Wow this is my last discussion on the Ning! I can’t believe it! Throughout this semester I have really enjoyed learning Indonesian and gaining more tools to teach myself other languages in the future. Many of the materials in the 105 course were very interesting to read and learn about how language learning works and the brain. I also learned more about grammar and general language structures than I had known previously. However, to be entirely honest I don’t think that I gained a lot of information that will change how I learn languages in the future. From learning languages previously, I already intuitively understood basic grammar components that might not be present or obvious in English, and I have been using language roots to expand my vocabulary for a long time. It was certainly nice and interesting to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of how languages work and having the tools to actually express that instead of only intuitively understanding it. But I don’t think that it will change how I learn languages, except as concrete evidence to encourage myself to keep learning languages since very little proof has shown that language learning ability decreases with age. I discovered just how badly my auditory learning skills are, but I knew before that this was one of my learning weaknesses. I already knew that reading the target language out loud and listening to recordings of books help me bridge the gap between the written and auditory language skills, although I did not have as much time to do so this semester as I had originally hoped for. One thing that I did find very new, challenging, and interesting was the International Phonetic Alphabet. I would like to become more fluent in understanding this symbology, since it is a very useful tool for pronouncing words correctly. It was helpful to understand how sounds are made, which might help me in the future compartmentalizing the different pronunciations of words and learning how to pronounce unfamiliar sounds. Thinking about the mechanics of making the sounds makes it much easier to reproduce a sound, rather than just trying to imitate the sound I hear. However, this semester was particularly challenging in that regard because sounds are not transmitted very clearly over zoom. If Farida and I were both fluent in the IPA or how to make sounds in general, this might have helped me a lot with the proper pronunciation of words. There were many occasions where she corrected my pronunciation over Zoom but it honestly sounded exactly like what I had said, and I wasn’t sure at all how to fix my pronunciation!
I found that the most effective project for myself and learning Indonesian was the final cultural project. I really found it fascinating to connect the language and culture and music together in a topic and see how intertwined they are as I conducted the research for it!
As a side note, while completing my last assignments for this class I discovered that all the other discussion posts only had to be 250 words. I had thought they were all 500 words this entire semester! C’est la vie!
Replies
Maddie, love to hear that you're interested in this linguistics/international phonetic alphabet! I think you would be really interested to look more into phonology, in respect to American linguistics and looking at phonetic similarities between languages all over the world! Many linguists analyze languages individually, as in looking at the phonetics and practices of language X and treating them as unique to that language, compared to the properties of language Y, and I read an interesting theory of the concept of a universal language - taking out the labels of each world language and looking at how they interconnect across the globe and have grown and incorporated each other.