During this past week (Week #6), I focused on expanding my Hindi vocabulary through learning about an interesting cultural issue in India -- colorism, or the preoccupation the media has with skin color (in India, this is referred to as "Snow White 'Syndrome' "). Although I continued with my goal of learning basic vocabulary (this week's key vocabulary was composed of words relating to colors and numbers 1-10), I really enjoyed also learning words related to colorism, which was the cultural issue about which I presented in MLC 105. I learned the word for beauty (सुन्दरता), beautiful (खूबसूरत), pale (gori), dark (kala or kali), face (चेहरा), skin (चमडी), and a few other words related to skin color. It is a very interesting issue to examine in that the issue of colorism integrates history (colonialism and the caste system), contemporary economics (BBC reported that in India, skin lightening cosmetic products outsell Coca-Cola!), and gender stereotypes. I also watched and listened to five "Fair and Lovely" Hindi commercials without subtitles, and interestingly, by using the context clues of the ad (each ad is a little story), I was able to understand most of the dialogue, although not the post-positions. The ads are very disheartening to watch because of the blatant colorism, but interesting to observe this aspect of Indian/Hindi culture. I will post a link to one below. With regard to this week's grammar, I completed some of the drills in Dr. Jain's "Introduction to Hindi Grammar" book about the Present Habitual Tense, and I found that I definitely needed to review this tense more, so I completed the oral conversation drills and worked on writing sentences with this tense -- I am going to utilize these sentences in my artifact.
I also began to plan out and draft my second artifact using my evaluation of the first one. I really want to work on my accent and on the grammar/vocabulary I am learning, so I am planning to write sentences about my family and about each family member's interests and record this paragraph, as well as pair it with culturally-relevant pictures on VoiceThread.
Here is my MLC 105 cultural presentation, presented on 2/21:
SimrunBal_CulturalPresentation.pptx
Here is a link to one of the sad (but authentic) Fair and Lovely ads (in Hindi) that I watched:
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