Reflect on your learning experiences this semester.
(a) What insights have you gained about yourself as a language learner and cultural explorer?  What did you find difficult?  What have you enjoyed?  How will you continue your learning?
(b) Which readings and learning activities did you find most useful?  What would you like to learn more about?

As a language learner, I found it will be very hard to improve the communicative competence without practicing with a local friend in target language. Luckily, we have a Korean teacher to practice with this semester, so I have made a little progress so far. And as always, I really enjoy exploring Korean culture all the time. Not only by watching their dramas, but also by listening to their songs, watching their TV broadcast, and also the most important thing-making local friends. By these learning process, I understand their culture deeper than before. What’s more, through the SDL105 class, I also learned a lot cultural aspects by watching the cultural presentations. I think this is really a good idea to present one’s target culture to other people. From these presentations, I not only have learned more about Korean culture during the preparation, but also learned other country’s cultures as well, which I think is really good and I really enjoy at the same time. I will continue my learning by going to cram school in Taiwan after I go back home. Since I will graduate this semester, I won’t have chance to take the Korean class at my college, thus my only way to learn from a teacher is by going to private cram school. Besides this method, I will also continue learning by continuously watching Korean dramas online, so I can practice my listening. Another method I will use is to practice with my Korean friends, although they will all go back to Korea since they will graduate with me at the same time, I still can practice with them by getting in touch with them.

The most useful learning activities so far is really by watching Korean dramas. It is because there are so many Korean dramas I can find online that I can practice by watching them everyday. Also, by watching Korean dramas I can learn more about Korean cultures as well, which will be very helpful for me to know more about the culture I am learning. And the most useful reading activities is by reading the lyrics. It is because that by reading the lyrics and listening to the songs at the same time, I can learn the lyrics and also feel the emotions behind the lyrics. Also, it will be more efficient for me to learn because knowing the lyrics definitely won’t bored me at all, so I can keep practicing by this method without getting tired and give up in the middle. What I would like to learn more is to speak Korean more frequently. As I mentioned before, it is quite difficult for me without being in a good learning environment, buy I will do my best to achieve my personal goal in the near future.

Summarize your work this semester, the progress you made and the difficulties you encountered.

I really have done a lot of work during this semester. I had practiced not only the weekly goals on my learning plan but also learned a lot from the Korean classes. I accomplished most of my weekly goals by reading or watching the films on the Youtube. About the conversation part, I did quite a lot during the class as well.

I think the most difficult thing for me is still the speaking part, and I think it really takes time to improve. Situation such as " I can write, but don't know how to speak without writing it first" happened a lot. Thus, I think if I want to improve my language skills more, I definitely should find a Korean friend and only talk to her/him in Korean. Except this part, I think I did quite well this semester, and hope I will be better at communicating in the near future.

documentation (slides, summary, sources) of your research-based cultural project

Kpop%20trainee.pptx

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I designed this dialogue by myself to show one of my learning goals. The translation is as below:

A:Excuse me! Is there any Korean restaurant near here?

B: Yes, there is! It's quite far from here, but it's really delicious. The restaurant is called "zzaam".

A: Oh really! But how can I go there?

B: First, take the Richmond shuttle bus and get off at Walgreen stop. From there you can see Panera Bread. Pass by the Panera and then turn right. You will see a CVS in only 3 minutes. Then turn left and go straight near the CVS, and you will see the zzaam restaurant.

A:Ah~ok! I see! Thank you!

 Introduce yourself and your family

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The translation is as below:

Hi, how are you? I am Yuchi.wu.

I am Taiwanese.

I am 23 years old and also a senior now.

There are 4 members in my family.

My parents, me, and one elder brother.

My parents are working in a company.

Both of my parents are the owners of the company.

My brother is in his 5th year at his college.

Since he majors in architecture in Taiwan, he has to study for 5 years in total.

I have been here for 4 months now, and I haven't seen my family for a very long time so I miss them very much.

It will be great if I can see them soon.

I really love my family!

Since all the goals for this semester on my learning plan have already been accomplished, so I set a new goal for this week, which is to practice all the materials I have learned during the whole semester for the final evaluation. The teacher in the class really taught us a lot, no matter on the vocabularies, writings, and the conversation. Also, they are all very useful for us! After reading these materials we had learned for this semester, I found out that we really had learned a lot! which I am very grateful. And, about the final evaluation, since it will be based on giving monologues, so I will focus on practicing the conversations we have learned for this semester, and hope that I will do well on the final evaluation. 

Reflect on your experiences of (trying to) read and write in your target language.  

From my experience of learning Korean, I think that I am better at writing than my reading. The writing part is based on sending messages to my Korean friends. By sending messages to them in Korean, I will try my best to express what I want to say in simple Korean, and if I write something wrong, my friends will correct me immediately. So, most of my writing practices are by sending messages, and it really helps me improve a lot when someone can correct me immediately or teach me another way of expressing what I am trying to say. However, I am not really good at reading. I think most of the reasons come from watching the dramas. By watching dramas, I am used to listening Korean but not reading them. Also, there are no many chances that I will read Korean in daily lives. Although, when my Korean friends will also message me in Korean, yet, they know my Korean level and will send me in the easiest expressions, so my reading really does not have improved that much. Thus I think to be better at reading, I will push myself to read more in Korean in the future by trying to find some lyrics of songs or stories, and try to read and understand them as much as I can.

Respond to the readings

I agree with the idea that the bilinguals are smarter. Although I am not a bilingual since birth, however I can understand and agree with what the scientists talk about in the readings. Although, some people say that learn a second language since a baby would have bad impacts on their learning, yet, I think the same way as the scientists told" it would make them smarter and react quicker than other children." From my experience, I speak mandarin and Taiwanese as my mother languages. Later, I have learned English, Korean, a little bit of Spanish and Japanese as well. From these learning experiences, I feel that I would think one thing in different ways. Like when I see an object, I might express my feeling in Chinese or English or even Korean, and three of them sometimes would give me different emotions as well. So, by learning more than two languages, the ways of thinking would be different as well.

Another thing is the logic of learning. From learning more than two languages, the bilinguals have to understand the logic of learning those languages. Such as the logic of the structure or the grammar, or they will find them very confused if they don't know how to organize them and use them in the correct ways. Thus, I think the bilinguals might be good at the logic of learning a new thing. In conclusion, I totally agree with the idea of bilinguals are smarter than those who are not according to the above two reasons.

How many new words have you learned in your target language?  How did you learn them?  Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?

First of all, I really have no idea of how many new words I have learned in this semester, but I could tell how I have learned those words. The basic way to learn them is from the class. In the class, the teacher would teach as some conversations or listen to a song and learn the lyrics, from these materials I have learned a lot of new vocabularies which are very practical as well. Another way is from the dramas and the TV show on the internet. From these two resources, I have learned a lot of new words and know more about making conversations. My realistic goal for my acquisition of vocabulary is that I can learn as many daily words that Koreans would use in everyday life as possible. Yet, if I want to engage some business there in the future, I would like to learn financial related vocabularies as well.

Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die.

I think the most essential things behind a language is its culture. Thus, when a language dies, the history and the cultures behind it would lost and disappear. From a language, we can know how the people who use the language react to their daily lives, that is in another words, their cultures. Such as the language in the reading, teacher has showed us that this culture has many ways of naming "basket". From this, it is apparent that this culture puts a lot of emphasizes on the baskets, maybe because different kinds of baskets have different usages. Thus, a specific name for a specific basket is important for them. Another example is the languages between the northern countries and the south. In the north, people have many ways of calling different types of snow, some are wet snow, and some are dry, and they have many different adjectives to describe them. However, in the south, people don't even have snow, so they would only call snow as "snow", no other special adjectives to describe because they don't need them at all. Thus, from this, we can see that knowing the  language of the specific area is very important because it can tell us the history and the culture of that area. In conclusion, when a language dies, its cultures and history would be lost as well. Thus, it is very important for us to preserve those dying languages so that we can record the history and the cultures behind it.

Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language.

Knowing the target language's history can help me a little bit on learning it. As I have learned a little background of Korean language, I could tell that Korean has been affected a lot by Chinese language and cultures. Since the begging of Korean language, it is said that Korean people could only communicate by speaking at first. Later, some scholars learned Chinese characters from China and spread it to the high social status people, and it was until then could the Korean people communicate by writing as well. Although, the Chinese characters were replaced by the Korean characters we see nowadays later, we could still see a lot of words that have similarities with Chinese vocabularies. By knowing this, sometimes it would be much easier for me to memorize some vocabularies than other students because I can speak mandarin as well. Thus, knowing the history of the language is very interesting and sometimes can help the learners know how to use or memorize some words much easier as well.

Reflect on the Culture Shock video and your own experiences and expectations of culture shock

This culture shock video basically talks about how the international students at U of R feel or react to the cultural shock they have faced in the campus. For me, as an exchange student as well, I have experienced almost the same as they had. Such as the different teaching styles between here and my home university. Here, the professors in the class would expect all the students should participate a lot in the class, however, at my home school, all we do in the class is listen to the professors and take notes. Thus, when I first came to the class here, I felt nervous and depressed because I was not used to it before. Another interesting culture shock they have mentioned in the video is the greetings and the "small talk". Here, when people meet friends on the streets or the cashiers in the stores, when they see you they will always say " how are you?' as an opening, and it basically just another way to say "hello". However, when I first heard that, I was surprised because those were the people I just met and they cared about how was my feelings? So, I happily replied back and expected more information from them and they just left in a second without even replying me. I felt weird at first, but later a friend explained all the meanings of this, I found myself really funny. Thus, I think culture shocks are basically from all the small things in daily lives. For me, I can always expect the "big shock" before I experience them because they are supposed to be very different. However, those "small shocks" would really make me feel shocked at first, but after I understand them, I will find them interesting and kind of enjoying the differences.

Second Artifact:  Show that you can ask and answer questions about identity

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The pictures are the conversation I had with my Korean friend. I asked her to practice this task with me to show that I am able to ask and answer questions about identity. The translation is as below:

Me(A) / My friend(B)

A: Hi! My name is Yuchi.Wu. I am Taiwanese~

B: I see~ Hi~ My name is Yerin.Lee, I am Korean.

A:Yeah~Nice to meet you! Where are you studying now?

B: I am studying in Taiwan now! What about you?

A: Wow! Really!? I am studying in Virginia as an exchange student.

I will go back to Taiwan next month. Do you want to go traveling together?

B: Really!? Sounds great!

A:Ok! I will contact you when I go back.

B:Ok~I will wait for your messages.

My goal for this week is to learn how to order food. The reason why I chose this topic is very simple, it's because that it happens every day! I started this task from learning some Korean dishes I like in Korean. The memorizing part was not very difficult for me because I already knew most of the names of the dishes I will love to try if I travel there. Then, I found some dialogues in my Korea University textbook and practiced them by speaking these dialogues by myself. From this process, I have learned the ways Korean people will say when they go to a restaurant, also knew about some of the Korean cultures. The culture part is very interesting! Like the elders will pay the meals for the younger people, also those who come late have to pay as well. And the way I accomplished this task is by designing the conversation I will have if I go to a Korean restaurant, then I showed them to my Korean friend to see if anything needs to be revised or not.

My goal for this week is to know how to buy tickets in Korean. The reason why I chose for this topic is because that I had many experiences of buying tickets during the time I stayed in Korea. It is not very hard, but still have some details that I have to learn about, such as the words for student tickets, discount tickets, and the opening time or the closing time, etc. Thus, I looked up those words I need to learn if I want to buy a ticket in the dictionary. Then, I designed a simple dialogue by myself. The simple dialogue is like:

Hi, here is my student ID card.

Can I get a student ticket please? Thank you.

Also, when is the closing time of this museum?

Except this one, I also write another dialogue under the situation that they don't want to admit my student id card since I am not a student there. So, I will add some conversations like " how can I get a discount", etc.

My goal for this week is to write a very short story. I want to write a story about one of my experiences in New York during the spring break. This time I didn't find any resource first because I think that the best way to write a good story is by practicing. Thus, I just started to write by myself. During my writing, I found the most challenging part of this task is to express my feelings or to describe the views I saw. I could only write some very simple words to express my feelings and always write them repeatedly. So, I turned to the internet to search some useful words for expressing some emotions I will write in my story, and thus learned a few new words that could decorate my writings a little bit. In the end, I finished my writing. Since my story only told about one of my experiences from my trip, so it ended up for around 300 Korean words in total.

Create a learning activity to teach someone else something you have learned in your language; outline this activity in your learning journal; teach someone using this activity; reflect upon the effectiveness of the activity

I want to create an activity about counting numbers in Korean. In Korean, there are two different systems in counting numbers. One of them is basically from Chinese numbers, when the language learner wants to talk about the Months they have to use this system. However, when talking about the ages, the numbers of animals, and population, we have to use another system which is invented by Korean themselves. So, I will design this activity by showing some pictures to the students, and ask them to express what they see in those pictures. Pictures include animals, people, calendars and clocks. To be more exciting, I will also ask them to compete in 5 minutes and see who can speak more and correctly. I think by this activity, it will be very helpful for the students to really understand how to use these two counting systems correctly.

Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language.  What do you need to improve your communicative competence?

My language learning so far puts more emphasis on readings and writings. However, I think it is not enough for me as a language learner because the most essential thing about learning a language is to be able to communicate with other people and also be able to understand what other people talk about in the target language. Thus, as I wrote in several previous learning journals, I want to practice my speaking more.

I think the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language is very tight and strong. By understanding the target culture, language learners can understand how the people react to each other, and what kind of expressions they will make while encounter certain situations. By watching Korean dramas and making local friends, I have learned and experience a lot of their cultures, and through understanding their cultures I can know how to use my target language adequately for certain situations. For examples, Korean people always put “being polite” in the first place when they meet a new friend. In Korea, they really take people’s ages seriously. Once someone is elder than another person, the younger one should always be respectful to the elder one, no matter in a family or in the working place. Thus, when the younger person talks to the elder one, he or she must use formal and respectful formats unless their relationship is very close. Also, when Korean people meet each other for the first time, a formal format is required. If someone use improper format, the one he or she is talking to will feel they are offended and think the person is acting really rude. Thus, Korean language learners should know this culture first before they begin to learn the language. Another culture aspect is that the Korean people would call each other as “brother” or “sister” even they are not really related. It is because that Korea is a country that emphasizes on the concept of “union”, so they think all the Korean people in the country are like their family. Thus, if they want to call each other they will use these kinds of words to show that the person they are chatting with is very close with them like their family. Thus, if a Korean language learner doesn’t understand their cultures before talking to the local people, there might be a big chance that the Koreans they are talking to will find this person not being polite.

To improve my communicative competence, I need to talk to the natives in Korean to improve my speaking and also practice my listening by watching Korean dramas or listening to their songs. I think by these two methods, I can improve my speaking and listening a lot and learn it correctly. Thus, I will also focus on practicing my communicative ability by the above two methods, and hope that I can have progress in this field at the end of this semester.  

My goal for this week is to understand the instruction on the airplane. I chose this goal is because that I have taken Korean Air for several times, but I still cannot understand some of the words the flight attendance talk in the short broadcasting on the airplane. So, I wrote down some words that the flight attendance might use during the flight, and then used the Korean dictionary to help me translate these words. After I learned about most of the vocabularies I wrote and translated, I went to Youtube to find some clips about it. Fortunately, there were some clips on the website, and I found most of them are very similar, which was a very good news for me. Then, I evaluate myself by writing down the dialogues of the films in Korean, and then translated the meaning of them by myself. After translating, I then went back to the films and then compared my writings with the English subtitles below the films. 

My learning goal for this week is to understand a poem. Fortunately, the teacher in the class taught us one poem in the class as well. I found it quite difficult to understand the meaning of a poem because the way of expressing the author's feelings is very different from writing a book or composing a song, which are more directly most of the time. In order to practice more, I found out that there are some poets will post their poems on the instagram, and most of their posts are very short and not too difficult to understand. Thus, I read several poems on the instagram, and tried to explain them by myself. From this process, I not only learned a lot of new vocabularies but also learned a little bit of the structure of Korean short poems. Also, I really found the ways the Korean poets express about their feelings are very beautiful, and also are quite different from the poems I have read before, which is quite interesting for me.