Fatima Al-Bassam
SDLC 105
April 1st, 2014
Reflection Paper
As a senior looking for classes to take, finding a course that would both interest me and challenge me was a bit difficult. As I was looking through the lists of possible electives I can take, it occurred to me that I can finally learn Urdu. Urdu has always been on top of my list. My father and aunts were born in India and spent a big part of their childhood there. Consequently, Indian culture has been a big part of my childhood and I grew up listening to my father occasionally having whole conversations in Urdu.
Given my background, I was very excited to start my learning journey this semester. I developed a learning plan for myself and found various materials both online and in the Global Studio to help me reach my goals. The first few weeks went as smoothly as possible. Everything went according to plan and I was always on top of everything. However, as soon as my workload for my other classes started to increase, my motivation to learn Urdu started to decrease.
Looking back, I might have been a bit too optimistic about my learning journey. I never expected it to be this difficult. Learning a whole language on my own is something completely new to me. Though I already speak three languages, Arabic, English and Spanish, all of them were acquired in a conventional setting. Motivating myself to sit down and spend some time on something that does not have a deadline while I had a lot of other pending work was a struggle I did not foresee.
I went through periods of standstill in my journey. These periods increased during the height of my workload, midterm week. Right before Spring Break, I decided that I have to change my way of learning. I was not happy with where I was. I have had some accomplishments of course. By that time, I could read and write easily in Urdu, ask questions about a person’s day and identity and have a very basic conversation, but these were not enough.
When I met with Dr. Sharon that week, I mentioned how difficult it was to motivate myself to learn while there's so much to do for my other classes. Her suggestions were extremely helpful. So far, I've been incorporating them into my learning plan. One of the most helpful ones was to schedule 15 minutes of learning Urdu in between my other work. This serves as a nice break from my normal business school workload and a way to motivate myself to learn more Urdu. I also increased my revision of past lessons and started incorporating Urdu into my everyday life. One thing that has helped me to learn more is listening to Urdu radio while I work on other things.
I hope to continue my work and reach some more goals till the end of this semester. This has been a challenging and interesting experience so far. I’m glad I chose this as my last elective of my college career.
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