Identify a topic for your culture project and reflect upon how this project relates to your language learning. State your learning goals for this project.
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Identify a topic for your culture project and reflect upon how this project relates to your language learning. State your learning goals for this project.
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My culture project with Rachel will be about the Israeli Defense Force. This is a topic that is worldly controversial and hard for people to understand how it can be beneficial to the individual and to society. Surprisingly, Israelis do not dislike being drafted into the army. They think it is part of their duties as an Israeli citizen and gives them commonalities with other Israelis. The experience people gain in the army can be in many different fields including intelligence, combat and even party planning. The army tries to make different jobs to accommodate the strengths of the soldiers and use their skills to the best of their abilities. This also gives people good experience and helps guide them towards a career path by figuring out what they like doing and what they do not like doing. Being asked about your experience in the army is a typical question in interviews and casual conversation.
This greatly affects the culture; it affects their education system (college is postponed), family planning and loyalty towards the state. It is an essential part not only to the safety of the country but also the richness and pride in their culture.
My learning goals for this project are to understand how the army affects the culture in both negative and positive ways, learn military vocabulary, and present this in a way that makes sense to people who do not feel the same pride and affection towards Israel.
The one thing that started my interest in Hindi language is Bollywood. I grew up devouring Bollywood movies, dancing to their songs, and dressing up as my favorite Bollywood stars. I was introduced to Indian culture by the movies that I watched. So for my cultural project I want to examine to what extent Bollywood movies reflect Indian culture, how it has changed over the years, and if it has, why has it changed. My learning goal for this project is to learn more about the Industry that has entertained me all these years without fail. To learn vocabulary pertaining to my endless source of ‘masala’ (mixed spice-describing movies that mix different genres such as action, comedy, romance and melodrama) movies.
For my culture project (with Sarah Stewart), I will be studying the IDF, or the Israeli Defense Force. This has always been something that interests me, ever since I visited Israel on Birthright and met and traveled with soldiers. People my age in Israel are drafted into the military, and the stark contrast between what I am doing with my life right now and what they are doing with theirs is something that I think about a lot. This project, I hope, will help me to understand how the country feels about the draft, how individuals feel about the draft, and also to learn language about a subject about which I really am passionate. To me, that is the ultimate reason to learn a language: to be able to think and talk about something that you're passionate about, but to do it in that new language. So, this project will enable me to learn about my favorite subject and combine that with learning more Hebrew.
My goals for this project are:
- Learn vocabulary for the military
- Learn vocabulary for civilian attitudes towards the military
- Be able to correctly read and pronounce these words
- Create a cool slide show for the project!
As I spoke about in my last cultural post, i did my project on the Navratri festival, or Dandiya. This is a fun event where people come together to worship a goddess, by dancing. It is a very fun event! Learning more detail about this festival benefitted my language learning in that I was able to learn more about one of the major festivals celebrated in India. It is very important to learn about the culture the language originates from because it helps put the language in context. My goals for this project included learning the purpose of the festival, exactly how it is celebrated, how people dress, and the like. This way, when people speak of the Navratri festival, or when I see a Navratri festival in a movie, I can fully understand what is happening.
I have decided that the topic for my presentation will touch on the events currently going on in Ukraine, specifically the protest efforts against the president. The current president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, is a strong advocate for the "Russification" of the country. The president made his stance very clear when he declined to further negotiate with European Union officials, regarding the conditions needed to be met in order for Ukraine to continue their process of the EU. Speculation followed that the president's decision was a result of his excessively high interest in a coalition with the Russian government, where if the scenario played out accordingly, the Russian government would assume the majority of power in the relationship. This deal "made sense" to the president of Ukraine because as a result it would provide the country with premium prices for gas, oil and other natural resources. However, the people of Ukraine were outraged with the decision made and stormed the streets of the capital, peacefully yet passionately protesting against the president and his administration. Currently there are over 500,000 people at the capital square protesting. I chose this topic because I believe that this history in the making for 21st century Ukraine. My way of describing it would be: the struggle of the Ukrainian people to establish democracy and independence in their country by their own means.
For my final cultural presentation I think I am going to focus on the government programs Sweden has in regards to family. I spoke a little about this in a previous post (attitudes towards family) but Sweden is EXTREMELY family oriented and has quite a few amazing government implemented programs in regards to family. Such as what Molly mentioned about about Paternity and Maternity leave. Another extremely interesting program they have is child allowance. Which essentially is that the guardians of children 16 and younger receive 1050 kroner per month. My learning goals for this project is to learn about the Swedish governments familial programs and also see what is the reason for this. That programs like these are very rarely seen in other countries.
So I think that for my culture project I am going to talk about how Sweden has a really egalitarian culture. For instance both moms and dads get the same amount of parental leave rather then just having moms get maternity leave (like the America). Also, they have feminist movie rankings to discourage people from seeing movies that are inherently sexist. They also have a practice where they combine the words for he and she and make a gender neutral word "hen" rather than saying "man" when they're trying to speak of people more generally. Based on these practices and also subtle things in the language you can tell that Sweden is a very egalitarian country that places an emphasis on equality (and feminism is the norm, not the extreme).