I thought the cultural competence article was interesting- particularly when it addresses the function of language. When I think about the purpose of language I often just see it as a way of communication- as the interactional function, but it serves many roles and functions. I think in learning a language we often utilize it's representational function. For example, we have been learning about how to say different family related phrases such as "I have a sister" which utilizes language as a way to represent facts and express knowledge. Ideally as I become more proficient in Hebrew I would hope to utilize more of the functions of the Hebrew language such as making jokes, using slang, cultural mores etc. that characterize the interactional function of language.
The section on corpus linguistics was also interesting because of how it analyzes the words that are most important to learn based on their frequency of use in the language. The article makes the distinction that frequency is not equivalent to usefulness. I think this is a noteworthy difference because for example the word "the" appears very frequently in English, but only knowing how to say "the" without any noun is not very useful. The word "bathroom" may not be as frequent as "the," but it will be much more useful and you can convey more meaning with "bathroom" than you can "the."
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