Learning Journal Entry #6

[Nicolas Dacey]

For this week we read pages 97 - 158 in Crystal's book. I remember last week a couple people in class had read this section already, and considered it very helpful. This entire section of the book was about writing, and although I found it very interesting, this aspect of language learning is least important to me right now. Even though I had this impression about the section, I did find that chapter 23: How writing and speech differ, could be useful stuff to think about when I am speaking a language, and when I write it down. He talks a lot about the "permanence" of words that are written, and how it can be analyzed thoughtfully. Writing also lacks the interaction of speech, a fundamental part of language that helps convey meaning. He then went on to talk about how electronic writing is a medium between the two; an idea I have never really thought of before, but it makes sense. Technically, I am writing this blog post electronically, but am not doing so in CMC or Netspeak. I write in a carefully thought out and socially respected manner. I suppose when he talks about online writing, he is referring to how people communicate to each other in more of a live setting, instead of how I am communicating to others (this can be read at any time).

To update on my progress, I have downloaded the byki software and started using it at home. Once again, I am not a big fan of this software for the same reason as Rosetta stone. The words come up written in Hebrew instead of phonetically. I want to recognize the words in multiple ways. I want to combine hearing the words with seeing them, and because I don't understand the sounds of the Hebrew aleph bet yet, I can't do so with these softwares.

I made a voki today. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it. I tried to make a text box in this ning and put the code to imbed my voki on my homepage, but that didn't work.