End of Semester Reflections and Self Evaluation

[Brian Mahoney]

Recently I have been working a lot on conditional clauses and sentences. I feel like I have learned most of the tenses and types of things I would like to be able to say, but I still misuse them a lot. I have also been practicing using a lot of common expressions and interjections (like "sure", somewhat, the rest of, finally, etc.). I had tried to learn some of these types of things before but they're often hard to find in a dictionary or to learn from a book, so most of them I have come across during class meetings and written down. Since I was just writing them down as I came across them I hadn't really learned them, I could just recognize them and sometimes infer their meaning. I finally got organized and compiled them into one list, which has made learning them a lot easier and more efficient.Overall, I think I have made more progress than I expected to this semester. When I first started out it seemed like things were sort of too overwhelming to be able to really gain much understanding of the language. At some point, though, I feel like I crossed a threshold where I am now much more comfortable with the language. I feel confident enough with the language to try to sort of improvise ways to say things to get my point across. I can still really only speak correctly at a very basic level, but it seems like when I try to say things that I don't actually know how to say what I end up saying is usually wrong in a lot of ways, but usually understandable. I've never been very good at studying lists of things and memorization, so my vocabulary is still pretty terrible. A lot of the vocab that I wanted to learn I'm still not as familiar with as I would like to be, which is disappointing since I picked the things I wanted to know how to say. I've also realized that there are a lot of basic expressions that are usually the first thing someone learns when learning a language (like how to ask someone to repeat themselves, or talk slower, or what a word means...) that I only sort of know. I had skipped them because I thought it would be more useful to learn enough to be able to actually understand what they mean instead of just memorizing, but I never went back later on to learn them. Having realized this, that's one of the things I want to do now, especially considering how important they are in carrying out an actual conversation. In the end, I'm fairly pleased with the progress I've made. One of my main goals was to reach the point where I am familiar enough with sentence structure and inflection and such to be able to pick apart sentences that I don't understand. I think I've made a lot of progress in this area, which will make it a lot easier to continue to learn the language through reading, which will be the easiest type of medium to have access to in the future.