After watching my recording from the beginning of the semester I realized that there are things that I am doing consistent with my initial plans but also things that are inconsistent. I had a very structured organization in my learning plan where I planned out every day of the week down to a T. After following this learning plan for a month or two, I have realized that I have lost some of this structure, for both better and for worse. Evidently, the stresses of the semester became more of a hurdle which made it difficult to keep up with my structured plan. There are days when I neglected to do an activity outside of my 3hr/week tutoring. On the other hand, not following my structured plan to a T, whether it be what I intended to do or not, allowed me the space to do other types of language learning activities that didn't fall into my initial plan. A lot of these "other" activities were inspired by the topics we covered in class. For instance, when we were learning about IPA and phonetic sounds, not in a structured manner but I spent time outside of class learning the distinct phonetic sounds of Afaan Oromo and practicing my pronunciation that way. I am eager to use what we learned just this past class and duplicate the 'Swahali' activity with my target language. In fact, throughout my language-learning journey, I've realized that a very important aspect of learning a language, at least personally, is patterns. Furthermore, because a lot of what I work on with my tutor is on building my vocabulary, I believe I am significantly lacking in building up my grammatical competence, understanding how a sentence in Afaan Oromo is formed, what parts of speech go where, etc. In the second half of my language learning journey (as far as this class is concerned), I want to whilst building up my vocabulary prioritize developing my grammatical competence so that I can effectively use the vocabulary I'm learning to form discourse competence. In regard to my understanding of the relationship between language and culture, this process has made me aware of their importance to one another, and their codependence. I say this because my prior understanding of the Oromo culture has subconsciously been very helpful when learning the language. For example, last week I was learning vocabulary for food with my tutor and we got to the word "butter". She used the word in a sentence and because of my knowledge of the Oromo culture and the people's use of butter as a treatment for their health on their hair, I could easily decipher what her sentence meant. For someone without this knowledge, the sentence would not make sense.
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