My language background to date can be broken up into who sections, the pursuit of Latin and the pursuit of Ottoman.
Starting in seventh grade, I began my courses in Latin. I ended them in Senior year of high school in a library doing my first and only online course. I would say this was a period in which I studied the language for the sake of the language with no ends in my mind beside literacy toward access to literature. I learned a great deal on how languages are structured and learned helpful ways in which I could understand them. In my native tongue, it is difficult to know the function of words before learning another and reflecting upon similarities.
These paradigms continue to help with Turkish, which I value differently than Latin. After taking my first class on the Ottoman Empire trying to find a direction in which I should apply my history major, my professor told me that in order to pursue the study of the Ottoman Empire, I would need to learn Ottoman. This put me into something of a panic and I took the opportunity summer (2018) presented to study modern Turkish, a prerequisite for Ottoman. That summer’s program was the most intensive language study I have ever done and it would have been all the more difficult if I had not the grammatical understanding six years Latin had provided me. Due to my ignorance of this program at UR, I waited until this summer (2019) to continue to study Turkish. I continue to communicate in Turkish with a friend from my time in the program.
With application deadlines for graduate school on the horizon, I decided to take Arabic to learn the script, pronunciation, and some basic vocabulary. My hope is that after this course in Arabic I will be able to read the script even if it is written in Ottoman. I will be able to understand the words which were written and then begin to work on the vocabulary and grammar that is particular to Ottoman and not found in Modern Turkish. With continued practice both my Ottoman and Modern Turkish will become more fluent.
The many of the questions used in the survey on learning styles seemed frivolous or not applicable to me. The structure of the survey with the single-selection criteria made my selections necessarily arbitrary more often than not. For these reasons, I will pay little credence to the results which, by algorithm necessarily reflect the arbitrariness of my selections. The intelligences survey’s questions were only slightly better worded, and the scale system was definitely more appropriate for the purpose. However, I have difficulty finding meaning or value or even truth in the outcomes. I spend little time at introspection because I am a college student busy with a relationship, classes, assignments, and applications. I have not particularly good social relationships, despite the survey’s results. The only friend I have made in my three years at VCU is someone that annoys me with their superstitions and Lenin-worship. Perhaps I do not understand these types of surveys. As to my learning style, I think in different terms than “auditory,” “visual,” and “tactile.” I think in terms of “reading,” “writing,” “listening,” and “speaking.” These are equally valuable activities that I do as opposed to abstractions, which is what I would call the other paradigm. At present I think the best way to learn language is to learn the components of these activities, such as grammar and vocabulary, and participate in them. This can be a pre-emptive learning, which involves studying the concept or word before using it, or an active learning, which involves learning the concept as it is being used or as I use it. It seems both are necessary to learning and build on each other. One has an incomplete understanding of a word if they have not used it and seen it used, but simple studied it on Quizlet. Likewise, one has an incomplete understanding of words if they have not memorized their translations or contextual meanings, thus allowing words to pass by without full comprehension. A mixture of these tactics along with a mixture of these focuses on reading, writing, speech and listening are what I think is the best way to go about learning a language. The way to expand my language capacities under this scheme is simply to memorize and use new words, phrases, and concepts.
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