Jocelyne Rodriguez
Journal Entry 2
How have you organized your self-directed learning plan, and what have you learned so far? How will your studies allow you investigate your target language and culture more deeply? What first prompted your interest, and motivated you to start learning?
Based on the FIRE model, I am both a factual and rational learner. This means I like to have rules and specific grammatical guidelines to learn languages. I also work a lot with memorization. For this reason, my learning plan emphasizes grammatical learning of rules and patterns in my target language. I am interested in learning how to determine when to use certain words, how to determine when to use specific articles, propositions, etc, and rules for verbal conjugations. Furthermore, I want to be able to build a more extensive word bank for which I plan to rely on exercises that use memorization.
Moreover, I know I am also a rational learner and that learning the reasons behind rules and general fun facts helps me retain information and remember rules. For this reason I want to use some time to learn more about cultural influences in language, language development, and the origin of certain rules and practices.
My language learning is motivated by my interest in Latin American politics (including Brazil). For this reason I do not only want to learn about grammar but I also want to be able to incorporate some cultural learning. So far, I have been learning basic useful phrases like greetings, phrases to express basic personal information like ‘my name is..,’ and ‘I am from…’. Although my study of Portuguese has been very basic so far, I have already encountered differences in communication between Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese which highlight cultural differences between the two countries. For example, Portugal uses the informal ‘tu’ (you), while Brazil only uses the formal (voce).
After receiving feedback from your classmates and Dr. Marsh-Soloway, what changes do you anticipate making?
I plan to review my learning plan once I find the most appropriate learning pace for me and how long it takes me to master certain topics. Furthermore, a big part of my learning plan includes building a word bank. For this I am still looking for a way to organize the new vocabulary words I learn. Currently I am organizing words under topics but I would also like to separate words according to their use. I would like to organize words not only under topics but also under parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives).
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