I originally decided upon taking this course that my goal for the end of the semester would be to obtain fluency in Polish, which although it is a stretch and at this point appears to be something beyond the reach of anything less than a genius, I still strive for. The last couple weeks of attempting to learn sufficient polish to be able to converse has impressed upon me the important difference between having an achievable goal and having the motivation necessary to achieve any goal, the latter of which is more crucial for eventually becoming a polish speaker. To me, autonomous learning does not operate in such a manner that you should be able to achieve stepwise short term goals. If the reward for achieving something on your own is anything other than the achievement itself, then there is no true motivation to continue striving for something greater. If evaluation is defined by anything other than further motivation to better one's self then the objective of the learner has dropped from achieving a goal to achieving good marks in an evaluation and has become tainted and failed as an autonomous learning process. As such, i find the benchmark goals and necessary cultural posts of this self-directed language learning process not only troublesome but counter-intuitive. If motivation is the key to autonomous learning and teaching the ability of autonomous learning to students the goal of the course, then those students who have no interest in learning about culture should not be forced to by a syllabus. Doing so, in my opinion, decreases the motivation of each individual student whose motivations to achieve even the loftiest goals are still motivations to goals that they not only feel they can achieve with enough hard work, but also goals that they want to achieve. Forcing upon someone who already has the perfect amount of motivation to meet their goals (as defined by their knowledge of themselves) other extraneous objectives for the sake of being able to evaluate the success of a program or of the students in a class as a whole are entirely counter-productive as they burden the student and hold him to a standard which is not only his own but also does not necessarily fit with the student's learning style or ability to learn, both of which are better known by the student than an evaluator. That being said, although this process of journaling is not only entirely boring but also cuts into the time when I could be accomplishing my goals and spending time on Polish (what i find to be the actual objective of the course itself), I am forced to embrace preset standards so that my other goal of getting into medical school will not be ruined by the misplaced objectivity of a liberal arts college.
My goal of becoming fluent in Polish appears to me to only be possible at this point with a dramatic increase in vocabulary and understanding of grammar and language structure as a whole. As a result I have begun memorizing a list of 10-20 vocabulary words and phrases every day using the before you know it program. However, learning random lists has proved itself to be a more sporadic approach than I originally anticipated and has become increasingly frustrating as it does not aid in understanding everything that is going on in the polish workbooks that I am spending an hour per day on. As a result I have begun to focus on memorizing primarily verbs and how they conjugate at this point so that I can more accurately predict the types of nouns that fill in the rest of sentences and their driving points. This approach appears to be helping and although my vocabulary and understanding of the language structure in general is growing at a rate that I am proud of i have found that it is not enough to become fluent at the end of the semester so I plan on stepping it up. Also i find that although I have gained understanding in being able to work with written text, I am lacking in the ability of audible recall which the BYKI program is unhelpful with. In my attempts to work through polish with my language partner I have found that it is much easier to understand written polish than to understand spoken words. However, i expect that the reason for this is that I have become too accustomed to listening to a computerized voice in my BYKI lessons and as I spend more time conversing (once I have reached a stage in which i can successfully converse) with my language partner, this aspect of the language barrier will begin to erode.
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