When I began MLC 105, I really had no idea what strategies of language learning would work for me. Now I do. The most significant evolution in me as a self-directed learner is that I know what strategies to use, and I have much more confidence in seeking out the resources I need. Because I know where to go for help and resources, I am that much more capable of doing so.
In observing cultures, I have more insight now into what to look at when viewing other cultures. My previous experience was in personally being immersed in another culture (when I moved to the States) and in classroom settings. Being immersed means I could directly interact with the culture, and use my own culture as a reference point to gain understanding of this new one. However, there is no such direct connection while I was learning Farsi. In a classroom, I had no control over what I was learning, or how I approached the culture. Textbooks often give a very simplified and/or biased impression of foreign cultures. In MLC 105, I got to choose what I researched. I could dig deeper into what interested me. I think that was really important in my learning process. I stayed interested and alert while learning because I was always investigating something of my choosing. Also, just the practice of making cultural connections and analyzing without direction developed my observation skills.
As for learning the language itself, certain activities and strategies emerged as the most useful while I studied. Repetition was essential. Writing and saying the vocabulary over and over, though sometimes tedious, really made it stick in my brain. However, once I learned enough to form phrases, it was forming vocabulary into phrases that made memorization easier. I could then make connections. I could actually talk aloud to someone. Talking aloud, even when it was just to Holden, my one-year old friend who didn't understand me (but didn't care that I repeated the same six phrases over and over), gave me confidence and made muscle memories for speech. Constant exposure was helpful too. I wrote the alphabet and numbers on the dry-erase board in my office, so I could look up every once in a while and run through them again. That made it a kind of habit. It wasn't a big time commitment, I could speed-study.
I am definitely a "doer" learner. Watching and listening to media wasn't very helpful. It was essential to have face-to-face watching and listening, but when it came to movies and recordings, I didn't get much from it. It was good when I just began to hear the flow of speech, and interesting culturally (investigating music, for instance), but not that great for practicing conversational Farsi. I definitely don't recommend trying to learn a language without having someone experienced in it to touch base with.
Over all, I'm not very comfortable with self-directed language study. I thought I would be, because I love self-directed study in other topics. I love following a thread of interesting research, discovering what interests me. But I relied a lot on my learning partner when it came to language study. The nature of language is social. It's impossible to get the right sounds for me without seeing a person in front of me, and having them listen to me and correct me. When I heard "so-pekhaikh," Sofia was able to communicate to me (after much back-and-forth) that it was actually "sob-pekhair." Without a tutor, I'd have gone to Iran and greeted someone completely incorrectly.
I discovered that I get very intimidated by new language experiences. It is so fundamental to understanding that it seems impossible to learn. Foreign languages aren't instinctive to me, I have to work hard to get them. But every time I succeeded in learning/understanding something (like when I found I could pick out nouns, pronouns, and various other words in a sentence), it was extremely exciting. Learning a new language, because it's such a challenge, is exhilarating.
I plan on studying abroad in Senegal next spring, and will work on developing my French while I'm there. I'll implement everything I learned in this class, most importantly to put what I learn into practice soon and often. I can only rely on my own study for so long before it's essential to try it in conversation.
The most crucial factor in becoming a self-directed language learner is to know you need help. If I'd continued with BYKI, for instance, it would have been disastrous. You can only go so far before you need to interact with a speaker. Self-direction comes in afer that, and in between that. Even just touching base with someone about what you're learning could mean the difference between making up a new language (Tania-Farsi, where we greet everyone with "so-pekhaikh"!) and learning a language.
The cultural project was a great way to focus all the cultural observation skills I'd developed over the semester. I had to commit to something specific to look at critically, in my case traditional persian women's clothing. The clothing revealed how Iran is separated into distinct cultural regions, where whether and beliefs shape what was worn before globalization. It was a window of insight into the problems of minority representation in Iran. Iran is fragmented culturally in a completely different way than the US's "melting pot" or "salad bowl," so Iranian perspectives on diversity and culture are different as well.
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