- I have been staying on track with my goals from last month so far. I started watching Merlí on Netflix. I actually am watching a spin off of it that professor Feldman recommended. It is called “Merlí Sapere Aude”, a spin off of the main character's son named Pol. He is a college student in Barcelona and he is conflicted with school, and his sexuality and social life. I have to watch it with the subtitles but I like the show and it is definitely good listening practice for me. I also found a children’s book called “El Vaixell de Vapor” which means Steamboat. It is good for me because it is about the colonists who went to America– so there are a lot of years and dates which is good for my comprehension of time and numbers.
Moreover, I started a journal that I occasionally write in. I try to write in it a few times a week. It’s good for me to write in because I have memorized how to say things I do daily like “I went to exercise at the gym” or “Vaig anar a fer excercici al gimnàs”. This is also really helpful for practicing my verb tenses like past tense and future tense, etc.
We have learned a lot about phonetics in SDLAP 105, specifically points of articulation and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and how different languages have sounds that other languages might not have. This has helped me get through my frustration when I have trouble pronouncing Catalan words or sounds. Since there are some sounds in Catalan that English does not have, some words are hard for me to pronounce. Similarly, Catalan has a lot of x’s in their words, often combined with i’s and e’s to make “ix” or “iex” and these are pronounced like “CH”. It is hard for me to pronounce words like these fluidly in sentences. For example, “caixa” which means box, is hard for me to pronounce because we don’t really have anything like this in English. We have the “CH” sound, but not really any words that have “ix” in it, and even so, it would be pronounced differently in English.
Marionna and I meet occasionally because she is very busy. We will do vocabulary; I try to think of topics that will be relevant to my studies– so for example, the other week we did Political terms and she told me about the Political parties in Spain and how their democracy and elections work.
In my journal, I always start by writing the date. I make sure to include what day of the week it is, what month it is, season, and the day of the month– which I write out rather than just writing the number. I think it is a good and practical habit to do this.
My goals for the last month of the semester are to learn more about the political situation in Catalonia. I am also going to start brainstorming ideas for my culture presentation. I think I will present the current political situation.
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Starting the practice of writing in your journal seems very helpful in actually maintaining knowledge of phrases and everyday sentences. The phonetics of language are important and I agree that some words seem very difficult to mirror in language with pronunciation. Writing out the date as well, which can be hard to remember in other languages, seems extremely helpful. That show seems to have a lot of appeal and different meaningful terms to memorize.