Sunday, November 17
110 Reflection
These past couple of weeks, I have seen my Ge’ez sessions change to be more interactive. Our lessons call for more of a conversation/discussion style between my language partner and I. Because now I have the tools to construct grammatical sentences, be they simple or moderately complex, our discussions have served as a window to more learning and a way of assessing my progress as well. As such, written and oral conversations in Ge’ez and Amharic have been a growing part of the class periods. In each class period we have also been learning at least one grammatical concept and honing in on it. Some new concepts that we have gone over are future, subjunctive, and imperative conjugations of verbs. The subjunctive, as was the case when learning Spanish, is the hardest one for me to grasp. The imperative and subjunctive forms are also similar in some conjugations as they are in Spanish. In Spanish, you use the subjunctive to make a formal command. Similarly, the subjunctive and imperative are only different in the 2nd person in Ge’ez conjugations. However, the subjunctive almost always requires another verb to be conjugated in the sentences (another clause?). It was also a bit confusing to be how the imperative form could be conjugated in the 3rd person, because in English and in Spanish I believe imperative or command conjugations are only seen in first and second person. However, my teacher put it in the context of a sentence for me and it made a little more sense. I definitely need more practice on it though.
Another concept that we’ve been learning is the system of verb organization. There are 8 categories of verbs that are similar in conjugations and reading styles. This one was also a hard topic for me to learn as it requires a focus on intonation which is hard to gage. Intonation of words in Ge’ez is very important and there are 4 types of reading in Ge’ez. Knowing these 8 categories and their characteristics helps to keep track of how to read any type of word. This was less of a focus before but now with more oral activities this has become a bigger focus. My teacher helps me grasp this concept but exaggerating his own speech so I can detect the intonation. I find that I almost have to shift my mood in order to say some words correctly. To me, they sound more excited or even more serious. It’s interesting for me to now see the technical parts of reading, as I noticed it before when hearing scriptures being read but didn’t know that it had this level of technicality.
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