According to the online tests, I am a kinesthetic learner and am musical, verbal/linguistic, and naturalistic. I also believe that I mostly fall into the insightful and rational categories of the FIRE model.
I have always known that I learn best by doing, and have always copied my notes multiple times as a way to absorb class material. I also know that I learned Hindi vocabulary words best while meeting with my peer tutor and using the words in roleplaying conversations. To incorporate the musical part of my personality, I think it would be good to use Hindi music to practice identifying words, or as a memorization device. I often make up songs to memorize presentations or formulas in other classes, so I think memorizing a popular Bollywood song and understanding its meaning would really help me learn words and phrases.
One concern that I have is that I will be willing to take risks and have the motivation to speak in Hindi as often as I should as a kinesthetic learner. I'm worried that I will never feel like I know enough to begin a conversation with someone who is fluent. I'm hoping that my peer tutor will play the same role as my tutor in India and push me to speak in Hindi as much as she did, because I may be a timid at first.
In the FIRE model, I think I fall mostly in the insightful and rational categories. I like knowing big picture theories before learning particular applications, like a rational learner would, but I also enjoy organizing, problem-solving, and debating, which are insightful traits. For these reasons, I am really interested in learning about the evolution of Hindi and other Indian languages in conjunction with my practical study of Hindi. I'd like to know why a certain grammatical structure is the way it is when I learn it, because I think it will help me remember it better. I also like to plan out and organize how I will learn different topics before I tackle them.
One type of language learning that I dislike is attempting to memorize a list of vocabulary, because it is overwhelming and I feel like I will only remember most of them for a few days. Instead, I always remembered words best when they were used in my language classes repeatedly, or we learned them in a unique way, like in a song or because someone asked during class. In other words, I hope to, at least partially, learn words organically and in unique ways that will help me associate new words with their meanings.
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