During this past week, I met with my language partner twice (as usual) and my focus this week was learning about how to tell time and how to utilize health-related vocabulary. Since the topic of health is quite broad, I focused on learning vocabulary for body parts and common diseases. To accomplish this, my language partner and I reviewed those vocabulary expressions and I then did a listening and reading activity on the GLOSS Foreign Language Center's website. The activity was called "Your Health: Learning How to Deal with Health-Related Problems." I was able to recognize the phrases in the audio segment well, but reading the passage related to health took me a really long time, so it was a bit disheartening...however, it did remind me, once again, that language learning is a process. It took me a long time to recognize visually the new words for health, so on my own time, I made flashcards for those words.
I also attempted to listen/watch a video segment related to health that showed a healthcare provider in the process of diagnosing a patient in a clinic in India. The video segment was produced by the Hindi-Urdu Flagship Program at the University of Texas, and it was from the website "Hindi-Urdu Language for Health" (also created by the University of Texas). Listening to the healthcare provider's diagnosis was really difficult because it was not meant for those who are learners -- she would use a different dialect (as would the patient), and it was a struggle for me to understand ALL of what they were saying. However, I did recognize key expressions and the new phrases that I learned, so that was definitely a positive experience for me. Here is the website for Hindi-Urdu Health, in case anyone is interested: http://www.hindiurduhealth.org/
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