Learning Journal 1 - Evaluation of Artifact 1

In my first artifact I went over through a basic conversation, asking how my friend was doing, what time he wanted to eat lunch and what else he had been doing these days (and I responded to his similar questions). Throughout I incorporated some new vocabulary/phrases I have been learning, such as "I would like to...", "difficulty (struggle)", "where were you?" 

There were moments in recording where I was quite happy with my accent (particularly those phrases and words I have known for longer and used more often), but other times I could hear my "American" accent coming through quite clearly. This usually occurred for new words, particularly those borrowed from Arabic/Persian (e.g. "mushkil" is borrowed from Arabic). However, I think what I did most poorly was having to slow down to properly enunciate words that are normally slurred together by native speakers. Particularly for the imperfect past tense, where the imperfect is said by combining 3 words (2 of which are conjugated). It is not that the native speakers mispronounce the words, but they are used to saying them and can string them together effortlessly. I, on the other hand, found it very difficult to properly enunciate without slowing down and breaking up the sentence so that it sounded quite unnatural.

As far as linguistic accuracy, I did a good job, using the correct pronouns, verb conjugations, sentence structure (my friend help me piece together one of the more complex sentences). Likewise, I believe I did a good job with cultural appropriateness. Addressing people with the correct pronoun is important in Pakistani culture (even if that person is not present), and because I was having a conversation with a friend I used the informal second-person pronoun and verb conjugations. Furthermore, the general gist of the conversation was not very formal, for example using slang like "tik tak" (meaning "pretty good") rather than the grammatically correct "tik hu" ("I am good").

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