Given that I am currently interning at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the East Asia Exhibit, I thought it could be worthwhile to focus on the state of art in Malaysia for my second cultural artifact. In particular, I am interested in exploring h
Read more…Given that I have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of Dari in Afghanistan, I would investigate the following question:
What do different dialects of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan tell about the political and social power dynamic
Read more…I learned how to write in Persian early on in life. However, it had been a few years since I last wrote in Persian. My language partner, Zari, made writing a major part of our learning plan. So after most of our lessons, I am assigned to write a shor
Read more…Dr. Harrison points out a few factors that contribute to languages going extinct. These factors include the passing away of the elderly who practice the language. As a result, this contributes to a lack of speakers to speak and continue the language.
Read more…This past two weeks I reviewed a lot of vocabulary with my language partner. I learned words such as agac (tree), alkol (alcohol), araba (car), baba (dad), balik (fish), banka (bank), bay (male), bebek (baby), bilet (ticket), bilgisayar (computer), c
Read more…This week I learned grammar rules in the Turkish language. First, I learned the vowel harmony in Turkish. For the front unrounded vowels, if the vowel preceding Is either “e” or “I”, the suffix vowel is “I”. For the front rounded vowels, if the vowel
Read more…This week, I learned more common phrases and numbers in Turkish. Hazal and I reviewed common phrases that we learned last week and also added some more. I also practiced my pronunciation skills by having a conversation with Hazal. One of the conversa
Read more…This week, I had my first meeting with my language partner, Hazal. We started by learning basic greetings. I learned how to say: “hello” (merhaba), “how are you?” (Nasilsiniz), “I’m fine” (Iyiyim), “thank you” (Tesekkür ederim), and many other phrase
Read more…It's hard to believe that two weeks have already gone by this semester! I'm excited to be back and to catch up with my language partner, Melisa, and to be speaking Malay again. Over the break, I realized how hard it was for me to keep up my speaking,
Read more…My recent Malay lessons have been a deep-dive into grammar, which has definitely been more of an emphasis this semester compared to last. In particular, I have been learning how the structural components of affixes work in Malay and the purposes that
Read more…The past two weeks or so have been a continuation of some previous themes and topics of the semester (e.g. affixes) as well as new ones as well. This semester, Melisa has incorporated more review of previous lessons, which has been useful in helping
Read more…After some uncertainty, it turns out that Hazal is able to continue helping her three University of Richmond students. Because she had to return to Nevshehir in these circumstances, I was almost certain that she would not be able to continue the less
Read more…I learned something new recently. According to my newly acquired textbook, Vietnamese is sometimes mistakenly thought to be a monosyllabic -- a word containing only 1 syllable -- language, but that is not the case. Vietnamese words are primarily disy
Read more…Over Spring Break, my family and I traveled around Ontario, Canada. At one point, we visited my uncle, my father's brother, and his wife in Toronto, and, to my surprise, they only speaks Vietnamese. They live in a Vietnamese community in Toronto and
Read more…Languages go extinct via internal and external pressures on the language itself. An internal
pressure on a language results from a small pool of speakers resulting in a community that may be
spread out and unable to use the language in ordinary circums
While learning Korean these past weeks, I have found that I feel like I am translating things twice. It is interesting because Hangul was foreign to me so first I would have to translate the symbols of Hangul into their respective letters/sound in Ko
Read more…In the beginning of the presentation, I talk about why I wanted to study the Portuguese language. I mention how I took Dixon’s class and learned about the Portuguese Empire and current issues in Luso-Brazilian cultures. As I think about this initial
Read more…İki hafta önce Hazal ve ben sadece bir günde buluştuk çünkü Salı’da genel buluştuğumuz zamanında başka şey yapması gerekiyordu. Bu yüzden o haftada sadece Perşembe’de buluştuk. O günde biz yeni bir der kitap bölümü başladık çünkü öncedenki bolümü get
Read more…Things are going much better than I thought it would. As expected, I have encountered some obstacles tackling things like dictions due to my speaking habits. This makes reading and writing more difficult than I initially assumed, but it also shows me
Read more…I think, for the most part, my language partner and I have stayed on task about our learning plan. We have dedicated a good amount of time to reading academic and news articles in Persian. Upon reading those articles, we took the time to discuss the
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