Overall, I think my language learning has been successful and I have been able to reach reasonable expectations. At first, I was a bit discouraged because I was not able to remember everything I had learned in India as fast as I wanted to, but once I realized that learning Hindi in America would be a bigger challenge because I was not constantly surrounded by it, I developed a more reasonable plan for myself and have been able to stick to it pretty well. The syllabus that I created on my blog at the beginning of the semester only planned out my first 8 weeks because I wanted to reevaluate my plan for the remaining weeks after mastering those tasks. I am glad I did this because, after getting through those 8 weeks, I feel like I need to spend some time reviewing old material before moving on. I also would like to spend some time learning about music vocabulary for my Culture Project.
I think the most effective resources I have used so far are Mango, flashcards (mostly my own, but also on interactive sites), my old notebook from Hindi class last year, and the GoogleDoc Sanya and I created to keep in touch throughout the week. I generally put questions on the GoogleDoc or formulate my artifacts there, then Sanya can see them to give me advice. I think that in the remaining weeks of the semester, I need to focus most on forcing myself to attempt to speak only in Hindi with Sanya. I find myself always reverting back to English when we meet, but I'd like to really try to use Hindi only for the rest of the semester. I also need to find more ways to incorporate all of the tasks I have learned so far into new conversations because often, Sanya and I have conversations only pertaining to the task for that week, which allows me to easily forget the material from previous weeks. Although I have all my vocabulary from the semester in a deck of flashcards, reviewing these doesn't allow me to keep up my ability to converse about these topics.
Learning about Indian culture as I try to learn Hindi as well has made this process a lot more interesting. Learning about culture has influenced the tasks that I wish to master in Hindi as well as the way I think about learning the language overall. I think this will be the most essential way to improve my communicative competence beyond just memorization of key words, grammar structures, and phrases. Sanya has already told me many times, "We don't actually say it like that," when I come up with a phrase during a conversation that is too complex or uses archaic vocabulary. In a few limited contexts, I would say that I have a "discourse competence" of Hindi because I can create many sentences and react to questions or comments from other people about certain topics. In an even more limited sense, I would say that I have some "sociolinguistic competence" from everyday phrases that I used a lot in India, such as introductions and common questions that I would find myself saying without even thinking first. I hope to master more tasks on this level before the semester ends.
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