Blogs

• Summarize your assessment and goals in a blog post in your learning journal.

I am at Level 3 or the NCSSFL-ACTFL's equivalent intermediate low-intermediate mid. I took Bahasa Indonesia (level 2) at the University of Melbourne last semester, and I received a grade equivalent to a later "A" grade here.

I will briefly describe some of the larger goals I have for myself this semester with regard to learning the language. My strategy and structure for learning and the scope of the content mirrors my Indonesian language class at the University of Melbourne. I did quite well in the class, and more importantly, I learned a great deal. So, my learning content will be sourced from the same book, and my weekly strategy for learning the material will be similar to that in my language class. I will spend four hours a week covering a chapter and a half (there are ten chapters in total). There will be no homework outside of those four hours -- except for studying for an exam or completing a weekly artifact.

Indonesian Grammar In Context is a fantastic book, and, besides its focus on grammar, it delves deeply into Indonesian culture.

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• First Cultural Post:  What are your cultural learning goals for this semester?
  • Which one or two topics will you explore during the course of the semester?
  • How do you expect to explore these topics?
  • What do you hope to learn through your exploration of these topics?

I want to learn more about the people of Brazil and Portugal. I would love to explore how Portuguese was created and how it spread. I also want to learn more about other countries that speak Portuguese, because I really don’t know anything about it. I will explore these topics by researching online, and in the library, and by asking my partner about her family history with Portuguese. I think understanding where and how Portuguese came to be will make me understand the culture better, and be more helpful to my learning experience. I believe it will help me understand the similarities to Spanish, and create a wholesome learning experience for me. I am also just fascinated by Latino culture, but I don’t know anything about Portuguese culture. I want to educate myself more about the language and the people through these topics.

• Summarize your assessment and goals in a blog post in your learning journal.

I don’t consider myself having any prior experience with Portuguese. I have taken Spanish before this class, but I feel as though it may help me a little, but I still don’t know anything in Portuguese, or anything about the language period. My goal this semester is to become a intermediate Portuguese speaker. I believe with constant practice and hard work I can do so. I am going to work and reading, writing, listening and speaking everyday, focusing intently on my learning goals. I want to travel to Portugal soon and I think taking this class will help me. I also think it will help me when I go to Brazil eventually. I am really excited to start this language journey!

Week 2

Reflect on the readings. What parts of the brain are most important for the production and comprehension of speech?

In speech production: Thought is generated in Wernicke’s area, encoded in Borac’s area and the signals are passed to articulatory organs. (Crystal, 2005)

In speech comprehension: The auditory cortex receives signals from ear and transfers it to Weirnecke’s are, where it is interpreted. (Crystal, 2005)

The Weirnecke’s area is the common denominator.

How do you conceptualize or process meaning?

The most common mechanisms for deriving meaning from a lexeme are:

• Grouping them – by field of meaning, or function in speech, for example.
• Observing the position and associated lexemes – where is it used? And with what other lexemes?
• Associating lexemes – either by similarity or opposition, associating words or phrases helps increase vocabulary.

Do these readings bring to mind any questions or motivations that could help promote your foreign-language abilities, retention, and recollection?

What I found most interesting in the reading was the idea of how different populations use their languages to represent the world around them. I think it showed a strong correlation between language and culture. Knowing that there are aspects in any language that are inherent to the culture where it grew is exciting, because now I see my language study as an opportunity to have a peak at a new foreign culture before I get the chance to travel there!

The Global Studio does not currently have any resources for Amharic.  Some resources that could be purchased include a book titled “The Essential Guide to Amharic: The National Language of Ethiopia”.  Another resource could be an Amharic Language Tutorial Program, Amharic 101. One of these is a print resource and the other is a downloadable program so I could switch between the two.

Amharic is not on BYKI or Mango Languages but I did find a couple of resources to bookmark on Diigo. One of the resources I bookmarked is a youtube video which will be useful for me because I can hear the pronunciations of the words as I am learning them. I will supplement these resources with talking to my language partner and engaging in conversation so I can learn how to implement what I am learning.

I have begun to work on my first two language tasks by talking to my language partner and practicing the different greetings and basics of Amharic. I have been practicing my pronunciation and writing out phonetic versions of what I am learning so I can read them back to myself. I have also been practicing making some speech sounds that do not exist in English.  They are extremely hard to make and it’s obvious that I’m not a native speaker but one of my goals is to be able to make these sounds before the end of the semester.

The parts of the brain that are most important for speech production and comprehension are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. We mainly process meaning through looking at the interactions between words in sentences. As the reading stated, many words in English do not have much meaning on their own. We usually process the meaning of a word when we see what other words are around it and how those words are working together. I think these readings really show that in order for me to learn Amharic and be conversational, I must be able to know how words work together. Also I need to learn how to understand the meaning of phrases that are not direct translations to English. The reading pointed out how the word ‘mean’ can convey many different things based on the context of the sentence. I think learning how to distinguish words like this in Amharic is important for being able to understand what someone is saying and knowing how to respond.

After talking to my language partner, I learned that in addition to having different variations for male, female, and plural there is also a way to address elders.  The language that is used to address elders seems to be the only type of formal language.  Also, I believe this formality only applies to those that are elderly, not simply older than you.  The formal language applies to the actual words that are being said in Amharic but not in how someone is specifically addressed.  In Habesha (Eritrean and Ethiopian) culture, although people are respectful to one another, they usually call one another by their first names no matter their age. Growing up around Amharic, that’s something that I have always noticed.  An example of this is that I have been calling my aunts, uncles, and family friends by their first names all my life.  Even as a child in elementary, I would address adults by their first name and it was not seen as disrespectful.  I have never heard anyone use “Mr.” or “Mrs.” in Amharic to address someone older as is done in English.  Amharic seems to have more distinctions for gender than for formality which is an interesting comparison to English.

I am currently a novice/ beginner for all aspects of the language.  I am able to say and understand a few phrases that I have heard repeatedly and memorized, but I am not able to hold a conversation or respond when someone talks to me.  My main goal for this semester is to be able to have a conversation and know how to respond with a coherent sentence when someone is talking to me.  I would also like to learn the Amharic alphabet and be able to read some, even if it takes me a while to process the characters.  Another goal of mine is to learn how to pronounce certain sounds that do not exist in English.

My interest in Amharic comes from the fact that I have heard it spoken in my house all my life.  I have always been interested in being able to understand what is being said and communicate with my family.  My main goal this semester is to be able to have a conversation in Amharic.  I also hope that I will be able to improve my accent in order to sound more like a native speaker.

In the past, the only language that I have learned, other than English, is Spanish.  I began taking Spanish in middle school and finished my sophomore year at Richmond.  I was always an excellent Spanish student and learning the language was easy for me.  I think the idea of being able to speak another language is important because of how vast and diverse the world is.  I enjoyed speaking in my Spanish classes because I always felt that speaking was the most relevant for my Spanish studies.  I always disliked writing because the topics that we had to write on were forced and weren’t topics I would ever have to actually write about when exhibiting basic communication skills.  Since I did not have much difficulty learning Spanish, it was never a subject that I disliked.  However, I do not expect the same experience from Amharic.  I believe that my Amharic studies will be much harder than Spanish, but at the same time much more rewarding.

In the FIRE model, the aspects of the factual category that relate to me are 2 and 5.  I like to learn the aspects of a language that are most practical, meaning what I need in order to understand and hold a conversation.  This is especially important for me now as my main goal is to be able to have conversations with my family.  As for methods of learning, I think worksheets, drills, and task-oriented activities that build skill competency are important for me to practice what I am learning.  In the insightful category, I value time to plan and think things through before beginning to work.  I am not the best at jumping into things without planning, so to be successful I need to know what my plans and goals are.  This is especially important for me now because I need to make a specific plan of what I want to learn since I am in charge of my learning. In the rational category, I like topics that empower systematic and cause-and-effect thinking because this is what seems most straightforward to me.  For the evaluative category, I think I learn best in a comfortable, personally pleasing environment because then I am not afraid to ask questions and engage in the class.  This is one reason why I am excited about learning Amharic through this course.  I have a language partner that I will have one on one time with so asking questions will not be a problem.  I think the comfortable learning atmosphere of this setup will enhance my learning experience.

From the surveys that I took I found that I am a visual/tactile learner.  Even though the quiz says that I learn best through visual activities and hands-on activities, I think I prefer learning languages through auditory activities.  I find that I learn best when practicing words through speaking.  This is especially important to me because I like to learn how to pronounce what I am learning.  Activities that would help me learning a language include hearing the words spoken in the language and being told their meanings and then repeating the word.  That way the pronunciation of the word along with the meaning will stick in my mind.  In a language like Amharic, pronunciation is extremely important so I need to spend extra time on that aspect.

For learning Amharic, I think I will need to expand my learning activities because it is a harder language to learn than Spanish.  I believe that I should expand my learning activities by including the task of looking at pictures and practicing being able to name the picture in Amharic.  I also need to practice by having everyday conversations with my language partner and learning how to understand and respond appropriately.  In addition to communicating with my language partner, I think I should try to engage in conversations with native speakers and do small things like ordering my food at an Ethiopian restaurant in Amharic.  In Amharic there are different words and phrases for a man, a woman, and multiple people.  I think keeping these differences distinct will be challenge and I need to develop some learning activities to help practice them.  

My experience as a language learner started fairly early on – my mother always wanted my sister and I to speak English, because she believed it would be a useful, maybe even essential skill. When I was born in Brazil, bilingual or American schools were even less common than they are nowadays, and they were of course, private. Nonetheless, my parents put me in a bilingual school when I was only four years old. Therefore, I do not actually remember the start of my experience learning a second language. I recall stories from my mother: The baby-sitter would offer me an apple, and I would ask for a maçã (the Portuguese word for apple) instead. So, I guess that there was some confusion between the two languages and the world in my young mind. However, even though I started to study English as an infant, I would not say I became fluent until I came to college in the United States and was “forced” actually communicate only in English.

I have friends who had English speaking parents, so they would speak it at home, but that was not my case. Thus, I lived the first eighteen years of my life only speaking in English when I was in school. Looking back at my experience in Middle and High School, I see how my classmates and I cheated ourselves – we spoke Portuguese even when we were supposed to speak in English. But I have a theory that it was not because we did not know English or because we were lazy, but rather because children are less likely to take a conscious effort to speak in their second language and teenagers are prone to self-consciousness. At least I know it took me “not having an option” (in regard to which language I could use, when I was abroad) to lose my fear of being wrong –   funny pronunciation here, maybe a grammatical mistake there, or plainly not making any sense at first. I still have a noticeable accent and I learned to be in peace with it, even proud.

After getting some confidence on my English and having the opportunity of teaching both English to Brazilians and Portuguese (or about Brazilian culture) to Americans, I have come to enjoying the process of “making sense” out of the languages and finding (or not) relationships between both. And I found that helping people learn the languages I know has been an intense (and lovely) learning experience for myself as well. I feel like I have a better understanding both about how English and Portuguese “work” and about how different learning a language at an older age is from my personal experience. I think it was good preparation for my present venture into independent learning of Catalan.

In regard to learning style and approaches, the assessments pointed that my learning style is mostly tactile (55%), which did not surprise me at all – I had already noticed that I absorb whatever I write down more efficiently than what I read or hear, so much that I am usually the girl with the notes and summaries in the classes I take. However, I need to beware of falling too comfortably into writing when I need to learn how to speak as well. I have never tried the one-on-one conversational style approach that SDLC110 takes, so it will be a completely different and new learning experience for me. One that I am very much looking forward to embrace.

             I have had the opportunity to learn Spanish most of my life.  As a child, my father was a fluent speaker because many of his employees, customers, and partners were Latino.  I first started to learn the language by listening to my father and his business partners talk and try to either find a similarity to an English word or by using context clues to determine the meaning of the sentence.  When I first started, I had no formal training.  I did not conjugate verbs properly, use the correct word in every instance, or use the correct endings on adjectives.  My formal knowledge started to develop in high school.  In my sophomore year, I elected to take my first Spanish class.  I found the class entertaining, relevant, and rather easy.  To me, the vocab came naturally, the verb endings had a very simple pattern, and the structure of sentences were very understandable. 

            Spanish class was fun for me because there was such a focus on helping everyone learn the language together.  Spanish may have been frustrating at times when things were going slowly or when I picked up a topic quicker than other classmates, but I understood that the class was not just for me.  We were all there to learn a foreign language and had the right to learn it to the best of our individual ability through collaborating with each other.  In a math class or a literature class, it is much different.  In a math class, the teacher is teaching each student individually and it is up to that student to perform.  In Spanish, the teacher would teach us a lesson and then ask us to apply that lesson in groups.  The teacher would then walk around and see how we were doing.  Rather than trying to help the students who were clearly the best at Spanish excel, the teacher focused on getting all of us to a point that we were comfortable with the language.  That is what I love about language.  Calculus, biology, and accounting are all classes that students either understand, or have to work extremely hard to understand.  Language seems different.  Language is innate in all of us.  I feel that certain aspects of a language may be difficult at times, but the relationship between a foreign language and a person’s original language is helpful when learning.  Language is interesting because you are not learning something completely new.  You already know how to make the sounds, you know to listen to the sounds coming from others, and you know one language already   

            The first test I took showed that I am a visual learner (40%), an auditory learner (35%), and a tactile learner (25%).  On the second test, I scored highest in the body movement and math/logic sections of the test.  I believe I am a visual learner.  Usually, after seeing information either from a page of a book or on a board, I can commit it to memory.  It is much more difficult for me to memorize auditory information the first time I hear it.  I usually need to write it down in order to memorize it.  I think one of the best activities for me to learn new language concepts is flash cards.  By using flash cards, I can memorize grammar rules, vocabulary, and conjugations in a matter of minutes.

            The FIRE model offers the four aspects factual, insightful, rational, and evaluative on a scale of one to seven to see how important each aspect is to a student.  I believe this is an interesting idea because it allows the student to think critically about how they learn.  I believe once you understand how you learn, you can adjust your studying styles to be more efficient.

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I would say that the first week was pretty successful! I was waiting for the semester to start, because I was hoping there would be an exchange student from Barcelona willing to partner up with me for my SDLC110 in Catalan. Thanks to a classmate’s help, I found a language partner and had him introduced to Dr. Soloway, so now we are just waiting on the bureaucracy part to be over with before we can start the weekly meetings.

Besides looking for a language partner, I explored some of the Catalan resources from SDLAP Wiki and did some independent research, I even found a Netflix series that is in Catalan!

I am curious as to how we will be sharing our learning experiences in 105, considering the broad range of languages the students are interested in. I am also looking forward to learning more about linguistics in general, since “languages” are not really one of my fortes – Surprise, surprise! Hahaha, I already had this impression and on the "multiple intelligences" assessment I took for this class, my language score was just average.

Prompts addressed: the task(s) you are working on; a statement of what you hoped to accomplish;

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Starting from my middle school years, I decided to learn French due to a recommendation from my best friend at the time. This in turn, had a huge effect on my life as I continued to pursue French all the way to my senior year of high school. During the five years of taking French classes, there were many areas of the language that I liked and disliked. One of the most enjoyable aspects of learning a new language was being able to learn and immerse yourself into their culture. By watching French movies, celebrating Mardi gras, and eating their native food, I was able to become more motivated in learning their language. Furthermore, I also enjoyed learning and expanding my vocabulary. It was interesting to find words that we did not have in English. Additionally, by expanding my vocabulary in French, it also expanded my vocabulary in English. There are many words in French that are very similar in spelling to the English counterpart. This made me realize that languages are a lot more similar to one another than we think. Therefore, although the pronunciation may be different, the way many words were spelled were similar, if not the same, to the English counterpart.

            What I disliked about learning French was the addition of formalities. In English, there are no new pronouns or additions to words that are needed when talking with elders or those who have more authority over you. In Korean and French however, there are specific vocabulary and rules that are added when speaking or writing formally. If you did not include the additional rules when talking to an elder, it would be seen as a sign of disrespect. Another aspect that I did not like while learning French was the subject and verb reversal. This was hard for me to get use to because I could not simply translate from English directly into French. If I did translate it directly, it would not make sense in French. This was especially tough when I was just starting to learn the language. It took me around two to three years until I was comfortable enough to write in French without thinking that I need to say it in English in my mind first.

            Based on the surveys I took, I am a visual and musical learner. I do think that the survey was accurate since I learned how to speak Korean by watching Korean dramas and listening to their music. Whenever a word that I did not know would come up, I would write it down in a journal, find out the meaning behind it, and then memorize it. By doing this I was able to become conversational in Korean, although I can still be hesitant and shy when talking to those who are older than me.

            Activities such as memorizations and individual projects definitely suit me more because I am able to go at my own pace. Assignments such as worksheets that build skill competency are more comfortable to me. This is because I like to know what exactly I need to study and how it might be formatted on the exam.  Therefore, I tend to prefer assignments that have one correct answer compared to ones that are more open ended. However, I would like to expand my learning activities to incorporate some that do have open ended question and those that are more discussion based. Sticking to one type of activity may be limiting and could actually negatively affect my learning as well. Therefore, I would also like to do activities that are more diverse. I think incorporating a diverse set of activities such as papers, worksheets, discussions, movies, and media all work together to give a student the best experience.

From my early high school years, I was always involved in a language class. During high school, I did not have many options for foreign languages and decided to take on Spanish. In the beginning levels of Spanish, it was very enjoyable because the course was just to give students an idea of Spanish/Latin-American culture. A lot of time was invested in learning about the culture through movies, food, and music. This phase of learning was very enjoyable because I am more of a visual/tactile learner. I even found learning the basics of the Spanish language enjoyable because it was well mixed in with the other activities. However, as the Spanish level progressed, things got more and more complex. And with it, things like grammar, syntax, and other detail-oriented learning began to stress me out. In my junior year of high school, I was not fond of Spanish at all. I had the option of going into a more advanced course next year, but I opted out of another year of Spanish because I was simply burned out.
Looking back on my experience with Spanish, I would like to have taken a different approach. My first year taking introductory level Spanish was enjoyable because the learning process was not only worksheets, drills, and exams but filled with other activities. These activities were not pointless but were well mixed in with learning goals. I genuinely enjoyed my leaning experience when I was immersed in the culture. This was done with a variety of cultural music, foods, and other activities that supplemented the language portion of the learning goals. In higher level Spanish courses, most of the days were spent taking notes from lectures and doing drills. This made it really hard to be enthusiastic about learning on most days. All the material was simply on paper and later tested verbally or with pen and paper. This put a lot of pressure on performance and did not make learning fun.
Another experience I had with learning a new language was with English. English was not my first language since I was born in Korea. I moved to the United States with my family when I was only seven years old. I took English lessons in Korea, but they were not at all practical when speaking English in real life. When I first got to the United States, I was very lost in elementary school. I did not know any English and could not communicate with anyone. I remember this process being so stressful that could not make it to school the next day because I became sick. However, as the years passed, I learned English the fastest out of all my family members. This was primarily due to my habit of watching a lot of television as a child. I learned a lot of English from watching TV because I enjoyed watching all the cartoons. I often recognized many phrases used in my daily life that I once heard from television. I then deciphered the meaning of the word or phrase by trying to recognize what context it was used in on TV. This really accelerated my learning process when I first came to the States.
My previous experiences with languages show that I am not a learner that thrives from repeated drills and exams. I like to be immersed in culture with many other aspects other than the language itself. I think it really helps me appreciate the language and the culture. Learning activities that really suit my learning style was watching TV and deciphering the meaning of words by understanding the context. I would expand my learning activities by watching more difficult-to-understand materials such as watching the news in Korean with no subtitles. I look forward to revisiting the Korean language once again.

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