Through SDLC, it is clear that we as language learners have known more about compositions and basic theories related to languages. Since I am not a native speaker, the difficult part for me is using foreign words to break down complicated compositions for different words. Everytime I try to memorize terminologies, I need to translate them all the way back to Chinese. Also, such phenomena appears when I tried to distinguish different sources of sound. However, I think the significance of this course is more found in vocab accumulation rather than theoretical knowledge. After learning suffix, I have a rough idea of what a word can possibly mean even if I had never seen that word before. For example, er means people, and pre usually means before. Therefore, the course overall made it easier to categorize words in terms of meanings and forms. That helped a lot when I was trying to enlarge my vocab by using that method. I basically connected words that have similar meanings and words, and then, compared them with each other to see if they share any common trait. The activity that I recognize as the most effective is reading phones we ourselves created. By doing so, we separated the pronunciation of a certain word into pieces and so that we can check if our pronunciation on a word is accurate enough. Doing so improves not only our pronunciation but also our conceptual cognition to language itself. We can even guess or spell a word that we had not seen as long as we know characteristic and radical composition. That saved a huge amount of time for me, a sophomore who is currently studying GRE. I could almost determine the meaning of a word by merely looking at its root and suffixes. Thus, I would recommend this course as a method-based course rather than a course full of opaque theories.
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I like how learning the root and surfix helped you understand the langauge a lot better. Sometimes learning a new language is very difficult but learning the patterns in the language may help a lot. I wish you the best luck to achieve your goals this semester. You got this!