Go back and watch the recording of your presentation of your learning plan on the class PanOpto collection on Blackboard. Comment briefly on how things are going. What has changed? How have you incorporated materials and insights from class into your efforts? Have discussions regarding language structures and learning strategies helped you to understand the target language and culture? If so, how?
Reflect on your language learning so far. How would you describe the relationship between language and culture? What do you need to do to improve your communicative competence? Based on the readings by H.D. Brown, what kinds of competence are emphasized in your plan?
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I have learned a good deal since sharing my learning plan with the class, however, moving as there are also a great number of things I wished to cover that I did not get to. I have gained a lot of confidence in my reading skills, as my language partners and I have practiced a lot by reading common fables and basic introductions to each other. Working with a heritage speaker has also taught me a good deal about contemporary culture, as well as expanded my basic and some niche vocabulary. The biggest change between my learning plan and actual course has been a reduction in the speaking aspect.
In my original plan I had speaking exercises set for nearly every other week but managed to do about two of them. In general, the biggest derivations from my original learning plan have dealt with relaxing the course structure. This process has taught me a lot about how I naturally acquire language and how it differs from how I idealize the process of acquisition.
Our linguistics course has given me a lot of insight into the mechanics of language acquisition. Learning how to identify and even name patterns in spoken language makes the process of learning much more streamlined. The biggest take away from our linguistics course has been how I go about learning vocabulary. Rather than going for a set of words defined by a certain category such as weather or food and all the rest, looking at shared roots teaches me so much more about meaning and correlations to syntax than brute memorization. Speaking has always been my main focus, and to both prove and develop my competence in this aspect, I must speak. So, I will speak.
Since presenting my first learning plan, I think I've shifted more of my focus from learning about Korean history to learning more about Korean workplace culture. I think I've also integrated new ways of practicing my Korean listening and speaking through more fun activities like karaoke and cooking, rather than passive ways of learning like watching YouTube videos (which was part of my original plan). Since taking this class, I think I've been more attentive to which points of articulation I use when practicing my Korean pronunciation. Korean definitely uses different parts of the tongue, mouth, and throat than English, but being aware of this has helped me improve my pronunciation. I think that culture largely shapes language. Just as culture changes over time, language also continues to adapt to new aspects of culture. We can see this through slang terms. Globalization has definitely made an impact on how language and culture have changed, as well. In Korea, many slang and "trendy" words used these days are English.
Things are going well thus far in my language learning journey. I feel that I have made a lot of progress in learning Hebrew even though the order of concepts I am learning has been slightly different than what I had initially outlined in my language learning plan. A lot has changed from when I initially embarked on my journey, namely that I have been focusing on different parts of the language then what I had thought. After consulting with my language partner the best way to learn Hebrew is really to learn the alphabet and all its components, then to move on to reading. This is logical because a concept like listening would not really make sense to learn if you could not understand what the words were saying in the first place. I have incorporated the material in class into my Hebrew learning adventure by noticing the details of my language relating to linguistics such as the phonetics of Hebrew. I have noticed some of the sounds and the mechanisms used to make them differ from English so this has been an important component for me to notice and understand. I think our discussions regarding language structures have helped me learn a lot better. I notice these Specifics in Hebrew whether it be the use of vowels or the structure of the language more generally. I think I have noticed that language and culture are heavily tied together based on my learning of Hebrew. Language drives culture in many ways because language is how individuals in a particular society communicate their ideas. Based on the readings, the competence that is emphasized in my plan is grammatical competence thus far. Once I understand the language better I will probably try and venture into more competences.
Hi Jacob,
I agree that learning the basic level first that being the alphabet before advancing to sentence structure or vocabulary is a great way to learn a language or jump back into it. My target language is Korean, and the Korean alphabet was the first concept I tried to learn and master before moving to vocabulary. The Korean alphabet system helps me understand how to write the characters since each vowel/consonant has their own pronunciation. My native language, Chinese, lack an alphabet system so writing in Chinese is much harder than in Korean (at least for me).
Upon review of my first PanOpto collection on Blackboard, I see that I was a tad optimistic, but overall I'm feeling pretty good about my progress. I didn't even include vowels or grammar structure as separate weeks, which I think in and of itself showed I had a lot to learn. In terms of vocabulary, I've found that though I find learning things in relative isolation (such as flashcards) relatively easy, it's much harder for me to distinguish them when surrounded by other words, i.e. actual translation. I've been doing fairly well when being tested on them, but it's much harder to distinguish when someone is speaking to me. While I don't have the vocabulary to understand more than children's songs, listening to music in Hebrew has definitely helped my pronunciation and given me a deeper sense of familiarity with the language itself.
Originally, I was planning on trying to focus more on Biblical Hebrew to emphasize (and eventually translate) Torah portions. I am far off from that point, but it's still my eventual goal. For now, I'll be focusing on trying to grow my everyday vocabulary and phrasing as much as possible. To increase my communicative competence, I need to prioritize learning to communicate socially effectively (socio-linguistic/strategic competence), so I'll actually be able to engage with the culture on a deeper level rather than focusing on learning it to be able to read (linguistic competence).
Hi Paige,
I like the idea of listening music in your target language! My target language is Korean and I try listening to Korean podcasts for beginners. While most of time the sentence structure, grammar, or vocabulary I am not familiar with, I get a sense how the language sounds like. Also, I like to listen to the same podcast again that way I can hear similarities and learn some vocabulary. I think you are on the right track with identifying resources that might aid in your study of Hebrew!
Things are going pretty well. After some feedback on my learning plan, I fine-tuned a lot of my focus as I didn't realize how broad my objectives were. I also sort of gave up or put aside my objective on learning how to type/text as I realized it's almost like learning a new language but using my fingers as well. I was never a fan of typing class and I think it's better to learn more naturally. I also need to get Korean keyboard keycaps if I did want to learn how to type now. For my focus on gym terms, I found a YouTube channel by Kim Jong Kook where Jannette and I have been learning both workouts and gym jargon. In addition to the gym jargon, I've also been learning extra vocabulary in body parts. One of the problems I have that was addressed in class was trying to associate English sounds to help me pronounce Korean words. Something Jannette noticed when I was learning new Korean words was my accent. I realized my though process to pronouncing a new word was to try and associate a similar English sound and add a “Korean” accent to it.
Language and culture go hand in hand. They are inextricably linked, and I believe you aren’t able to fully learn a language or fully learn a culture without learning both. I believe to improve my communicative competence I just need to throw myself back in Korea. The competencies emphasized in my plan are more heavily focused on discourse and sociolinguistic as I am learning to speak a lot more naturally, especially with jargons for specific activities/areas.
I agree with learning how to write, it feels like learning a whole different language. Most of the time I text Korean, the suggested bar shows the corresponding terms, so I can usually type Korean in the correct grammar. But with pen and paper, I end up making lots of mistakes. Also, I also watch Kim Jong Kook - its funny how he surpassed Haha and Seok Jin.
With feedback from classmates and a critical review from Dr.Soloway, I think my learning plan has improved a good amount since my initial presentation. I had a general idea of what direction I wanted to lean towards, but as Dr.Soloway pointed out, my plan lacked specificity along with proper ordering. For example, one of my goals was to have topic based conversations with my partner to improve my speaking proficiency, but I didn’t have an exact theme for what the topics were going to be. Now I have much more niche topics that require more niche vocabulary - like political affairs and hiphop culture - so I can feel my usage of Korean expanding.
What I am learning in class definitely helps as it points out aspects I never directly thought about, and it makes me connect what we are learning in class to my target language. For example, the international phonetic alphabet that we reviewed in class, along with GAE, was helpful because I could see the differences between GAE and the Korean phonetic inventory. I was able to see what was unique to Korean, what was unique to English, why certain sounds were harder to pronounce for native Korean speakers, etc. Learning these differences might not necessarily have a huge impact on my learning, but it is still very interesting nonetheless.
This class has also taught me that culture and language are much more intertwined than I initially thought. For example, the documentary about how language affects the way we perceive things made me realize that language has a huge impact on culture. And no doubt culture has a huge role in the formulation of language. So in order to improve my communicative competence, I can’t just focus on language or just culture, I need to focus on both.
I totally agree with you. My knowledge of the impact of culture on language has been crucial in my language learning process. I see why people say you need to learn both the culture and the language to fully 'learn' or be fluent in a language.
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