It is admittedly quite surprising that it is already midway through the semester and that I recorded my Panopto video so long ago. Regardless, it is quite insightful to look back now (and not at the end of the semester), gauge my progress, and reevaluate where needed. So, this is how I held up:
According to the survey I took at the beginning of the semester, I fell into the "musical, language, and social" learner, and was also slightly more of a visual one than auditory (45% vs. 40%). Funnily enough, I had not incorporated music until last week, where Melissa and I went over the Malay songbook (and Mehreen's singing recordings in it!) and now it's my turn to give it a try. Music is a fascinating gateway into culture, and this in particular will help with one of the goals that I listed in my recording: feeling comfortable speaking and pronouncing. This is something that I have kept up with and constantly tried to improve during my time learning Malay. To this end, my reciprocal exchanges with Melissa have been really helpful and I have already improved so much just in this small regard. The word "tengan" that was so hard for me to pronounce earlier in the semester suddenly does not seem as bad. I also noted that I would practice prefixes/suffixes in Malay, which I have not done much of and would like to focus more on (with the exception of the "me"/"mem" one). The last challenging aspect that I wanted to improve upon earlier on was surrounding compound words, and I actually also went over some with Melissa last week. This is a process and I wouldn't have expected to reach complete perfection by this time, but at least I am still working towards conquering similar challenges linguistically and have not lost sight of that original vision too much.
In terms of my original goals, one of the first ones I mentioned was gaining insights into Malaysian culture and gain a different worldview. While in hindsight this seems somewhat simplistic, I also remember where I was going with this: it is my third language, and with each one you gain so much perspective and insight. To this end, my conversations with Melissa have been wonderful and I am excited to continue working towards this. We are watching a movie this week, which will be my first exposure to a film in this language. I also watched a cooking video in Malay and got to dissect words and learn recipes with Melissa in my target language, which was a lot of fun. Another goal was incorporating my language study into my academic work and gaining some geopolitical insights. My Politics of Asia class has been really helpful in this regard, and I wrote my Political Leader Profile on Mahathir Mohammad so that I could talk further with Melissa about this key figure in Malaysian politics and learn more about the domestic political situation in Malaysia at the same time. I also wanted to be able to describe myself and my background comfortably, and discuss culture and tradition, and to this end I think I have made substantial progress.
Overall, my process of individual learning so far has been going well, but there are of course a lot of areas where I can improve. To improve my communicative competence, I need to continue trying new and unknown methods and seeing what sticks, so to speak. I really want to start listening to music in Malay, and I already have a lot of options lined up. I have downloaded a Malay keyboard on my phone to help me be able to go online and learn that way too. I want to engage more deeply with Malay pop culture, and also meet more Malay people. To this latter point, there is an event at the Malay embassy in Washington, D.C. that I told Melissa about and am really hoping I can go (though it falls right before Thanksgiving and I may not be able to). Regardless, I am starting to learn what works and what does not, and this has been helpful to me because soon enough I will need to independently keep up with my Chinese as well and it is important to have this experience and exposure.
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