This week I kept working on vocabulary by using flashcards. I got some of this vocabulary from Rosetta Stone and other words and phrases I got from the internet. One of the problems that I have been running into while trying to be proactive in learning vocabulary is that some of the translations or spellings are wrong. I found this out when I was meeting with my language partner. He was looking over the lists that I had compiled and he pointed out the mistakes in the vocabulary lists. This is frustrating especially when I'm trying to learn the language and do not have a teacher at my side all of the time to tell me when words or phrases are correct or incorrect. This makes it much harder to progress with learning vocabulary independently of Rosetta Stone and my language partner because I don't want to learn things the wrong way.
It has also been hard to try to keep up with learning a specific number of words a day. This is especially hard if I can't hear a native speaker say the words. If I learn the word based on my own pronounciation and learn it wrong then the process is almost pointless. I can, on the other hand, begin to recognize words more rapidly on sight though.
For my own language learning this week I continued to work on Rosetta Stone and listened to more BBC news podcasts in Farsi. I also visit the BBC news Persian website to see if I can recognize any words. In our individual sessions, Maroof and I have been working on introductory conversations such as saying hello, goodbye, asking someone's name, where someone is from, greetings throughout the day etc. This process has helped me to build my vocabulary and started to make me think in Farsi. Now my responses are becoming more automatic and less labored.
The reading for today about nonverbal communication in other cultures was very informative and interesting. I thought the fact that the article started out by describing individualist and collectivist cultures was strange at first but then realized how other aspects of cultural communication stemmed out of this basic classification. One experience that I can relate to is how the article describes certain actions that mean different things in different cultures. When I was in Spain, I learned that a specific hand gesture means "crowded." The way I was used to seeing a similar hand gesture used was to portray some kind of solicitation of money.
Another aspect of the article that I have personal experience with is the monochronic v. polychronic aspects of different cultures. In Spain it was never really clear when we were supposed to arrive at a location. Our professor would say something like "mid afternoon" and I would have to ask my host family what time that translated to.
Finally, I thought the last chart of the article was informative. I learned a few years ago that showing the soles of your shoes to someone was an insult in the Middle East and I recently saw protesters doing this in Egypt toward pictures of Mubarak. It is also interesting to see how some behaviors do not translate between cultures at all. An example of this is friends holding hands in public, but people in a romantic relationship not holding hands in public in "culture 2" while in "culture 1" it is acceptable for couples in romantic relationships to hold hands in public. For my next cultural post I hope to research nonberbal communication in the Middle East.
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