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What's going on, guys? Welcome to this video.

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Today, I'm going to talk to you about reading in English or Portuguese.

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So, I finished my first Portuguese...It's

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not a novel, maybe it's a novel?

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I don't know. I think it's meant to be non-fiction.

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Anyway, so this is Carandiru, it is about a prison in Brazil, I think arguably one of Brazil's worst prisons, at least of the time, not sure, Brazilians in the comments are probably correct me, but the guy, Drauzio Varela, I think I said that right, he is a doctor and he went to this prison to take care of a lot of the prisoners who are suffering from things like AIDS and tuberculosis and a bunch of these other horrible diseases during the 90s.

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So, this was when they had an AIDS epidemic and they had all of these other problems with diseases and things in the prison.

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He went in there and pretty much just tells the story of different prisoners, you know, and what prison life is like in Brazil.

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And I'll tell you what, guys, I would not want to be there if I were a criminal, right?

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So, it is incredibly violent, the life that they lead.

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So, some interesting things that I learnt from this book, apart from obviously the Portuguese and I'll go through later how I used reading in Portuguese and reading this book to learn the language, but yes, so I guess it's set in the 90s, the guy ends up working in this prison, so he's there for a few years and the prisoners learn to trust him because, obviously, they can count on a doctor who's got their best interest, at least health wise at heart and he tells all these interesting stories about prisoners who, you know, day to day life, the different pavilion's that they live in.

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So, you'll have everyone from, you know, thieves, rapists, murderers.

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There will probably be corrupt politicians, police, everything like that, and it's really interesting, because in Brazil, it's run by the prisoners effectively, like there are prison guards, but I think more or less the prisons are pretty much run by the prisoners.

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And they kind of elect, each pavilion, kind of elects its own leader who's sort of in charge of the pavilion and takes care of, you know, I guess being orderly, so that everyone's under control.

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So, some of the interesting things there were they had this AIDS epidemic and they had drugs, big problem with drugs and the drug, I think at the time, initially was cocaine and they were all injecting cocaine and they would share needles, So they were using the same needles, quite often they would put cocaine in the needle, inject half of it, give it to someone else, they would inject the other half.

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And so what happened was you had this massive amount of AIDS, HIV being spread throughout the prison population.

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This was really unprecedented, especially amongst the trans community in the prison.

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So, these are the men that are sort of transitioning to be women or have decided they're going to present themselves as women and they have a lot of sex with the other prisoners and they end up with AIDS.

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So, the funny thing was that after cocaine stopped becoming the drug of choice and they started using crack, which is I think a crude version of cocaine, and it's more...

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it's more addictive, but you have to smoke it.

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After they started doing that, the number of people with AIDS declined in the years following because no one was using needles anymore.

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So, that was really bizarre.

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It's kind of like what? I was not expecting going to a worse drug, like crack, from cocaine, to have a positive effect in terms of health.

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That was really weird.

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The other thing is just how many weapons there are in the prison.

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They have knives, they have all kinds of things, they tend to deal out their own justice, so if you piss someone off, they're probably going to, you know, kill you or bash you and pretty much nothing that the prison can do.

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What else? Rapists are the most hated people in Brazilian prisons, which is kind of...

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I guess it's understandable, but at the same time, it's kind of ironic considering a lot of the people in there are murderers or people who have killed plenty of people, but apparently, according to their sort of prison culture, you can't, because they can have women come to the prison to see them for conjugal visits or, you know, family members, they pretty much don't tolerate any rapists.

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So, if you come into the prison and people find out that you're in there for rape, you pretty much get killed or you get moved to the pavilion that has all the other rapists, so that you're safe and no one can get in there.

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So, that was really, really sort of interesting.

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I mean, I think in Australia it would be the same.

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Rapists would be not really considered in high esteem here in Australia, but I don't think the average prisoner would come after you and try and kill you for it.

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So, yeah. Anyway, that was really interesting.

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It was an eye opener. You've got to sort of learn about day to day life in these prisons.

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Some of the stories were incredibly tragic.

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You know, there was one story I remember in there about a guy who fell in love with a woman, his best friend ends up seeing this woman with a policeman having an affair, tells the guy, the guy doesn't believe it.

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The woman's like, 'nah, I'd never do that, never do that' and this this guy who's being cheated on ends up, I think, trafficking a bunch of cocaine, and the woman has been cheating on him this whole time and she ends up dobbing him into the policeman that she's cheating on him with, who just gets him sent to prison and he ends up meeting his best friend in there, who he just completely ditched, in the end, for suggesting that his girlfriend could cheat on him, when in fact, you know, because he thought that his friend was trying to get them to break up, so that he could be with the woman, he was just jealous.

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Turns out he was telling the truth, the guy who ends up going to prison because his girlfriend dobs him in, she ends up going away with this policeman and the guy who ends up in prison gets tuberculosis and dies a year later with his best friend taking care of him the whole time.

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So, there's these massively tragic stories in there of that sort of stuff.

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But yeah, it's just bizarre.

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Interesting read if you can find this, I think it's in English.

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Anyway, guys, what did I do in terms of learning Portuguese when reading this book?

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So, you're here to now learn about how to use a book in English, in Portuguese, whatever language it is that you're learning, how to learn about how to use that book to improve your vocab.

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So, reading's incredibly important.

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If you want to improve your reading, you need to be reading something where you understand about 98 percent of the words on any given page, ok?

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So, that's about one in every 50 words is new to you.

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Ideally, you know, that's pretty difficult when you first start, but ideally, you want to be at least above ninety five percent, right?

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So, which is one in twenty words, which is, you know, a new word every second or third sentence.

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If you can get to that stage where you are picking a book where every 20th to 50th word is new, you should be able to understand from context what that word is, and you don't need to stop and go and look up what that word is every single time to keep going, right?

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But if it gets below 95, 90 percent, that's every tenth of 20th word that you're going to have to be looking up to try and understand, you know, what's going on, which is potentially one word, every sentence, ok?

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So, the first thing is try and find a book where you can get about, I guess, less than 10 words per page that are new.

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Obviously, it's not always happen, right?

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There's some pages in here where, you know, I've got more than 10, but ideally you want to be above 98 percent comprehension in terms of the words on the page you know, I read one chapter at a time.

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I read it without annotating anything, without highlighting anything like this.

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I try and understand everything the first time I go through and then the second time I go through a highlight the words with a highlighter, right?

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So, I don't have one here, but I'll have a highlighter, I'll be reading that chapter again and every time I come across a word that is unknown to me, I'll highlight it and I'll come back to it later, and every time I come across a word or phrase or maybe some grammar that I'm also sort of like, hmmm....I'm

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not really sure why that is the way it is.

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I can't, I recognise the word, I kind of know what the word is, but it's been used in a way that I don't understand and I want to look that up.

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I want to check it later on, right?

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I'll also highlight that as well, ok?

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So, that's the second time you read a chapter or a page, you know, a given amount of text.

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This is why I would recommend not doing an entire book and then going through again, because you kind of also forget, chapter by chapter, the words that you were looking up or that you wanted to look up.

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So, I've gone through once, I've read it, I've gone through again and I've highlighted everything that I was sort of unsure about or didn't know.

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I then get a dictionary online or, you know, maybe you get a book somewhere that you can use dictionary somewhere and I look up every single one of these words or phrases or grammatical things that I want to learn, and then I annotate on the actual page itself.

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So, let me show you. Here is where I will write the meaning of that word or that bit of grammar, the synonyms, whatever it is, below that word and then once I've done that, I'll read the chapter one more time to make sure that every time those words that I am trying to learn come up, I understand the context again, ok?

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So, you end up reading this entire book that you're studying chapter by chapter three to four times before you finish the entire thing.

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And I think this is a really key point when it comes to learning vocabulary, it's that repetition, repetition, repetition.

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So, by the time you finish a chapter, a page, you know, or the entire book, you've had at least three or four repetitions of every single piece of grammar, word, vocabulary, whatever it is that's new to you, ok?

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And beyond that, the reason that books are so good like this is that the same vocab keeps coming up again and again and again.

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Right. So, there is vocab that doesn't come up repeatedly, but there is a lot that will just keep popping up, right?

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Especially say here I'm learning about prison life.

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So, I was learning different words for prisons, prison cells, different people at the prison, different jobs at the prison, different crimes, different sicknesses.

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And those words were used pretty much every single chapter.

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And, so before reading the book, I had no idea what that vocab was, but after reading the book, I'd probably seen some of these common words when talking about prisons, you know?

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maybe 100 times, maybe 200 times.

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So, if you're going to read a book about anything, especially non-fiction books, try and find things that are related to vocab that you want to learn for your day to day life.

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So, maybe if you're trying to learn to be an engineer and you're working on cars, you want to read a car book, so that you, all the vocab you learn is related to your day to day life.

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Obviously, I can't really say that prison vocab is that useful for me, aside from the fact that it's just interesting, ok?

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So, yeah. Anyway, that is a bit about the very first book that I have read in Portuguese, at least a proper book, you know, not a kid's book or a simple book.

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And it was really interesting, really, really interesting.

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I'm trying to find the next book is going to be this one, which is all about Brazil before Cabral, which is the guy who found, quote unquote, found Brazil in, I guess fourteen ninety nine.

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So, that's going to be the next one to tackle.

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I'm really interested and I've actually got a heap, you're going to laugh, I've got a heap on Portuguese history and I've got them from, you know, fifteen hundreds all the way through to the most recent time period.

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So, I'm trying to learn as much about Brazilian history as possible for my marriage and the fact that half my family is now Brazilian.

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I want to understand them. Anyway, guys, that's probably enough for this video.

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My question to you is, what is the last book that you read and why did you read it, ok?

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So, go down into the comments right now, guys, and let me know, what was the last book you read and why?

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Why did you read it? Why was it interesting?

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Why did you choose it?

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Ok?

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And besides that, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell notification if you want to stay up to date with all the new videos coming out.

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I'm Pete. Thanks for joining me, guys and I'll see you soon, Peace!