I’ve realized that I need to be a much better planner than I am right now. That is my biggest flaw, I believe, that I don’t schedule my time well and this causes me to not do my best on everything the way I am capable of doing. I also think that I need to gain a better sense of taking my work seriously and that if I do this it will become more interesting and rewarding.

Now, for tangible topics, I do believe in the end I accomplished a little less than I had set out to, but not so little that it is disappointing. After studying the language and learning parts of it, I think setting vocabulary goals and not Grammar goals was a big mistake in terms of trying to put sentences together. I realized that learning vocabulary is not effective unless you know how to put an entire idea together, and Grammar is the way this happens. With only a knowledge of Vocabulary the speaker can sound no more intelligent than a baby who just speaks in single words; i.e. “me want”, “hot”, “yes”, etc. However learning the vocabulary is not a complete waste as it familiarizes you with the language.

I learned that learning a language is difficult, however it is not impossible. It takes a different type of studying to learn a language as opposed to being in an English or history class. Where the latter are associated with acquiring large sums of information in short periods of time through reading, learning a language is about learning small sums of information over a longer period of time, and it is through constant repetition of the information that allows it to sink in. I really started to learn this towards the end when preparing for my final evaluation. I realized that just reading over the information in our study sessions then a couple more times at home is not enough to retain information for an entire semester. I realized that the only way to learn and more importantly retain the information is to constantly go over the old information along with the new stuff you learned in order not to just replace the information you previously learned but retain that and learn new things.

It think the best learning techniques that can be used to learn the language is a combination of different things I tried throughout the semester. First, Rosetta stone is very effective. But also, there are videos on YouTube done by a group of people who just want to educate others. These videos show you how the word is written and then has people saying the word so you can hear it used in a human voice. I think watching these videos then making note cards out of the vocabulary you learned is advisable. Then, with these note cards, repetition is key. Ideally half an hour to an hour a day should be spent going through the note cards a few times. This repetition is crucial to learning.

Having the language partner and also someone else studying the language is important too. I think that just reading and knowing the words is not nearly as important as putting them in practice. So going to our weekly meetings with Maya, DC and I were able to practice Hebrew orally. Also Maya brought a unique view of Israeli culture to the meetings, because she was born and remains an Israeli citizen. She was able to greatly help us with our ideas for culture topics and also many times was able to call her parents who were fluent in Hebrew to assist us in learning the language. Talking to a native speaker of the language is important, I believe, because they bring something about the language that a book can’t. For example such things as inflections put on words that can only be guessed at by a foreign speaker learning from books.

In the other part of the class, learning about other cultures, I believe I come out of this course knowing a lot more than I used to about Israel and the way things work in that country. I think also just going over the history of language and the ways language works in the textbook is also useful information for going forward into the world. Knowing that difference in languages can influence culture and how cultures differ so much more than just through their language. I never had the opportunity to study abroad so I didn’t get to experience other cultures in the ways I would have liked, but I think this class taught me a lot about culture’s that I didn’t before know because of my lack of exposure to them.

I think overall I benefitted a lot from my taking this class. I think that the material is not what benefitted me the most, but rather the exposure to self-taught topics and the steps I need to take in order for self-motivation. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about other cultures and about language itself. I would encourage people to take this class in the future.

I have always found accents and dialects very interesting and have always tried to guess where people are from based on the way they speak. I may find this so interesting because I, myself have a dreaded New Jersey accent. As I don't find it to be that prominent, when I came to college I found that there was a definite difference in the way I pronounced some words as compared to my roommate from Connecticut. I believe also that dialects can lead to a lot of pre concieved notions about someone that are ususally false.

The biggest mistake I believe that is made when talking about dialects are the assumptions that are made about someone simply determined by their accent. I will admit that before I came to Richmond the only exposure I had to people who spoke with a southern twang was on television. This was obviously not the best thing, because of the stereotypes that are portrayed that ususally go along with such an accent. Not all southern people go hunting on the weekends and have 4 teeth. Now obviously I was more intelligent than to think that this was actually the case, but in the way people are portrayed through the media one may be misled.

I think accents are important because they are part of who we are as people. The easiest way to recognize someone, after their physical appearance is by their voice. For example if you call a number hoping to talk to a friend, simply by hearing the person on the other line say hello, one can usually recognize if they have reached the right person or not. This however can lead to errors as well. It is important not to judge someone you are meeting for the first time simply by their appearance or the sound of their voice. However it is human nature to relate something unfamiliar to something familiar and therefore avoiding prejudice can sometimes be very difficult.

The reading for this week acknowledges the plethora of languages that exist in the world and how they can be related and categorized to and with each other. The reading highlights different language "Families" and how these families form the languages and, where the languages are used today.

Recognizing language families is very important because it gives us a greater understanding of History, and in many cases can help you better learn and understand words and grammar for a language based on other languages in that family. Basically what a language family is, is a collection of languages that can all be traced back to a common ancestor from which, in some way, all the languages in the family were formed. These daughter languages that are formed can be found to have similar language tools. In many instances words are very similar to each other, which i think is apparent as an English speaking person when studying Spanish or French. especially because they use the same alphabet. However even some languages that do not use the same alphabet can be similar which I have noticed when studying Hebrew. It is amazing how other languages and cultures have so much influence over each other, such as English and Hebrew whose modern calenders sound very similar.

As someone who loves and appreciates the value that History has in the world this section I found to be very interesting. I believe it is very important to know where you come from, and language is a very big part of that history. For all i know even certain families may have individual speaking nuances that are unique to them and that can be traced back for generations. I think it is important to recognize that even though something, in this case languages, may appear to be so very different, they can in fact be discovered to be more similar than anyone thought possible.

The world is a unique and fascinating place. What makes this so is the abundant amount of cultures one can find when travelling the globe. This reading was about how the various languages of the world keep the diverse range of cultures that exist, and that if these languages are not preserved all will be lost. This, however i believe to be very untrue.

I do agree that differences in culture are fantastic and keep the world interesting, however being fearful of losing languages is a little absurd. All current languages that exist now must come from somewhere; usually they are hybrids of previously existing languages.  Some of these previous languages may have died out. For example there is a definite Latin influence on the English language, however Latin is no longer used as a conversational language. Is this detrimental to the world? Not at all, because like an organ donor, Latin was able to give parts of itself to various other languages. So no latin no longer exists, but pieces of it live on in other languages.

What it seems is that the author is afraid of change. This i believe is a very common thing for humans to experience. Humans like patterns and consistency and things out of the ordinary tend to be intimidating or scary. However if it wasn't for change nothing would have ever progressed and the world would go from being fascinating to being pretty mundane and boring. It is important to recognize that all languages the author is talking about preserving did in fact come from somewhere else, and one day millions of years from now new languages will exist and they will have the old languages like English that are no longer in existence to thank for their birth.

This week with Maya I reviewed information from the previous week and expanded upon the knowledge that i gained the week before. I completed my ability to relate the date and time to people learning the numbers up to 30 and general numbers for telling time, such as "quarter to" half past" and "quarter of". Phrases like these seem to be translingual. When i was studying spanish there were words that could be translated for those same phrases as well. My goal is to be able to use this information as one of my Artifacts. This information is crucial to being able to communicate with someone who speaks Hebrew. My Spanish teacher always used to say that he wanted us to be able to be dropped in the middle of a Spanish speaking country and be able to communicate and be able to get out of the situation. This is also what I would like for Hebrew.

In class this week we read and discussed how important the written word is to a language, and studying Hebrew this is especially apparent. This is because I am accustomed to reading english from left to right and top to bottom. However Hebrew is different. Even though you still read top to bottom, the language is actually read right to left which in order to read the language needs some adjusting to and training. Also the reading addressed the actual writing of a person. The individual characteristics of each individuals writing is fascinating. You would think that since everyone is taught how to write the same way, all people would learn to write the same. But just like each individuals personality is different so is each individuals handwriting.

Also what I find fascinating is the influence certain language's writing has over another languages characters. It can be seen though even in languages that dont look very similar. Personally i have always found the similarities between the Greek alphabet which is over 3,000 years old can be so similar to the English one. Although the difference is apparent the characters are very very similar in some cases.

This week in our tutoring session we discussed months of the year days of the week and numbers from 1-10. We were able to use this information to partially tell the date, however not learning numbers above 10 we cannot tell the entire date yet. There are two sets of months in the Hebrew language. The first set of months is the ancient one that consists of over 12 months. We chose not to focus on this as it does not seem relevant to our goal of developing conversational language skills. We focused more on the ability to pronounce the modern 12 months. These are very similar to the English pronunciations of the words so it was fairly easy to learn these.

The reading for this week Figuring Foreigners Out was very informational, however things I believe are able to be noticed just by living and paying attention to others. Simply the way people carry themselves and their facial expressions can be a strong indicator of people's country or general area of their origin. One thing I found especially interesting was hand signals and the subtle differences from culture to culture. Also hand motions that can be friendly in America can, as it turns out, can be offensive in other cultures, and vice versa. Miscommunications like this can result in events that can be very negative for all involved. Information about other cultures is imperative to learn when traveling abroad, as to not accidentally cause an international incident.

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This week in our meeting with Maya, DC and I went over directions as planned in the previous meeting. We also however learned man other vocabulary words. We're focusing on key words that we all think will be useful when trying to make simple conversations in Hebrew. Once again this week the pronunciations of the words was a key factor in learning words. After reading this weeks reading for 105 i learned that pronunciations of certain sounds that are made in languages can be integral to that language. I discovered that the sound described in the book as Glottal, or when "we make the vocal folds come together to cause a closure or friction" (pp. 60). This is the sound i believe most closely matches the sound you need to make when producing certain Hebrew words. Also in the reading was discussion of tone of voice in language which is definitely an integral part of speaking a language. This, however is not something we have covered yet in the meetings with Maya. I also think this is the most difficult part of a language to learn, especially since the tone of voice for certain languages can change from region to region in areas that speak the same language. 

An interesting thing that happened in our meeting with maya was that we at one point had a question that Maya did not know the answer to. So she decided to call her Mom and ask her how to say what we didn't know. Maya's mother lived in Israel and speaks Hebrew fluently. Next week we decided to discuss numbers and the calendar. 

In my first meeting with my learning fellow Maya, we didn't focus on any single topic to start learning about. What we did was discuss her experiences and how she knows Hebrew and things related to the culture of Israel. She was very informative and interesting and gave me a good idea about topics i could write about in the culture postings. We then discussed all of what we wanted to learn. I am meeting with a partner, my roommate DC, and we both decided to learn the same things. 

All three of us then began to go over some general vocabulary, not only to try and memorize the words, but also to familiarize ourselves with the different kind of sounds that you have to make in order to speak Hebrew. They are sounds that do not need to be made in English and therefore can be very challenging to pronounce. I have always found that what I lack in the ability to pick up on grammar in languages I am able to pronounce words the correct way.

In parting we decided on a plan for the following week. We decided to discuss directions. For example how to say where something is or how to get somewhere. 

There was very little progress made this week in order to actually begin learning Hebrew. Since my language partner, Maya, and I weren't able to schedule a meeting until next week it didn't allow for me to really sink my teeth into a topic in the language and get started. I did explore the Rosetta stone and found the first lesson to be very unlike any way of learning i have attempted before, and i do believe that this type of learning will be beneficial.

The first reading I found to be interesting and in fact relevant to me more so than i ever would have thought. The ways in which the brain functions are fascinating especially when it comes to the way in which it interprets and learns different languages. From personal experience in attempting to learn a different language other than English i can attest to the fact that the brain works very slowly when trying to learn something that is completely foreign to it. The language i had difficulty learning was spanish, and if a language of which every American is exposed to in some way is difficult, then a language in which i know absolutely nothing about is most likely going to be an even more difficult challenge.

I also have an interest in the process of the brain because of a head injury i incurred a few years ago. I was unforrtunately in the hospital for almost a week after fracturing my skull and incuring slight brain damage which left me, as far as i knew at that point, with a significant hearing loss as well as a constant ringing in my left ear. After a couple years of struggling in school I finally seeked out assistance and found after a rigorous neurological testing that I had in fact developed cognitive learning problems that are directly related to the way i take in information. It was concluded that my aility to understand and learn new concepts had been impaired by the injury and that I would have to work harder to understand things that in the past came to me very easily. I think this applies not only to the reading, in terms of the Brains ability to retain information, but also to the format of the class in general that will allow for me to really be able to figure out the best way to learn information outside of a classroom setting.

My decision to take this class was one i came upon out of convenince. Being in my senior year this class fulfilled a graduation requirement so i decided to enroll. I have always found that I enjoy learning about a variety of topics that seem interesting to me. I very often find myself researching on the internet trying to read up on a random topic. Thi is why I decided to choose Hebrew as the language I wanted to learn. This is a language that is very unike those that I have previously tried to learn. I took classes in French as well as spanish and found them to be very comparable to the english language in many ways. This is something that is not true about Hebrew. I believe Hebrew is very different from most modern western languages. Also I think studying Hebrew provides an opportunity to learn more about Jewish culture, which is something I have never really known much about.

In reviewing the FIRE model of learning I was able to determine that I am a Rational learner. I believe I often stuggled in my other language classes because they are very structured and intsructor run, which is not the best way for me to learn. I am more of a hands on learner and I believe the best way to learn is not by someone else telling you what to do, but rather by learning the way that you find best for yourself. I think having strict organization can hinder creative learning. I believe this class will be an eye opening experience for me in terms of my writing style, as well as a benefit for my general knowledge.