I started writing in Nepali after I felt comfortable and sure that I was writing it properly. I noticed that when I was writing, I always second guessed what I was writing and was always checking to see if what I wrote was properly written, which thi
Here's the link to the first and only Adhikari, Mahmood, Wise podcast where we talk about ASL and our experiences as autonomous learners this semester. We hope you learn something and enjoy the podcast!
As we approach the end of the academic year, I can look back and reflect on a tumultuous semester in which myself and my friend Susmita were able to do ASL classes over Zoom for about 10 weeks. Towards the beginning of the course, we learned about th
If I was to be given a research grant to conduct a linguistic study on ASL and its culture, I would spend time and resources further exploring the different topics that Susmita and I brough up in our final cultural presentation. These include topics
There is no free handwriting or typing within ASL rather, we use a combination of signs, expressions, and even finger spelling to communicate our thoughts. The structure of sentences within ASL also varies greatly from that of English. For example, i
Languages go extinct gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then lose proficiency in their native language. Most often, speakers tend to favor a more prestigious language because of the potential social and economic bene
Having watched the presentation of our original learning plan from the beginning of the semester, I can proudly reflect and say that so far things have been going smoothly despite some initial troubles with the Zoom technology and our class setup. Pr
Once again, as we are learning ASL, for the purposes of this discussion I will be focusing on my native language of Bengali. “Bengali” also known as “Bangla” belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family and the “lingua franca” or “bridge language” of th
Unlike other spoken languages, ASL does not have specific cultural aspects such as a type of food or annual tradition. Sign language evolved and adapted independently across different communities and geographical regions. However, given the rich hist
I believe that the difference between sound and spelling is that spelling is more primarily influenced by cultural factors whereas speech is subject to more internal language related factors such as articulation and airstreams. This distinction is no
I apologize for the delay in posting my language journals. We could not start our language lessons until the first week of February because of some logistical issues, but I learnt so much in a single month that I now have a lot of thi
Reflect on your previous experiences as a language learner. What did you enjoy? What did you dislike? Think about the FIRE model and the surveys you have just completed. What kind of learner are you? What kinds of language learning activities suit yo
Looking back at my progress plan something that I mentioned that has actually really helped me with my progress in learning Nepali has been watching instructional and YouTube videos in my free time. It definitely helped with pronunciation and sentenc
Growing up in Nepal, I was never told explicitly to follow one religion. As a Buddhist living in a Hindu-majority country, the lines between Hinduism and Buddhism was extremely blurred . Up until 2007 before the government of Nepal declared Nepal a s
For the final month of SDLAP 113 lecture, I met with my language partner Somyung Kim and Warren Chae over Zoom. We started off our lessons and returned to the same concept of speaking in only Korean with occasional English only for words that we do n
My target language, Nepali, belongs to Indo-European language (sometimes, but not commonly, also referred to as the Indo-Aryan) language. Nepali is written in the Devanagari script, similar to Sanskrit and Hindi. It shares a lot of similarities with