I’ve founds that I really enjoy learning another language. It’s been a fun mix of language learning and cultural exploration and all of it’s been very interesting. Even the difficult parts were still interesting and held my attention. I really enjoyed being able to explore a non-traditional language and I will continue this Sanskrit practice as I dive further into language acquisition and yoga practice which will solidify this cultural, language based immersion.
The format of being able to post blogs and discuss in class about our learning experiences has been really beneficial. In the past I’ve found it really difficult to stay focused or stay on track but by having a language learning community it’s a lot easier to stay motivated. It’s been so impressive hearing all of the wonderful things others have been learning this semester. I’ve really enjoyed being able to learn about other cultures that are really diverse and different. It’s been cool to see the number of Korean learners and to hear the different ways that they’ve been tackling language learning. I enjoyed the cultural blog posts especially and it gave me excuses to explore parts of the language and culture that I knew very little about. Overall it’s been a really positive experience being able to take part in this community of language learners. I will continue my language acquisition through continuing my online and book learning and by eventually getting to read primary Sanskrit sources.
I found some parts difficult in language learning such as keeping on track with the speed of language acquisition or the completion of tasks. In some ways Sanskrit was much more difficult to learn than other languages I’ve learned, such as French, because the resources and ways of learning are much difficult. There aren’t TV shows, movies, or modern novels to practice language skills with. Most of the learning comes from ancient texts that are usually religious or poetry based, and then there are a lot of cultural focused resources and grammar guides. I learned a lot from studying the yoga books and vocabulary, and it was really interesting to see the words that I’ve been familiar with in the past but am studying them under a different linguistic lens now.
I liked some of the classes/activities that focused on morphemes and word building. There was one activity where we were piecing together meanings of morphemes and entire words in a very agglutinative language (I think it was a Native American one). I’ve done similar exercises in the past and it was cool to see how fast I could do it after learning it over a year beforehand originally. I really enjoyed some of the readings on language acquisition and the readings on bilingualism: the one from the New York Times and the other from ScienceLine. I remember studying about bilingualism in my intro to psychology course and it was cool to see the concepts all come together across departments. I’d like to know more about the disappearance of languages and efforts to preserve these dying languages, since I don’t think we talked about that too much.
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