My learning experiences this year have been very interesting. As I have previously mentioned in past posts, this journey has been very challenging at times. Urdu is a language that I had only started to hear very recently after I met my Pakistani friends here. Although I had gone to an International School in high school, I had never before encountered anyone that spoke the Urdu language. This meant that I was challenging myself to learn a language that I was not even familiar hearing. This made the start extremely slow and very difficult. Most of it consisted of repeatedly exposing myself to the sounds of the Urdu language as well as focusing on hearing tone, pauses, and what sound people make when they don't know what to say. I found that interestingly enough, once I payed closer attention, it stopped sounding so foreign and instead began to sound like an actual construct of words to me. This was very encouraging.
From this specific experience, I have learned that I as a language learner require practice and person to person exposure. This was crucial to my language learning because if I did not have as many people around me to help me practice, I don't think I would have been able to as easily accomplish my learning goal of being able to hold a simple conversation with someone. Having the option to engage in practicing randomly, at any time of day, and with random individuals (given that I ran into a Pakistani at some point in time) allowed my brain to truly exercise itself. This meant that I would come out of a Math test, spot a Pakistani friend, and immediately have to switch my brain into practice mode-- a true indicator of how much I actually knew.
I will continue my language learning by hopefully continuing to keep in contact with my friends. Since most-- if not all-- of my resources that I used were online, I have very easy access to more learning opportunities wherever I go. This means that after I graduate and move away from college life, I will still be able to continue my language journey with Urdu-- or perhaps try and start a new one as well with another language. I found that the readings that had to do with how different humans learn and experience language in general were most useful. Many times, understanding these concepts would help me understand something about myself as a language learner-- pushing me to try something new or be more lenient with myself. I would like to learn more about expressions and general tone when speaking the Urdu language. This was something that I was not as easily able to pick up on, and something that in turn may be a little more advanced because it requires developing a sense of "native speech."I feel that after reading the articles and papers that this can be achieved, even if you don't have as much vocabulary. If I can learn the little parts of the language correctly from the start, it can help me get better at all of the complicated parts and build up on things like vocabulary and sentence structure.
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