When I was in Baku last summer, I would go to the same Café in the mornings. The Place was called HOMI, Coffee For You. I cannot recall the meaning of Homi, but it may have been something to do with hospitality or kindness or alms. I started going th
Read more…One thing I really appreciate about SDLC program is the flexibility of the curriculum. While at first it seemed daunting and a bit intimidating, I think I have really grown to enjoy this freedom. I have enjoyed language classes in the past but didn’t
Read more…Due by 5pm on Sunday, April 5: Discussion Post #10 on the Ning
Imagine that you have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of your target language and culture. How would you get started, and what would you investigate? How w
Read more…It's hard to believe that two weeks have already gone by this semester! I'm excited to be back and to catch up with my language partner, Melisa, and to be speaking Malay again. Over the break, I realized how hard it was for me to keep up my speaking,
Read more…For this cultural post, I wanted to focus on Kpop. Specifically the group Seo Taiji & Boys because they created the industry. They are seen as the cultural symbol that showed all the changes, not only in the culture industry, but also in the whole en
Read more…As Turkish goes, I have had a change of heart—not about Turkish, but the methods by which I should study it.
Upon my first meeting with Hazal, I was disappointed to learn that she was going to use the Istanbul Turkçe series. All my previous Turkish
Read more…I find the brain to be incredibly fascinating, as many others do as well. I took a comparative vertebrate anatomy course last semester, and we touched on the brain. Quite honestly, I think the school should have a course solely dedicated to the brain
Read more…Due by 5pm on Sunday, February 23: Discussion Post #5 on the Ning
Do some preliminary research on what interests you about the target culture and describe how this topic relates to language. Do you need any special vocabulary or linguistic knowledge
Read more…In my first meeting with my tutor Jimin, we discussed my learning plan and were able to come up with 10 goals in order to reach my goals and to improve my grasp of the korean language. The ten goals I came with were to improve my writing and speaking
Read more…Nowruz was celebrated by millions of people on the twentieth. The name of the holiday translates directly as new day, but is more often translated as new year. Interestingly, it is the spring festival that begins the new year, not as in the arbitrari
Read more…Korean, just like every other language I have learned contains a subject, object, and verb. Among the languages I have learned, I put these languages into two different categories, subject + verb + object, which includes English, Chinese, and French,
Read more…Turkish:
I met Hazal for the first time officially on Thursday. It says something about the importance of continuously using a language that I was waiting for her for an hour the day prior because I mixed up the two Turkish words “Çaršamba” and “Perš
Read more…Due by 5:00pm on Sunday, January 26: Discussion Post #1 on the Ning
Reflect on the readings. Do you have any questions about the texts? Are there any claims that you find problematic? Do you think language is a purely biological phenomenon? What part
Read more…This iteration of the bi-weekly language learning journal is more of a tri-weekly one, given the extra week of break because of the coronavirus outbreak (and the post is admittedly coming a little late as well because of my energy being expended towa
Read more…The past two weeks or so have been a continuation of some previous themes and topics of the semester (e.g. affixes) as well as new ones as well. This semester, Melisa has incorporated more review of previous lessons, which has been useful in helping
Read more…Similar to the reading, “How to investigate language structure”, the Persian language also has a structure to follow. The general structures include phonetics, the study of speech sounds, semantics, how meaning is expressed withing a language, gramma
Read more…Due by 5pm on Sunday, February 9: Discussion Post #3 on the Ning
What kinds of structures do you observe in your language of study? Refer to the diagram on page 9 in Aitchison’s linguistics. How do you combine different disciplinary perspectives to f
Read more…At 3, surrounded by my extensive Chinese family from my father’s side of the family, Cantonese was my native tongue. When I turned 5, I began primarily learning and using only Vietnamese after entering kindergarten. In the 3rd grade, I mo
Read more…Happy Year of the Rat! With Chinese New Year occurring this weekend and as a Chinese learner myself, I feel obliged to hone in on this holiday for my first cultural artifact post. Ethnically Chinese Malaysians make up over a fifth of the population o
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