Kevin Retana

"I really liked reading about your perspective with language-learning as an auditory learner! I am a visual learner so it helps me to see what the word looks like. Auditory learning is always something that I have struggled with because I feel like I…"

"Hi Kevin, I really like how you emphasize that Korean food culture goes beyond the dishes themselves and reflects values of respect and community. Your point about language connecting to etiquette is insightful. Studying honorifics alongside food…"

"Hi Kevin, I like your explaination of why understanding pronunciation beyond spelling is crucial for Korean learners. I also like how you connect linguistic theory with your own learning strategies. Your examples of tense consonants and the vowel…"

While studying the Korean constants, I noticed that it has a constant phonology because the “j” and the “ch” sound similar. As well as the vowels “yeo” and “eo” sound the same. Different disciplines can be useful to see a holistic understanding because they can interconnect with different perspectives to learn a language with all available perspectives. In Korean, in psychology, they perceived the Subject, then the Object, and lastly the Verb. For computational Phonology the sounds that Koreans hear know what each mean while for me, I still have trouble differentiating the sounds. I prefer the disciplinary approach of stylistics literature for korean because it is easy for me to read the words out loud while practicing the pronunciation, and when I practice a simple sentences I have an image of the words written. If I were able to read fluently, it would be great to view the perspective of authors because they can influence the population, so understanding the source may have a better…

Chinese primarily follows the same subject-verb-object structure as English, but I am still learning the different ways in which words can be arranged. For example, in some cases, I can signify having completed an action by adding the word “le” after the verb (and sometimes the rest of the sentence), but I don’t know if this applies to all cases of the past tense. One of the other concepts I am coming to understand is the way characters are combined to create new words with complex senses. The words for “stairs” come from the characters for “building” and “ladder”, and a part of the character for ladder means “wood”, as it was used in early building structures. Tracking ideas like this might relate broadly to the “language”, “anthropology”, and “sociology” areas of Aitchison’s linguistics. As a beginner, I will probably focus mostly on applied linguistics, but I am also interested in literature, philosophy, and psychology, so I hope to consider and learn more about how Mandarin has…

Kevin Retana

Comments

Discussion Post #3

Discussion 3 Spring 2026

Discussion #3 (Spring 2026)

Discussion Post #2

Note: this page contains paid content.