Annie Hankin Reflection #1

[Annie Hankin]

What I genuinely enjoyed learning another language is being able to communicate in a different way with people outside of english. Most Americans do not know another language, so by being familiar with one I felt special since I could do what they could not. When I utilize my Spanish outside of the classroom, I get excited that I can practice with people and understand what they are saying. I gain a sense of pride in my ability to understand and speak with others. My biggest challenge is pronunciation and listening skills. I always thought it was a challenge trying to get the words to sound as if I was a native speaker communicating. It bothers me when I hear Americans speaking with a very thick American accent. When I detect a thick American accent like in Spanish or French class, it means to me that they were not putting in effort to better communicate themselves to new people. Listening skills was always a struggle in my opinion since the words were not broken up and spoken side by side without a pause. I have to distinguish the words from each other in the conversation. I was surprised from the surveys to learn that I am more of an auditory learner than a visual learner and that I enjoy nature. I always thought of myself as a visual learner since I preferred to see how things are done instead of being told how to complete tasks. The best activities that would improve my language learning significantly is having consistently and being able to practice it outside of my learning environment.  When learning Spanish, I always watched Spanish shows with subtitles either in Spanish or English so that I can get used to hearing what words sound like coming from a native speaker. I currently still watch Spanish shows today to keep up with my listening skills or my reading skills with Spanish subtitles if possible. To learn korean, I  found a show that  has English and Korean subtitles along with Korean dialogue which would benefit me a lot since I could learn what they mean in the moment and how they are written in Korean. Since the show already covers reading and listening skills, something I could expand on for my language learning activities is being able to practice the writing aspect a lot more often since I do not get much practice for that.