As I entered this class, I had (and still do have) a very broad interest in learning everything I can about Chinese culture. I was also a complete beginner when it came to language learning, so my focus in learning vocabulary has been fairly general
Read more…I have now had about five weeks of instruction in Mandarin. I have been following the plan set out in my syllabus, and tutoring meetings have been regular every week. I have also created something of a pattern to follow – for the first part of the we
Read more…Korean Culture has honorifics and hierarchy. It is used at the end of the sentences to show respect based on age and social position. There are levels at which you speak to people. If they are older, you speak formally. (Age) If they are your boss, y
Read more…The most interesting thing about learning ASL and about deaf/hard-of-hearing (HOH) culture to me is that like spoken languages, ASL has various dialects that vary across country and region. One of these dialects is the result of historical audism and
Read more…Bahasa Indonesia has a rich phonetic inventory that is very similar to that of English. Both Bahasa Indonesia and English have twenty-six letters, but most Indonesian letters have only one pronunciation. Most consonants (except most notably C and R)
Read more…There are both sounds in Spanish that don’t exist in American English and letters that sound differently in Spanish than they do in English. An example of a word that uses a sound that exists in English, however, uses a letter formation we do not hav
Read more…Looking at the Mandarin phonetic inventory, I can see pretty quickly that the sound system is organized differently from American English. One big difference is that Mandarin focuses a lot on aspiration instead of voicing, so sounds like p / pʰ, t /
Read more…The main structures of language that are discussed in How to Investigate Language Structure such as the medium of linguistic transmission, grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and semantics are present in Spanish as they are in every language. However, th
Read more…Russian consists of both soft and hard vowels and consonants which are used in different instances and when combined in different ways (as in, with different surrounding sounds in Russian). Many of these phonetic sounds have an English equivalent. Ho
Read more…Korean has 14 consonants and 10 vowels that make up its basic sounds. All these sounds are simple ones that we can make a direct translation from into English. When I work with Emily, she gives me the Korean sound but with English letters or relates
Read more…Korean has constants and vowels that are different from English. Korean phonology has three ways to distinguish constants. The p-like sounds have a soft sound with 발 (bal), a medium sound with 팔 (pal), and a stronger sound with 빨 (ppal). The tense or
Read more…There is no phonetic inventory of ASL because it is an entirely signed and not spoken language. However while there are no sounds or tonal structures that exist only in ASL and not in English, there are certain signs or words that exist only in Engli
Read more…I vividly remember sitting in the living room with my cousins, laughing over Hebrew. “Just try it, say it,” they all laughed. I felt a rumbling in the back of my throat, trying to create that “chah” sound. My cousins all around started to make the no
Read more…Israel is the only Jewish country in the world, and because of that, so much of its culture and national identity are connected to the Jewish religion. For many residents in Israel, being Jewish shapes public life, holidays, and even the weekly sched
Read more…There are many sounds in Chinese that are not used the same way, or don’t exist, as in American English. The most noticeable difference is in the tones used — I am learning to adjust my intonation to communicate the words I learn, as different tones
Read more…My target language, Catalan, fits well within Aitchison’s model of layered linguistic organization, from phonology and grammar to broader linguistic and other dimensions. At the grammatical level, its rich verbal morphology and SVO syntax structure s
Read more…One of the main beginner pieces I learned was that Korean has the Subject-Object-Verb structure for a sentence. Although I am still on the beginner parts of learning Korean and have not done too much work with sentences, I know that this may cause me
Read more…What kinds of structures do you observe in your language of study?
In Mandarin, I've observed basic syntactic structure. It follows SVO word order. I've also noticed morphological/grammatical words that modify sentences. Ma at the end of a sentence tu
Read more…In my study of Korean, I observe a highly systematic and multi-layered set of language structures that closely align with the diagram presented on page 9 of Aitchison’s linguistics, which conceptualizes language as an interconnected system composed
