Learning Journal 4

[David Mowry]

This week, I compiled a few newspaper articles to read and decipher. I learned 20 new words that I had to look up while reading, and I put emphasis on one grammar point I didn't know. After some work with my language partner, I feel confident in my ability to turn a noun into an adjective (for example: "Binada bekleyen partililer", or 'the party members that were waiting in the building...' This is an important aspect of the language that allows sentences to be shortened significantly, and it is often used in news stories. Another useful aspect of news stories is that I can encounter and dissect complex sentences by singling out individual fragments. I plan to integrate this aspect of the language into the composition I am working on as an artifact. In the coming weeks, I plan to move away from grammar and work on synthesizing what I have already learned in artifact activities. While I'm sure there are aspects of the grammar with which I'm unfamiliar, I feel confident with the points I have learned and encountered. I will continue to work on my weekly listening exercizes. This week has been all extensive listening activities, but I plan to conduct intensive listening over the weekend.