My goals for these last two weeks were to continue dictation and proverb practice on top of preparing for the final exam. I deviated from these goals slightly. Moving on from using proverbs to do dictation, we decided to use famous 6,8 poems for dictation practice. 6,8 poems are poems with 6 words in the first line and 8 words in the second line. A lot of these poems have messages you would normally find in proverbs, but with more of a lyrical/rhythmical feel to it. This was really fun to do. I got to learn more about Vietnamese poetry and the vocabulary was really unique as well. For example, one of the vocabulary words was a stick used to measure how deep a river is. I think this word would have been hard to come across in any other context. Additionally, because we are doing poetry some of the words in the same line sound very close to each other, but are spelled differently. This challenged me to listen more carefully to the subtle differences in sound before spelling the word. With all the dictation practice I've been doing, I've definitely seen an obvious improvement in my writing skills.
For the exam, we agreed to use the last day of class for the final exam and the previous class to prepare for it. We went over some of the learnt material that I was confused about and continued with dictation. Like the midterm, all 4 skills were tested.
Other than that, we also wrapped up the semester by discussing my progress and how I plan to continue my Vietnamese learning. I think this was an important conversation to have. It got me thinking about my goals in the beginning and how I can continue developing my skills despite not being in the program anymore. I realized that I would need to continue my own research for Vietnamese and find ways to keep practicing.
Comments
In the languages I know and study, proverbs are probably the most difficult and often times the topics I will never understand. In possessing the skill and ability to be able to analyze creative work in another language is probably my goals in my language learning. In a language like Vietnamese, I am sure that there are interesting roots of many words used in these poems, which may create a greater underlying meaning. I think you are probably at the level of your language learning journey where maintaining your Vietnamese may not be anymore than just adding a few words to your vocabulary everyday. I am sure that you will not have an issue finding anyone on Tandem or even mylanguageexchange. I know I have benefitted from both of these for other languages outside of my SDLAP studies, but good luck!