Week 10 Post Learning Journal #8

[Tana Kuptanon]

• How many new words have you learned in your target language?  How did you learn them?  Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?
• I try to  learn about 10 vocabulary words a week but lately I been slacking off because I am not officially in the 110 SDLC class.  So far I have about 80 vocabulary words. I learned them through a list that gave me all the basic Hebrew words. They are organized through root words. All the words I know now have root words that begin with א (Alepf). א is the first letter of the alep-bet. I am not sure of their similarities beyond the א. It is difficult learning even basic words because each word has a different name depending on who's using it and who it's referring to. For example saying They have the pie.. The word "They" can be female or male and it depends on who they are. If they have all females then use the female version of they. That is pretty straightforward and it is the same for male. However if the group is a female majority but has even just one male then male version of "they" is used. So Hebrew is a romance language and tends to lean towards men when both gender are involved. 
• My goals for acquiring vocabulary is not really realistic right now. I just try to read what Duolingo has for me each day but I don't think it is an effective learning technique. I often forget the new vocabulary I learn after I move on to the next chapter. Also Duolingo does not do a good job in building a strong step by step foundation to learn a language. They words they introduce through the chapter are often unsystematic and do not relate in anyway. 
• A more realistic way of building vocabulary-personally- would be to have a language partner work with me by keeping track of my process and help connect them with other relevant words. Right now I am learning vocabulary that can not be used in a single conversation. The words I know are like 

  ad	a-ba	אבא
  watermelon	a-va-ti-akh	אבטיח
  Spring	a-viv	אביב
  but	a-val	אבל
  thumb	a-gu-dal	אגודל
  walnut	e-goz me-lekh	אגוז מלך
  pear	a-gas	אגס
  red	a-dom	אדום
  or

• As you can tell they are start with the same base letter but have no relevance in anyway beyond the א. I think this is not the most efficient and easy way of learning a langauage. So my