Over the course of the semester, I learned a lot about myself. I had thought that keeping myself on track and following my self-set schedule would be a lot easier than it actually turned out to be. I also thought that I would have a much harder time learning from Amaia than I would learning by myself, but the opposite turned out to be true. I surprised myself to learn how much the learning process differed from other language classes that I've taken, not necessarily for the better. That said, I did actually learn a lot about the language, and I'm proud to be able to say that I even speak a little bit of Basque. Even though keeping myself on-task has been pretty hard, I've had a wonderful time learning from Amaia, about the culture and the language. I'm hoping to continue my learning through the Aurrera workbook and Memrise, and I hope that some of my favorite language learning sites like Duolingo will be able to help teach me Basque soon as well. Personally, of all of the readings that we did, I found "Figuring Foreigners Out" to be the most useful, because it helped me to understand the Basque language from a cultural perspective, and although I'm already pretty familiar with Basque culture, in made sense in comparison to that of the U.S. As for learning activities, I really liked doing the cultural presentations. It felt good for me to be able to share my culture with the other students in the class, and I found it really helpful in learning about Basque culture too, because I was inspired to research more than I normally would have. Overall, I think that this experience helped to teach me to be a better language learner in general, and now that I have more of a background in Basque, it is something that I will continue to learn and study for the rest of my life.

As far as what I've learned, I didn't accomplish nearly as much as I thought I would. I think that I might have been setting my expectations a little high, because at the time, I wasn't sure how well I would learn, or how my plans would change each week. My future goals are to be able to reach the level that I am supposed to be at in my learning plan, as well as continue to review the things that I've learned through Amaia. The sentences that I'm able to form at my current level are very basic, but my comprehension has grown exponentially, and I hope that through some more practice listening, I'll be able to improve my Basque organically as well.

This week I learned about some more complex systems of sentence structure, like past and future tenses. This semester I learned a huge amount- basically starting with the knowledge of bai, ez, and the numbers for 1 - 10. Now I know how to make sentences, say my name, give all of the colors of the rainbow, and tell time. Although I didn't learn much more than a high-school level beginner Spanish or French class, I think for self-directed language, that's pretty impressive. I had a lot of difficulty keeping myself motivated, and my greatest struggle was remembering vocabulary, as I'm sure it is for many people. Luckily, my grasp of the complex Basque sentence structure is pretty good, and I know enough vocabulary to get by. I hope to continue working on my Basque, now that I've had the basics laid down by Amaia, and maybe even someday study it in the Basque Country. All things considered, I've made a huge amount of progress, and I think I will continue to study on my own outside of class.

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One of my goals was to be able to write my grandmother an email in Basque, and with the help of Amaia for some vocabulary I didn't know, I was finally able to.

According to my learning plan, my goal for this week is to be able to have a conversation about what I or someone else was recently doing, and what I was recently not doing, like saying, “She got up at six,” or “we did not leave the house (yet)." I'm not quite at this level yet, but I'm getting much better at forming sentences in general. I'm going to continue reviewing with the help of Amaia, Memrise, and my Aurrera workbook.

My goal for this week is to be able to talk about what I have and ask people what they have, both in physical objects and abstract things, like a cold, etc. I also want to continue to review what I've been learning, in particular the vocabulary that's been given to me by Amaia. I'm going to accomplish this by working with Amaia, using Memrise, and my Aurrera workbook.

My goal in my Learning Plan for this week was to be able to describe where things are coming from, which I've already covered a little bit with Amaia, so mostly this week my goal is to review. I'll do this by meeting with Amaia, working on vocabulary with Memrise, and practicing with my Aurrera workbook.

My goal for this week is to learn how to describe or ask about where someone or something is going, and be able to order food. I'm going to accomplish this by working with Amaia and practicing ordering food and talking about where things come from and go, and by continuing to use Aurrera and Memrise to work on my vocabulary at home.

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My goal for this week according to my Learning Plan is to be able to use the words for “this” and “that” and “with” as well as count through higher numbers and therefore be able to label items, like “20 people,” etc. Going by what I've worked on with Amaia however, I've been working more with vocabulary and reviewing verbs and how to use them, as well as nor, nork and nori, which modify the subject depending on the verb and context. Because the rules are so confusing I haven't been as focused on my Aurrera workbook, but I'm still using it and Memrise in order to improve and get closer to my goals for the semester.

It is quite easy for me to read Basque, because sentences and even words depend on specific patterns that I can usually identify. For example, if a sentence starts with "non," I know that I will have to say where something is, or if it starts with "zenbat" how many. Even with my limited knowledge of Basque vocabulary, I can usually identify the meaning of sentences just by their context and the patterns that I'm already familiar with. Speaking Basque is a whole other situation. My writing skills aren't lacking, per se, but they certainly aren't at the same level as my reading skills. I can usually make correct sentences, but it often takes me a long time to craft, and my response is usually drawn out as a question because I look to Amaia to make sure what I said was correct and made sense. Basque is certainly not the easiest language to learn- there's a proverb that the Devil moved to the Basque Country for seven years, and by the time he left all he had learnt was "bai" and "ez," which mean yes and no. My writing is probably at the same level as my speaking, and is definitely something that I need to work on.

I think that calling bilingual people smarter is misleading, because intelligence is measured in many different ways. In the context of the article, intelligence is the ability to think about things from different angles, because of how quickly the brain works when moving from one language to another. While bilinguals might in general be better at certain puzzles, bilingualism itself does not guarantee an increased mental capacity, nor does monolingualism guarantee that a persons' brains lack the capabilities of thinking the way that bilingual people do. I think it would be interesting to study the brains of people who are better/worse at learning languages over the brains of those who already have learned them.

I really couldn't say how many new words I have learned, but the vast majority of them have been to do with grammar rather than actual vocabulary. That said, I've learned to count to 100, can list all of the colors of the rainbow, and can talk about my family too. I've written down a lot of vocabulary words, but it is still taking me a lot of time to learn all of them. I'm hoping that my Culture Project can help me with this, because as Basque surnames always mean a certain place, there are a lot of good vocabulary words within them. The words I did learn, I learnt through a lot of repetition, and quizzing on the part of Amaia. I think that I have met my goals for the most part, but there is definitely still a lot of vocabulary I want to learn. That said, I am glad that I got a lot of grammatical rules out of the way, because knowing those, I can continue learning vocabulary by myself next semester and be able to move on. I would say that I still have goals to continue increasing my vocabulary more than my grammar, and be able to know a lot more adjectives and nouns, which I think is definitely a reachable goal.

I thought that the reading was interesting, both because I am familiar with the Athabaskan languages as a Washington native, and also because I started learning Basque in order to try to help preserve it. Although I now know that Basque as a language is not in decline, it meant a lot to me when I began learning it to know that I was helping to carry on the legacy of my family. I really appreciate what these people are doing in Oregon especially, because although it is unlikely that after these five speakers are gone, the language will continue to survive, they are trying to preserve it at the very least. As an archaeology student and archivist, I can really appreciate that as well. When languages die, so does a large part of a group's cultural history, so I think that it's really great that the language can be immortalized in the internet.

Knowing a language's history can help a person understand it, because there are certain historical and cultural factors that help people understand language better. An example of this is my class on the history of English in terms of Greek and Latin. By knowing the history of words, I can understand how they are put together, and therefore better understand what they mean. This class has even helped my understanding of French, because the Greek and Latin roots are much the same as those found in English. This can help be applied to Basque too, because understanding how loan words entered the Basque language, as well as which ones, can be great for better speaking Basque. By knowing that things introduced by the Romans were given Latin-based words in Basque, like "oliba" for olive, you can start to predict what certain things might mean, before technically knowing the words for them.

Reflection Paper # 2

Maddie Philips

                  Since starting my language learning journey, I’ve learned so much about Basque that I was surprised to not have known before. I’ve even been able to teach my parents things about Basque culture, so I am really grateful to my language partner Amaia for being so open and willing to talk about what living in the Basque Country is like for her, as well as the cultural differences between the Basques in Spain and the Basques who live in France, which I was more familiar with. I’ve also been able to learn much more about the Basque language and how it’s used, including how to introduce yourself or talk about your family. This is particularly important because Basque culture is very focused on where people come from, particularly geographically, so that is one of the first things that Amaia taught me. For example, I learned that the French Basque country is called Iparralde in Basque, which I had not known before. That makes it a lot easier to talk about myself from a Basque perspective, because Iparralde, population wise, makes up only about a tenth of the Basque country. Because of that, by being able to make the distinction of coming from that area, people are better able to understand my own culture.

                  I’ve also found it funny coming from Iparralde that I’ve been able to teach Amaia new words, like “ttinka” for hug, “otto” for uncle, and “erreximenta” for jam, which are all words from a dialect of Basque that Amaia is not familiar with. Because of my own knowledge, my relationship with Amaia has become better, because I can truly show my own interest in the language by being able to teach her something too. As far as understanding the target culture, as much as I knew before, I’ve learned so much more. I had no idea that there were people who even had Basque as a first language, so Amaia has really opened up a world to me that I hadn’t realized existed. Ironically, a big part of the reason that I wanted to learn Basque was because I thought that it was a dying language, so to hear that it isn’t not only makes me feel a lot better, but also increases my desire to learn it, because now I have someone to speak it with.

                  As far as communicative competence goes, I definitely have a long way to go. My comprehension has gotten much, much better, but my speaking and writing skills are still lacking. Because of that, those are what I’m going to focus on this semester, and instead of trying to move forward, I’m going to try to review what I’ve already learned. Of course I want to continue working on my Basque and learning new tenses and ways to say things, but I think it’s more important that I focus on perfecting what I’ve already accomplished. This is a problem that I’ve had with every language that I’ve learned, and with French especially, I really regret that I can’t write a sentence without an error, even though I can understand and communicate with great fluency, comprehension wise.

I've actually made a lot more progress so far than I thought that I would, but at the same time a lot less. Because I've been moving so quickly, my comprehension has gotten to be really good, and I can understand almost everything my learning partner has asked me. That said, when it becomes my turn to respond, I've been having some trouble remembering the proper word order and verbs. My learning plan has been pretty effective in how I organize what to talk about for the week, but I've found that most of my instruction comes through Amaia, which is something that I need to work on. I think to finish the semester I might focus on perfecting the things I already know before I go on to learn more.

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This week Amaia was helping me tell time. My main goals though, were to try to work on the things I've already learned, as well as how to say them in the negative. Because I've been moving so quickly, there's a lot that I still struggle with, even though my comprehension is good. Because of that I set aside this week for a lot of review to try and work on my speaking, instead of just my comprehension. In order to accomplish this I looked at Aurerra a lot, as well as went on Memrise to work on some more vocabulary to make more sentences.

My  goal was to learn the verb “egon” to be able to say verbs like “I am sleeping,” etc., which I accomplished mostly through Amaia, although Aurrera did help me in being able to come up with the vocabulary to say certain things. I practiced many times being able to answer Amaia when she asked me a question, and memrise flashcards were especially helpful for finding abstract nouns to use egon with. I still need to work on this vocabulary though, although I know the basics and when to use egon over izan.