The attachment is my reflection paper #2.(The Final reflection paper)

Reflection%20paper%20%232.docx

Language is the fundamental step of communicating and influencing others, through the medium of reasoned discourse, to tell others what we believe or act. I enjoy earning a new language. Besides my home language, I learned English and Japanese. My experience learning these languages is fantastic. Getting new foreign friends, listening to the foreign song and watches their TV shows are approaches that I started language learning. During my learning experience, there are some points I like while others I dislike.

I enjoy learning language by myself because I always insist that interest is always my best teacher. Take my Japanese language learning experience as the example. I love a girl group named AKB48 and I listened to lots of their song. From listening to their song, I started to learn some Japanese vocab and tried to mimic the voice they are making. Moreover, I watched a lot of Japanese TV show. From this ‘active learning’, my Japanese vocabulary accumulated. I find out that the vocab I gained through the active learning can be memorized more deeply and I will use them during my talking practice with Japanese friends. However, this kind of studying process is time-consuming and the vocab gaining speed is really slow. Considering watching TVs and music are my interest and I love Korean group and K-pop music, I will definitely use this learning strategy when I am self-learning Korean this time.

Another good strategy that makes my Japanese language learning easier is that many Japanese words I learn have the same meaning in Chinese. This is called cognate, basically meaning you are finding common words. Asian language is similar at many points, both in vocab and grammar. In this case, because there are many common words between Japanese, Korean and Chinese, I will make a vocab list and try to record all these words down. I find this process really interesting and can help me learn the language efficiently.

Besides learning alone, I really enjoy talking with my friends. When I was studying Japanese, I hang out with my Japanese friends weekly. I never feel shame or awkward when I say Japanese wrong because I know it is too normal to make mistakes during learning a new language. Talking with others is always my favorite part of language learning. They shared their life stories with me and talked about their culture. I love social, so taking part in group discussions or discussing a topic one-to-one with my friends are my strength. I believe language is the tool to help me communicate. In all, my final goal of language learning is always communication.

I also learn from my Japanese language learning about my weakness which I am going to improve during my Korean learning. I don’t like making plans and strictly following the plan, which makes my studying less efficient. This time, I believe that I need to make some short-time goal and long-time objective to track my studying process. Moreover, after doing the learning style survey, I find out that I am a visual learner and I received lots of good advice from the website. I will use flashcard to learn new words and write down keywords, ideas or instructions. The most important advice is that I will definitely use during my Korean learning is that I will draw pictures to help explain new concepts and then explain the pictures. I think this will improve my understanding of the new concept.

If I have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of my target language and culture, I would start from daily conversation story and history.

If I am going to teach my friends about Korean, I would start from Korean daily conversation. I would start from teaching them how to introduce themselves.

For example: 안녕하세요 yushi(name) 입니다. 처음 뵙겠습니다.

                                Hello, my name is Yushi. Nice to you!

                                중국서 왔습니다.

                   I am from China.

Or I will start from history. I always believe it is history that define a country’s culture. Learning the history is the best way to understand Korea’s society.

I haven’t started to type in Korean yet. For me, I prefer writing free hand. First of all, I am still not familiar with finding Korean character on the screen. Secondly, writing is a really slow progress because I am not familiar with Korean letters and characters.

For the sentence structure of Korean, it may be compound, complex or mixed. A compound sentence consists of two or more coordinate clauses. A complex sentence consists of one main clause and one subordinate clause. A mixed sentence is the combination of a compound sentence and a complex sentence.

Right now, I just start from the easiest or the most common language structure: “subject + verb” or a “subject + object + verb.” For example, 캐럴이 와요(Carol comes).

It is a grieve for the extinction of several languages. Tracing the language history and trying to find a reason for the extinction of language, I would say it is hard to find a general answer. In theory, the sudden death of all its speakers could be a sound reason. However, in practice, this would not happen. The extinction of a language is more possible because of language shift. The children are gradually started speaking other languages. The language shift is can happen when there is a dominant language in the region which gradually replace all the other language. After watching the video, ‘When Languages Die’, I feel sad to realize that language will continue to die over time until everyone is using a universal language. I think the way that helps preserve a language would encourage young people to learn both their home-country language and the universal language. I think it might be hard to bring back a dead language, but it will be more easy to protect an existing one.

Korean is among the world’s most misunderstood and misrepresented languages because its origins are obscure and are the subject of ongoing scholarly debate. Evidence suggests that Korean and Japanese belong to the Altaic language family. The Altaic language also includes Turkish and Mongolian.

The really interesting thing is that I had always believed that some of Korean is related or coming from Chinese because Chinese influenced Korean greatly. Almost half of Korean vocabularies are derived by Chinese characteristic. However, Chinese belongs to a completely different language family. In this case, linguistically, Korean is unrelated to Chinese.

As for my Korean language learning, I am really happy with my progress. Watching my previous video is really funny and meaningful. Basically, I followed my original plan. I have learned all the vowels and consonants and now trying to use the vowels and consonants to learn sentences. My process might be slow comparing with other students, but for me I am really happy with it. Because I did not take SDLC 112, the most difficult part is make sure that my pronunciation is correct.

My overall learning objective is to speak fluently with my friend. So, I am planning to take SDLC 112 next semester. I will just stick with my plan later in this semester and accumulate more vocab. I will keep watching Korean drama show to learn more about Korean culture. During my learning in Korean, I learn not only language but also culture. I think I am more interested at learning a country’s history and find out some characteristics of Korean society.

I am extremely interested in Korean K-pop music. I am also happy that K-pop has become a truly global phenomenon because of the distinctive blend of addictive melodies, slick choreography, and production values and an endless parade of attractive South Korean performers who spend years in grueling studio systems learning to sing and dance in synchronized perfection. Looking at the girl group and the boy group dancing on stage, I can feel their passion and energy. In China, the idol group does not attract public attention and there is a little stage for them to show their talent.

Besides K-pop music, I start to watch Korean shows when I was in middle school. In Korean, gagman is a respectful job for they bring joy to the audience in Korean tv shows. Korean shows are really funny and sometimes it teaches me Korean culture. For example, from the tv shows, I start to learn what food Korean eats, what is hanbok, what is Korean’s history and etc. I still remember in a tv show called ‘Two Day and One Night’, the gagman made kimchi by themselves and explain why Korean’s traditional dishes is kimchi. I found it fascinating to learn a new culture and understand it.

Talking about Korean, there are 21 vowels and 19 consonant. Inside the vowels, there are 2 groups. One group is called monophthong, have 10 vowels including a, i, e, and etc. The other group has 11 vowels called diphthong, for example, like ai, ao, and etc.

When I was studying Japanese, there are 5 single vowels and 53 consonants. For me, it is easier to memorize and pronounce. Personally, I think consonants are easier to pronounce than vowels. Vowels are similar so it is really hard for me to memorize every Korean vowel.

Compare Korean with English, Korean has way more vowels. There are lots of sounds in Korean which is not in English. In this case, I find proficiently and fluently pronounce Korean is really hard for me. For example, there are two ways to say ‘i’ in the Korean. Move to diphthong, ao, au are really similar and is really hard to pronounce. Some vowels sound really similar, for example, ㅓ(o) and ㅗ(o) and ㅜ(u).

I think the only way to practice and remodify my own pronunciation is to speak more often with the native Korean speaker and listen to more Korean video. When I studying Korean vowels, I plan to speak each sound 10 times per day. After practicing, I think I can fluently pronounce Korean. After learning it from teaching video, I will try to talk with my Korean friend or my friend who also studying Korean.

Same as any normal child, I learn language from making voice to putting words together. It seems like people are following the same part of paths to learning language, no matter which language you are learning. One important thing that I realize when I study Chinese is the creativity of the language. Especially for Chinese, it is interesting that people saying the same words with different tones have different meanings. And the creativity of the language allows people to use different combinations of words to communicate. The way people communicate also shows people’s personality.

The remarkable thing that I start to think about language, is that language have some systematic pattern and structure. For example, the basic one structure in English is noun plus verb. I am not sure what pattern or sentence structure do Korean have and whether that is different from English. I know that for Korean, they use different sentence structure when they talk to different people. It is similar to Japanese. I think once I learn more about Korean, I will learn more about it.

Also, for Korean, it is more phonetics, which means the sound of the words and the written words are the same. This makes Korean learning much more easy.

There is no doubt that culture is the breeding ground of value and character. Both the article ‘Figuring Foreigners Out’ and the analysis of Skim Geert Hofstede bring out the notion that people from different cultures might form different values.

The results are really interesting. Take the monochronic and polychronic as the example. People from different culture handle time differently. I totally agree with this conception. When I travel to Hongkong, citizen there is more tendency toward monochronic. They believe time is a commodity which is quantifiable. People I work with really pay attention with time and they always have a sense of urgency in many matters. However, when I went to Norway for my vocation, people there are more polychronic. They usually have leisure. This clearly shows that people will have different characters because of different culture and country.

I also love the part talking about direct communication and indirect communication. Grown up in China, I am more tending to speak indirectly. Chinese tend to be collectivist and tend to infer, suggest, and imply rather than say things directly. During China’s long feudalism history, seignior has superior power and other peasants, inferior citizens, need to follow their order completely. Saying directly might lead to the fury of seignior. In this case, people are tending to speak indirectly. Even nowadays, in the democratic republican country, there are a lot of group activities, so people are really aware of the unity of the group. However, in the Western world, people will speak directly and to get direct answers. The great thing is that in Korea, people are more tending to speak indirectly. They are usually more aware of social stratum.

At the end of my journal, I want to quote one sentence from the article, even though I do not totally agree with it. ‘Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.’

My%20Learning%20Plan.docx

The article about the function of our brain is a really interesting topic for me. I always hear people saying cerebral localization which means that each area of the brain to respond to a single behavioral ability. However, I have never known what the behavioral ability is related to. These parts must work together for speech including thinking the utterance and until finally speak loudly. Moreover, the article today makes me reflect a little on how I used to define the left brain and right brain. The left brain is related to logic, sequencing, linear thinking, mathematics, facts and thinking in word; right brain is related to imagination, holistic thinking, intuition, art, rhythm, nonverbal cues, feelings visualization and daydreaming. I always consider me as a math person, which means my left brain might be more powerful. By the way, I know that the left brain is connected to our right body and our right brain is correlated with our left body. Most people are right-handed. This somehow could be an explanation that Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area are usually located in the dominant hemisphere which is the left hemisphere in 97% of people.

Another interesting part of the article is tongue slips part talking about how these little errors we make becomes one evidence. I tend to make a lot of mistake during the speech or even daily conservation. It is the first time I know that the tongue slips are not random but are largely explicable to reference to certain basic constraints.

They talk about how we analyze the meaning and how we mean. I am fascinated by the part talking about people cannot easily find the distinction between sense and reference. It talks about there is no single word for ‘mother’s sister’, for example. But in other languages, like Australian, it is called ‘ngunytju’. It reminds me that there is a Korean word, but there never have an English word for it. The closest English explanation could be ‘pretend to be cute’. I always use flashcard when I memorize words. One of the bad habits when I memorizing new word is that sometimes I got confused with the meaning. I will memorize the new word with a known ‘conception’ or ‘sense’. This part is really interesting and helpful for me to think about how each word is defined and what they really mean, especially in the real world.