I found all of the presentations to be very interesting. Since I know a fair amount about modern Korean culture, the presentations about Korea were somewhat familiar to me, but I would say I learned a deeper knowledge about culture through them. I am completely unfamiliar with Pakistani culture, and Hadi's descriptions of how languages developed in South Asia and what this means for the variety of languages in Pakistan today was extremely fascinating to me from a linguistics standpoint. From my knowledge, China has a similar situation in which each region often has its own distinct dialect, but the country has been teaching standardized Mandarin, the national language, for decades now. I guess I never realized a country could lack a national language that unifies communication across every region. I also found his motivation for learning his particular target language really interesting, that learning this language first would then help him learn other languages used in nearby regions in Pakistan.
Also, having no background in sign language, I learned a lot from that presentation, too. When the student was talking about the importance of using facial expressions for getting your point across, it made a lot of sense to me, but I would never have considered that to be so important in ASL. I really wonder how that is displayed in normal, everyday conversation, and what exactly makes a deaf person that much more expressive that you can tell them apart from a hearing person who is also using sign language.
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