Taking the SDLC 105 course this semester has been an incredibly enriching and fun experience that will help me a lot in the hard task that is acquiring new languages. During the last 14 weeks or so, I have developed basic skills in recognizing linguistic and cultural patterns in different languages that the whole experience of learning a new language more holistic, fun, and easy.
One of these concepts that I have learned during the semester is morphology. While I interact with words all the time, I did not know how to understand them in terms of their composition with affixes in all their variations. This concept came to me pretty naturally because I can recognize these patterns in the English, Spanish and even the Korean language. As such, visualizing how words are constructed in Korean or Hebrew (my target languages) is going to make learning vocabulary much easier.
Also, understanding the connection between language and culture has been extremely interesting to look into. Not only is it important to understand this relationship to better understand how a language formed its particularities, but also to get a better experience of learning said language. To put this idea briefly, it is much more effective and engaging to learn Korean while interacting with locals, their customs and history, rather than just by reading from a textbook. I definitely plan to apply this framework with my future journey with the Korean language, as I have already done it before when studying abroad in Seoul, and it was one of the best learning experiences of my life.
One particular activity that I really liked doing this semester was when we had to identify verbs, pronouns, and tenses by analyzing a group of words in several languages like Turkish and Swahili. I felt really good when identifying these patterns and even more when I made my own sentences with the words I recognized. Hopefully I will be able to replicate this to some extent with Hebrew, a language that has patterns such as suffixes that change depending on the gender.
In terms of readings we covered this semester, “Communicate Competence” from Principles of Language Learning and Teaching by H.D. Brown was probably the one that had the biggest impact this semester. In the chapter, H.D Brown proposes the complexities of acquiring language competence. More specifically, there are two main branches that conform language competency, those being organizational competency – which includes elements such as vocabulary, syntax, and morphology – and pragmatic competency – which undermines more cultural aspects like recognition of dialects and of figures of speech. This made complete sense to me since one can handle the basic structure of a language (vocabulary and syntax) without actually being able to engage in a conversation with a native of the target language, a situation that in my eyes would not entail competency of any language. This shows that languages are more than just structures that one has to systematically learn in order to communicate. Learning a language up to a point where one is competent requires a holistic approach that involves direct interactions with fluent speakers, as well as an immersion into the culture to fully grasp the context in which the language one is learning lives in.
I truly hope to take all these lessons and the ones not mentioned here and use them to make the best of my journey in learning the Korean and Hebrew Language, and I thank everyone in my SDLC 105 class that made this process as enjoyable as it could be.
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