Final Reflection Paper -
Over the semester, I think I have reinforced my beliefs concerning my ability to engage with different languages and cultures. Noting my past experiences in learning Spanish and German, I was fairly confident entering the semester that the strategies I acquired during my time engaging with them. Fortunately, I felt a seamless transition from my German studies last year to Turkish. I almost immediately began practicing my Turkish through relating it to daily activities, listening to Turkish music, watching Turkish media, and by having conversations in Turkish. I also dedicated myself to pushing my language capacities on a weekly basis through entering a C-LAC course in my history class. I believe that my history major was significantly helpful to these efforts, as it has provided me training on cultural comprehension since I entered the University of Richmond. I felt that I knew, generally, what to engage with, where to look and, most importantly, which questions to ask in my Turkish learning. I definitely gained more confidence in my adaptability as a learner, as Turkish is the first non-Indo-European language that I have ever been exposed to, and I think I surpassed my own expectations regarding my ability to rapidly learn it.
As for difficulties, the pronunciation and the word pacing proved the hardest cross-cultural transition. Turkish speakers tend to talk much faster than English speakers, which I was familiar with from Spanish, but my obvious lack of familiarity with Turkish upon beginning my learning created a steep learning curve. Moreover, encountering concepts not present in English caused me substantial problems in my phrasing of sentences, as I would take the Turkish words for items in English and formulate a sentence accordingly, which would subsequently be incorrect or awkward. Additionally, I sometimes found reading comprehension to be challenging due to the syntactic order of Turkish, mainly relating to object-verb association in sentences with multiple verbs. I know that I significantly improved in this area over the semester, but it is something that I want to be cognizant of in my future Turkish studies.
Notwithstanding these obstacles, I found almost the entire process incredibly enjoyable. Given that this was my last semester in college, I occasionally ran into some crunches with assignments, but I did not waver in completing my work by the designated due date. I also thought the 1-1 mutually constructed classes to be incredibly helpful. Despite having a standard curriculum in the provided materials, we were able to modify work based on my voiced needs and glance over sections that I established mastery over outside of class. During my educational career, I always felt restrained by large classes, as I discovered that I progressed differently than my peers in terms of positive and negative outcomes. After college, I intend to keep working with my language partner following a short rest, as well as focusing more on durative self-exposure from my massive increase in free time.
In the context of the course, I think the readings were all exceptionally helpful in relation to linguistics, as I had no prior experience with the study of language as a concept. However, I think they occasionally over-complicated subjects that are ideally simplified in early language learning. Once I advance in my Turkish, I believe these concepts will be more meaningful, particularly involving readings on the connections between language and cultural values. Nevertheless, I believe that they allowed me to gain a superior understanding of how languages function across all families and deconstructed some potential learning barriers for my future language learning plans. I also thought the presentations were incredibly fun and useful to testing my actual understanding of Turkish, as being made to teach something about it compelled me to extensively reflect on my level of comprehension of particular language and cultural topics.
Over the semester, I think I have reinforced my beliefs concerning my ability to engage with different languages and cultures. Noting my past experiences in learning Spanish and German, I was fairly confident entering the semester that the strategies I acquired during my time engaging with them. Fortunately, I felt a seamless transition from my German studies last year to Turkish. I almost immediately began practicing my Turkish through relating it to daily activities, listening to Turkish music, watching Turkish media, and by having conversations in Turkish. I also dedicated myself to pushing my language capacities on a weekly basis through entering a C-LAC course in my history class. I believe that my history major was significantly helpful to these efforts, as it has provided me training on cultural comprehension since I entered the University of Richmond. I felt that I knew, generally, what to engage with, where to look and, most importantly, which questions to ask in my Turkish learning. I definitely gained more confidence in my adaptability as a learner, as Turkish is the first non-Indo-European language that I have ever been exposed to, and I think I surpassed my own expectations regarding my ability to rapidly learn it.
As for difficulties, the pronunciation and the word pacing proved the hardest cross-cultural transition. Turkish speakers tend to talk much faster than English speakers, which I was familiar with from Spanish, but my obvious lack of familiarity with Turkish upon beginning my learning created a steep learning curve. Moreover, encountering concepts not present in English caused me substantial problems in my phrasing of sentences, as I would take the Turkish words for items in English and formulate a sentence accordingly, which would subsequently be incorrect or awkward. Additionally, I sometimes found reading comprehension to be challenging due to the syntactic order of Turkish, mainly relating to object-verb association in sentences with multiple verbs. I know that I significantly improved in this area over the semester, but it is something that I want to be cognizant of in my future Turkish studies.
Notwithstanding these obstacles, I found almost the entire process incredibly enjoyable. Given that this was my last semester in college, I occasionally ran into some crunches with assignments, but I did not waver in completing my work by the designated due date. I also thought the 1-1 mutually constructed classes to be incredibly helpful. Despite having a standard curriculum in the provided materials, we were able to modify work based on my voiced needs and glance over sections that I established mastery over outside of class. During my educational career, I always felt restrained by large classes, as I discovered that I progressed differently than my peers in terms of positive and negative outcomes. After college, I intend to keep working with my language partner following a short rest, as well as focusing more on durative self-exposure from my massive increase in free time.
In the context of the course, I think the readings were all exceptionally helpful in relation to linguistics, as I had no prior experience with the study of language as a concept. However, I think they occasionally over-complicated subjects that are ideally simplified in early language learning. Once I advance in my Turkish, I believe these concepts will be more meaningful, particularly involving readings on the connections between language and cultural values. Nevertheless, I believe that they allowed me to gain a superior understanding of how languages function across all families and deconstructed some potential learning barriers for my future language learning plans. I also thought the presentations were incredibly fun and useful to testing my actual understanding of Turkish, as being made to teach something about it compelled me to extensively reflect on my level of comprehension of particular language and cultural topics.
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