Omer Genosar
Reflection Paper #1
My experience as a language learner has actually been quite extensive and a very complex story. My native language is Hebrew as I spent most of my early childhood in Israel with Israeli parents. When I moved to the United States, I struggled mightily as a young child but I eventually transitioned to the point where my English surpassed even my Hebrew due to me using it more. Then from middle school through parts of High School I had to learn Spanish and now in college I am learning Arabic as well as “rekindling” with Hebrew.
Personally, I have had more downs than ups when it came to language acquisition. I would say that the best part of learning a language is being able to use it and the joy and surprise that other speakers of that language have when they hear me converse (or attempt to). My difficulties with learning languages is that I have a very hard time memorizing information. Unfortunately, most language acquisition courses are built on vocabulary lists and memorizing grammar rules and facts. My inability to efficiently learn through memorization and my short attention span has led me to really struggle with retaining the vocabulary. Regardless of my struggles, I believe that with the right amount of effort and possibly a different way of learning material will allow me achieve my language goals. Of course this is more pertaining to Arabic, for Hebrew I am at a point that I have never experienced before. How do I increase efficiency and depth in a language? All the other languages I have learned through school have looked to get the basics down, the “shallow” part of the language. For the first time I am dealt with having to increase proficiency in a language. How will I be able to do it?
The answer seems to be through using alternative techniques to teach myself Hebrew. Instead of vocabulary lists and memorization, maybe I could try a more personalized learning. I think that looking at the FIRE model, I could piece together how to achieve a personalized goal. The FIRE model makes it easy for me to envision myself as an evaluative learner. What this means is that activities such as conversations and piecing different materials together will help me the best. I believe that the best way to expand my learning activities is to fill in the gaps of what I need to know slowly and piece together sentences and conversations. My plan is to throw out the vocab lists and to simply work on completing sentences. If I miss a word, instead of writing it down I can simply move on until I miss it again and again and by the fourth of fifth time, I will have acquired that word because it is a necessity to my speaking. I feel that this is not necessarily time efficient, but instead “word” efficient. I will begin to be comfortable with only the words that I need to focus on. Overall, expanding my learning activities to be dominated by conversation and speech and not vocabulary lists seems to best fit my goals.
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