Have you started writing in the target language? Do you prefer to type or write free hand? Have you started to see patterns emerge in the structures between words, clauses, and sentences? What is the relationship between simple and complex sentences? How does your knowledge of parts of speech, government, and agreement affect your ability to communicate in written contexts? Provide a sample of several short meaningful writing exercises from your target language.
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To my benefit, Bahasa Indonesia uses the latin alphabet and possesses an intuitive syntax that has made writing relatively easy. Since I’m not learning new characters, I’ve mostly been typing instead of writing by hand. One of my favorite ways that I’ve been trying to write is by making my reflections and notes on my lessons with my language partner in Bahasa Indonesia. I’ve also been trying to write almost all of my WhatsApp messages in Indonesian, both with my language partner and with my students. This contrast has helped me dip my toe in both an academic-adjacent style, as well as a more informal register. I’ll paste some examples below.
Here is an excerpt from something I wrote comparing German and Indonesian morphology:
Dengan pekerjaanku kata kata, aku perhatikan kata-kata sering harfiah. Ini mirip dengan Bahasa Jerman. Misalnya “rumah sekit” dan “krankenhaus” sama, di bahasa inggris, “sick house.” Ada juga “Jam Tangan,” “Kaus kaki”, dan “Orang Tua.” Di Bahasa Jerman, ada “Antibabypillen,” “Zahnfleisch,” dan “Weltschmerz.” Aku pekir ini bukti sejarah linguistik di Bahasa Indonesia. Tidak bisa kata-kata ini di Bahasa Belanda atau bahasa lain misalnya Bahasa Malay tapi ini menarik.
I’m trying to avoid perfectionism and instead focus on conveying complex ideas as best as possible. Hesti, my language partner, is always willing to correct my syntax when I try writing more complex sentences (I’ve especially struggled with sentences using three or more verbs).
I have started to write in Korean however it is still limited to very simple sentences. Though my handwriting is not the best so I tend to always prefer typing for the sake of clarity, I find it is much simpler to just write by hand in Korean. I struggled to learn the Russian keyboard so I do wish to further complicate myself by also attempting to memorize the Korean keyboard. It does sometimes take me a while to piece together the different characters to create a syllable block since I am still learning the rules. I can definitely see how the hangul writing system was created strategically since there seems to be set places where characters go and when within a syllable block.
I do not yet have enough knowledge to figure out how government and agreement affect my ability to communicate in written contexts. I do find the sentence structure to be relatively straightforward as it is not necessary to add filler words like pronouns and “is” in sentences like in English. For example, their sentences are formatted following the subject-object-verb word order.I have noticed that Korean has cases similar to Russian but I am not yet at the level where I am familiar with them. Having already learned the Russian ones, it does not seem nearly as intimidating to learn the Korean cases. They have the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and locative case. After gaining a stronger understanding of the cases in Russian
korean writing.jpg
Throughout the semester I have practiced writing words and phrases in Korean by hand. Because I have not memorized the Hangul keyboard pattern, I much prefer writing by hand. While I have a lot of progress to make, writing by hand is much more comfortable to me. Regular practice has helped me observe patterns that are hard or even impossible to distinguish by only speaking the language. Complex sentences often are simply made up of fragments of simple sentences. My knowledge of Korean grammar and speech rules are fully responsible for how well I can communicate in a written context. Often, I can think of ways to express my thoughts, but it is in awkward and unnatural sentences due to my limited knowledge of Korean sentence structure. This is especially true for longer, more complicated sentences with multiple parts/ideas.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I can relate to the fact that it is extremely challenging to think and write at the same time because it takes time to process the meaning and the right spelling of the new words. Before I write something in Hungarian, I recreate the whole structure of the sentence in my head first and then try to spell it out without using any sources or help. Maybe you can try that as well.
I have not really been writing full sentences in the target language. I'm still working on vocabulary, therefore I have not discovered a pattern for clauses and sentences. Only very simple sentences. When I am practicing my writing. I prefer to write by hand. I find typing more difficult, however it does have arrange the syllables into the correct structure the different types of words with 3 letters/characters. I have found that in the Korean language, they do not have a sentence structure like they do in western languages with a pronoun and a conjugated verb. They have words that will signify the pronoun without saying I, you, she, he. Like in Spanish, a pronoun is not necessary. They don't have many verbs for "to be." they would not say the teacher is good, they would say teacher good. My knowledge on speech, government, agreement, do not affect my ability to communicate, but that could be because I have not learned much about government or agreement in written context and i also do not have much practice in writing.
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I have started writing in my target language to get a sense of how words and sentences are made on paper. Since I don’t know what characters are on each key on the keyboard, I much prefer to write in freehand, although my handwriting is very bad since I’m unused to the precise and angular hangul characters. One pattern I have mostly noticed in sentence structure is the order of subject-object-predicate(verb) instead of subject-predicate-object. For example, the sentence “I like soccer” would be written like“I soccer like” in Korean sentences. Korean subject-verb sentences like “I eat” or “she sings” also end in a “declarative ending.” An example of this is the ending “이다” or “은” which mean “to be.” These will be attached to the end of the noun in the sentence. More complex sentences will follow a 누구, 언제, 어디, 뭐, 어떻게, 하다 (who, when, where, what, how, verb) structure. The sentence “I drove speedily to school yesterday” will look like “I yesterday to school speedily drove” in korean structure. It is much easier to notice these grammatical differences when writing them down versus speaking it aloud.
A meaningful writing exercise I’ve been using is to write down sentences in English that I’ve used throughout the day and later I will translate and write them down in Korean. Today I had a conversation that went like, A: “If I beat you in rock-paper-scissors will you buy me a snack?" B: “No?” Later I translated and wrote it down to identify the differences in sentence structure, parts of speech, etc. Since I am writing down the same sentence in both English and Korean it is easy to identify the grammatical differences and identify written patterns in both languages. I try to write the sentence down without any dictionaries or grammatical guides at first, and then I fill in the blanks. I often find I have errors with two vowels that sound the exact same phonetically but are written differently and used in different scenarios (ㅐ and ㅔ) so I am also practicing with writing those vowels correctly through this exercise as well.
Here is my discussion post:
discussion post 8 .docx
As I mentioned earlier in one of the previous discussion posts - Hungarian has 14 vowels: seven short vowels (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written with an acute accent in the case of á, é, í, ó, ú, and with the double acute in the case of ő, ű. It is very challenging to hear the difference between the long and short vowels, and that creates difficulty in spelling the words correctly. I am definitely struggling with writing the words on my own after hearing them in the audio or in the speech. Due to the fact that my visual memory is the most developed one, I strongly prefer to write freehand. Handwritten writing helps me to memorize words faster, and forces me to pause and think over which kind of vowel (short vs. long) I am supposed to use in the particular word. I have started to see patterns in the endings and suffixes in the nouns. For example, if the initial word ends with a short vowel, and I want to add the suffix to it, then this short vowel becomes a long one.
You can see that the possessive suffix “-m” turned the short vowel “a'' into the long vowel “á”. For me it is still very challenging to notice those little things and keep track of these differences, however, sometimes the choice of the vowel makes a huge difference in the meaning.
Also, below I will include a picture of my handwritten notes from the grammar exercise in the book. The point of this exercise was to keep track of the correct spelling of the words (short vs. long vowels), and the correct word order in the different types of sentences.
I love when languages will have these little details of changing spellings with added prefixes and suffixes to allow for the pronunciation to sound "right." This reminds me of the occasional change in accent and emphasis in Spanish when creating plural nouns.