Learning Journal 4

[Tania Bukach]

This week I finally got a chance to meet my learning partner! It was really encouraging, and a little intimidating, to have Sofia helping me out. I have had to revise my plan again! What I had been studying with Byki turned out to be not so fantastic. The computer just doesn't communicate the sounds well enough. For example, what I heard Byki say "So Pehrer," Sofia corrected me is Sob Ba Khair." That actually was a ten-minute-long struggle. It took saying over and over, spelling different ways, and back and forth explaining just for me to dissect WHAT she was saying and repeat it! Eek. But I am now confident I can apply what I learned in our meeting to my new topics.

My new plan involves beginning with 25-word-long (or so) lists each week on a topic that I can double-check pronunciation with Sofia on, until I am competent at reading the sounds correctly, before studying them. I'll read about/watch/listen to something cultural on the same topic.

A big focus of the meeting was writing. The alphabet makes so much more sense after Sofia broke up the letters for me into categories - similar letters grouped by whether they change based on their placement or not. I already am much better at breaking a word apart into letters (where before I couldn't at all, and was despairing of learning writing this semester). Now I think reading and writing will be helpful in learning word pronunciation - a complete 180!