My first step was to enroll in Progele, the English course offered by my University. The second step was to develop ways to study English at home, but these things I will explain further in future posts.

I started taking English classes at my school only from the 6th grade. Teachers focused on teaching things like the alphabet, colors, numbers, animals, days of the week, clothes, and other beginner subjects. Classes were always focused on writing and all in Portuguese, almost never focused on speaking or listening to the English language, which was something that had a negative influence on my learning, because even today I have more ease with writing than with speaking or listening. Over the years, my interest in English has waned, there is no exact reason, but for a long time, I studied English only at school, I did not seek to study at home or learn in other ways, and so I stayed for many years.

 

      Well, it all started when I was still a child. I listened to a lot of English songs that were a hit at the time from singers like Michael Jackson (the greatest artist of all time and only my opinion matters), Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Beyoncé and others. When I listened to these songs, I found it amazing that different language that I didn't understand, I wanted to learn, but I still didn't have many possibilities, not to mention that I was a child, it was not easy for me to focus on something like that.

      When my parents bought our first computer I was about 11 or 12 years old. My sister started taking some Spanish classes over the internet and I remember that I was always close to her to see what it was like, because it was something different, I wanted to learn too. In the end, I didn't learn much of Spanish, but I tried to sing some songs in Spanish too.

       Since I played instruments early on, I always tried to play and sing some music. I printed the lyrics and their translations, so I put the music to play and tried to keep up with the lyrics. This method of study, which I did not know until then was a method of study, was so remarkable to me that there are songs that I tried to sing back then and that I remember the lyrics to this day, almost 10 years later.

      There was a saturday show on TV Cultura that my sister and I watched a lot called Inglês com Música. I don't remember for sure if it was one song a week or if it took several weeks on the same song, but I remember there were several students from different schools gathered there to learn and the presenter teaching phrase by phrase, pronunciation and the meaning of expressions. It really was a program that I loved for bringing together two things I liked, music and languages.


       This is how my interest in studying the English language through music was born in my heart. It is a pity that this interest has been dormant for a long time inside me, but I will explain it more calmly in the next posts.

Hi, how are you?

My name is Thayná, I'm 20 years old and I created this Blog to share my trajectory while I learn English. Yes, I'm still learning. I don't know how long it will take me to consider myself fluent in this language, maybe I will never consider myself, because the language is alive and constantly changing.

What matters is that what I want most is to learn a little more each day. A new word, a different expression, clear my doubts, discover a new world, a new culture, day after day.