Learning journal week 8 - 110 Pravaas

[Pravaas Gurung]

I have been quite satisfied with the amount I have learned throughout the semester. I have definitely learned lots of important vocabulary, confident with the present tense verb conjugations (though while speaking I slip up fairly often still, due to the small differences in verb endings like the "eh" and nasal "eh"), and improvement in listening competence.
What I found most difficult with the learning process has definitely been finding a balance between learning new things at a pace where I can retain them while still making progress by adding on to those things I learned. At first I dived too fast into learning important vocabulary words but struggled with knowing how to use them in sentences. Once I began learning sentence structure and verb conjugations the vocabulary became useful, but I had to spend quite a bit of time going back over the vocabulary because I had lost much of it because I was unable to use it until I learned those other things first.

Felicia and I worked together on a learning activity. We decided to teach a few useful verbs such as walk/go to and sit down. We first went through how to pronounce the words with the class before beginning to "quiz them" on the words. Then we played Simon Says, where the class had to perform the action that the verb referred to while also saying the verb. Though Simon Says uses the imperative forms, the base of the verb remains unchanged for those words, and knowing the base is most useful when learning how to conjugate verbs in other tenses. I believe using games like Simon Says while also saying the word out loud helps quite a bit (I remember doing this in Spanish class nearly 10 years ago) because the person is challenged to quickly, confidently access their memory and act on that (that is, if they want to win the candy I was handing out!)