1. Recording: Angella Lee's Artifact #2
2. Translation:
Hello!
This week, I learned about the campus structure of a Korean university. I learned about the types of buildings and streets that are at Yonsei University. Through watching a video, I was able to see the fountains and museums that are on campus. I also learned how to say that I am an exchange student (kko-hwan hak-saeng). Since I learned these things, I was able to accomplish one of my goals.
Thank you!
Do some research about the culture of your target language and write about the ‘linguistic aspects’, e.g., body language, how people talk about time, etc.
After conducting research about the Turkish culture, I realized how little that I knew about the country as a whole. For example, I was completely unaware of the prevalence of religion within the country. Even though Turkey is secular country that gives its citizens religious freedom, close to 98 percent of the people are Muslim. Consequently, this affects many of the customs that are carried out.
I have found a few interesting aspects of Turkish body language that differ from common American body language. Here are a few examples: (1) when you shake your head at a Turk, it means that you are confused, (2) the OK hand gesture means that you are accusing someone of being homosexual, (3) it is rude to point your finger at someone. I believe that I could potentially find myself doing all of these things in one day so I am happy that I have been made aware of them.
Beyond body language, I have also found out some interesting facts regarding verbal politeness. For example, verbal gratitude apparently does not occur in the Turkish household. It seems logical to me that a family member would not have to say “thank you” when acts of kindness are expected, but I cannot imagine not expressing my gratitude. Another similar fact is that parents tend to refrain from verbally showing warm feelings to their children. I find this so intriguing because the culture in the United States is the complete opposite in this matter. We tend to excessively express our love to parents. I am going to consult with Gökhan to inquire about the validity of these findings. Of course, there is much more that I could write about, but I just wanted to share these few things that stood out the most to me.
What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Do you think a reference grammar can be useful? Why or why not?
I need to learn about the word order (syntax) as well as how different parts of speech are expressed in Turkish. I am currently using “Turkish Grammar for Foreign Students” to facilitate my process of learning these elements. Thus far, I have learned that the language is structured by subject + object + verb instead of subject + verb + object. In my classes, I have been learning vocabulary for the most part so I have yet to experiment with forming sentences. However, I am looking forward to the challenges that I will have with getting accustomed to this structure.
Another interesting aspect of the language that I have noticed is that Turkish has grammatical cases in which suffixes are commonly to words for a variety of reasons. These cases include the nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, and the genitive. Studying these cases will be interesting because they will force me to consider the parts of speech and their role for sentence structure more than I have considered in the past. The reference grammar textbook is incredibly helpful. Gökhan is also slowly exposing us to these distinct grammatical features without fully teaching them so that we could at least recognize them in the future.
This week, I learned about the structure of a Korean campus. We learned about the general terms that deals with the layout of a Korean campus, such as “kwan” means building and “lo” means street, which are used at the end of the word. The beginning part of the word is usually the name of the street or building. After we learned about the general terms, we watched a video that detailed the specific campus structure of Yonsei University because that is my goal. Unlike University of Richmond where both Richmond and Westhampton sides of campus are integrated with class buildings and dorms, these two things are completely separated at Yonsei University. There is a section for just dorms and section for just classroom buildings, with sub-sections of both.
I think watching a video of the campus was a pretty effective way of learning about the structure because I was able to visualize where these buildings and streets are. This is a better way to learn than just listening to audio recordings because I will be unable to match the name of a building to how it actually looks like. Now that I know about how the campus is structured, I can proceed to identify the specific places that I will be using often, such as the science building and my dorm. I can also research the type of classes that they offer, so that I can successfully register for the classes that I want to take.
Based on the learning from SDLC 110 Turkish, I recorded introductions of myself, and two different individuals. I added where we live currently (differentiated from where we are from), what kinds of languages we speak, and what my hobbies are, which are something new from SDLC 111.
Learning Journal 6: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
My learning goals for this week was to firm up my reading, writing, and interpretational skills of Hangeul, the Korean writing system. I started off by reviewing all the materials provided in class. These materials went over stroke order, pronunciation, and identification for all of the letters. After that I used apps like Duolingo to help with my reading and recognition skills. The apps also read the letters and words out loud which helped with listening. For writing, I wrote the letters individually several times at first, then worked on writing syllable blocks, and then strung those blocks together to write a few simple words. Listening presented more of a challenge. Although I feel like I’ve achieved my goal in terms of reading and writing, listening and interpreting are still difficult. The differences between some letters are difficult for me to distinguish at times. This is concerning, especially because these subtle differences can significantly alter the meaning of a word. I also want to be able to pronounce words properly, a desire which seems impossible if I haven’t mastered distinguishing the nuance between the sounds of similar letters.
Fifth Cultural Post: Identify a topic for your culture project and your learning goals for your topic.
For this culture project, I’ll talk about the Korean Holiday called Chuseok. Chuseok literally means “Autumn’s eve” and is a harvest festival. This holiday is celebrated in both North and South Korea for three days on the 15h day of the lunar calendar’s 8th month. This date falls in alignment with a full moon. During this time, Koreans go back to their hometowns and hold celebratory feasts with their family.
Interestingly, the origins of this holiday are debated. Some believe that the holiday’s original purpose was to present offerings from the new harvest to ancesetors or local gods. Another theory is that Chuseok commemorates the day that the Kingdom of Silla won an important battle. Some speculate that Chuseok was the celebration for a winning team at the end of Gabea, a month-long weaving competition. Regardless of its unknown origins, Chuseok is a major holiday comparable to American Thanksgiving in terms of its scale.
One of my learning goals is to become more knowledgeable about Korean culture, including major holidays. Through this culture project, I intend to go more in depth about the traditional customs and foods associated with Chuseok, and I will learn some of the specialized vocabulary that goes hand in hand with this holiday.
The Turkish Writing System
Fun fact: Turquoise is the favorite color of Turks.
Turkey is one of the nations in the world with designated "official script" -Atatürk's writing system.
The Turkish republic was found in 1923, and 5 years later, Turkish people experienced an overnight shift of their writing system. As one of the means of modernization of Turkey, Ataturk-the founding father of the country, ordered to switch the Arabic script into a Latin script. Turkish alphabet now consists of 29 letters, 7 of which (Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals to meet the phonetic requirements of the Turkish language.
a, be, ce, çe, de, e, fe, ge, yumuşak ge, he, ı, i, je, ke, le, me, ne, o, ö, pe, re, se, şe, te, u, ü, ve, ye, ze. These are names of the letters in the Turkish alphabet.
The letters Q (qu), X (iks) and W (we) aren't present in the official Turkish alphabet, but are occasionally used in loanwords. ğ is not pronounced, but lengthens the vowel before it. There are no diphthongs except in a few foreign loan words. Ç is pronounced as ch sound as in cherry. Ş is pronounced like sh in word shrimp. Ö is pronounced the same was i is pronounced in word shirt. Ü is pronounced as ew is pronounced in the word brew.
Overall, Turkish writing and reading system is very simple and pretty much resembles English. It is important to learn the few differences though. I believe, I am pretty confident in my pronouncing and reading skills of Turkish, and I am glad Ataturk made the shift of the writing system in 1928, since it made it easier, at least for me, to learn the Turkish alphabet.
My first artifact conversation went well. I started with introduction expressions, stated my age, where I'm from, where I grew up and mentioned some of my hobbies and what languages I speak. I thought I could do some more revising for it to be perfect, but for the first time, it wasn't that bad. I hope to practice more as time goes on.
I would say I achieved my goals stated in my last post. I managed to learn days of the week, months, seasons, some describing words, times of the day and I'm able to read notices in the airports and public places. I also tried to learn fruits and food, although I definitely need revision of this. I feel confident about most of the vocabulary, however, saying the times of the day in Turkish is quite a challenge, since they have several ways of saying them. They either just use numbers, and that is relatively easier, or past/to, quarter/half past expressions, and I find this part challenging. I will definitely practice this during the upcoming weeks and do new exercises and try to ask and understand time in Turkish when I talk to my language partner, Turkish friends or classmates. I also revised colors, pronunciation and the ways to make the nouns plural. I think these weeks were a bit hard but very productive and I'm hoping to revise and improve more next weeks.
Weeks 4 and 5 are heavy vocabulary weeks for me. I am learning the seasons, months, days of the week, words to describe weather. I'm also revising all the introductions and questions that I have learnt so far, along with adding some new vocabulary regarding to the topics I'm looking at. I'm revising the numbers and learning how to ask and say the times of the day. I also am going to learn some fruit and food vocabulary. I am mostly using my language partner's help and practice with my classmates as my main tool for learning. I'm paying attention on common words used in airports and other public places. I'm using several resources, such as duolingo, google dictionary, and short youtube videos. I am also using sticky notecards in my room to help visualize and memorize the words I'm learning. As a way to evaluate my success, I'm trying to look at the English words and say or write them in Turkish, and do some short self-made quizes. Overall, I think my goals are a bit challenging but achievable, and I'm going to do my best.
Recording presentations and talking about about our target cultures was, indeed, a great and meaningful experience in my Linguistics class. I thought, it gave everyone an incentive to do more research on the language and culture of their choice. I particularly spoke about Turkey and main aspects of Turkish culture. In my recording group another person spoke about Turkish cuisine by stating the common dishes and drinks and the ways how they are made. I found that really interesting, since cuisine may reflect a lot about a certain culture. Another person studying Hindi talked about the famous Hindi festival Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. He mentioned the countries, that it is celebrated in, the decorations that people use, the history of celebration and other creative aspects of the celebration and much more. Majority of my classmates are learning Korean and their presentations talked about several aspects of Korean culture, such as history of Korean language in relation to Russian, Korea in general in relation to World Wars, beauty and fashion trends in the country, traditional royal cuisine, food, economy, Korean hip-hop, and even the history and role of the Samsung industries in Korea. Other language learners shared about Israeli defense forces, mentioning the mandatory 2-year army service for males and females, the history and exceptions behind it, as well as Japanese colonialism and its history.
I thought all of these presentations were important in understanding the cultures and the languages that we are learning. Some of us mentioned the importance of understanding the culture while learning a particular language. We also engaged in discussions after the presentations, and asked questions to each other to get a deeper understanding about certain cultures. My language partner heard my presentation and gave his feedback as well. I was glad I was given a chance to explore and talk about my target culture, and I'm sure most of my classmates valued this experience as well.
The culture shock video was fairly long and I watched just a part of it, but I though it gave a pretty good glimpse of what cultural shock is. I am able to confirm some of the ideas mentioned in the video.
I came to the US only 2 years ago and visited several cities in the North and South and experienced culture shock every time i moved around. It is astonishing how big the United States is, and how many different cultures within the country you can find. I also have had a chance to be in Georgia, Turkey, and Russia as well as study in international school with people from about 90 countries. This being said, I know what culture shock is, and I have experienced it more times than one can imagine ,and I even do get culturally shock when I go home after being in the US for a long time. It is a feeling of awkwardness and disorientation at the same time, but luckily, I get used to things quickly. Studying with people from that many cultures has taught me to be very understanding, empathetic and inclusive toward other cultures in the world. The important thing when one experiences a culture shock is to realize that every culture is unique and worth embracing, even if you do not understand certain parts of it. I still ask my American friends about small aspects of American culture to make sure I'm culturally educated. Looking back at my other posts, I want to mention again about the importance of reading about the culture of a country and watching videos before visiting or learning a culture and I am glad, that I have been to Turkey and have done significant research about the Turkish culture. I believe, 21st century is a century of diversity and inclusion and it is essentially important to be open to cultures, ideas and traditions.
Turkish doesn't quite work like English. It has some major structural differences. For instance, In Turkish, the verb goes goes at the end of the sentence and the most common word order follows the "subject-object-verb" formula. For example "He is eating a banana" would translate as 'o bir muz yiyor" , where "yiyor" is the verb. The order of the words can sometimes be alternated to emphasize certain words in a sentence and the emphasized word is the closest to the verb. The adjectives in Turkish work like English or Russian. The adjective usually goes before the noun. For instance, "yellow banana"would translate as "sarı muz", where muz is banana, and sari is yellow. Turkish also allows to build up words through suffixes: -lı/ -li/ -lu/ -lü, for instance are used to turn nouns into adjectives. Examples would be tuz-tuzlu, meaning salt-salty. Suffixes -sız/ -siz/ -suz/ -süz are added to the noun to express absence of the noun. an example would be ev-home and evsiz-homeless. Suffixes -cı, -ci, -cu, -cü (-çı, -çi, -çu, -çü). are used to express professions from the words( Diş - dişçi mean tooth and dentist. -lık, -lik, -luk, -lük are used to express specific nouns from adjectives, such as çocuk-çocukluk meaning child-childhood. Ler/Lar are used to form the plural of the nouns in Turkish, such as ev-evler. are used Also, in colloquial speech, the verb's place in the sentence can vary, although the written language has a specific structure that I mentioned above.
I think the mentioned points are the most basic structural features of the Turkish language. I believe knowing these structures and especially learning all the suffixes that form words will help me learn the basics of the language more easily. I think practicing exercises will help me remember these structures better. I think reference grammar can be really helpful to maintain good skills of the language, however I believe, simple practice of written and spoken exercises help me better in my language learning process. The combination of both, on the other hand, will help me acquire skills faster and better.
I can now make sentences on my own. I can know successfully create sentences without having out reference pre-made sentences on my own. Before I began I could only recite pre-made sentences such as my name is, or i live in, but now that I understand verb conjugation better, and have more vocabulary about time and and context I can now make sentences about more broad topics. For example, I feel as though now I am much better equipped to talk about soccer. This is because not only because I can make sentences, but also I know some minor soccer slang terms. I have also been watching some soccer interviews in Portuguese which has helped, me understand soccer in Portuguese much better.
Complete Reflection Paper #2 (500 words) and Post to Your Blog in the Ning
Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language. What do you need to improve your communicative competence?
I am beginning to understand the importance of learning the target language and the target culture and how they go hand and hand. In the beginning I thought that understanding the culture of the target language is trivial because learning a language can just be learning a language. Culture is language itself! Learning a language is automatically learning a culture. A big example where learning a language is impossible without learning the culture is expressions of phrases.Phrases, words, syntactic forms and concepts are impossible to translate directly because they sometimes don’t exist in some languages. Differences in language between cultures are evident when you compare how some countries have different definitions for certain phrases. A prime example is that generally a “good day” for a Western speaker means a sunny day, however a “good day” for an African speaker will mean a rainy day. It is all context. If I were to learn an African language and did not know this cultural references then I would not understand a lot of the context and fail at accurately understanding the language.
Culture can also have a huge influence on how we communicate. For example in Thai, the words we tend to chose are like a pyramid where formal talk is reserved only when talking to or about the royal family. Then the formality goes down based on age no matter their position. For example; at work, if A is lower in position but older than person B (person B has higher position but is younger), person B will still have to address person A as if A was B’s superior. However in America and many English speaking communities, this is not necessary and in fact frowned upon. If I were not to know these differences then learning the language would be difficult since I would not know what is appropriate and what is not. Hebrew also has the same references as one would address a boy versus a man versus an old man. The degrees of seniority or importances determines what word choices you should use.
I think to improve my communicative competence, definitely learning the cultural by reading the newspaper, talking to natives, watching movies, music...etc will definitely learn the culture and the language at the same time, so you’re killing two birds with one stone. However also sitting down and learning the language is also important in achieve communicative competence. Learning the language is a formal setting will help me track my progress and learn Hebrew “correctly”. I think that some people after spending time with many speakers of that language are able to pick up phrases but if you wanted them to build their foundation and to continue the language they are unable to do so because their foundation was not strong enough to continue and build. I still feel incompetent in learning the basic root words in semitic languages. I don’t understand what it means to find root words because I can’t find the similarities. I also have problems but they are similar to this where I just a need a few clarification and from then on, if I see the problem I am able to relate it and build upon my skills. Fortunately, I am still young and have ample of time to build my solid foundation into rock solid knowledge. I am not too worried about my communicative incompetence because I know I can improve with more effort and time.
Over these two weeks, I feel as though my sentence forming has improved dramatically. Although I may not be able to respond to questions right away, I feel that I am now able to confidently make sentences on my own. My language partner and I have been working on verb conjugations, and the differences between using ser vs estar, and the preterite, vs imperfect tense. To build on these things we have been working, I have trying to practice using instances of both, during my conversations with my language partner. I feel the strategies my language partner and I have used have been effective. So far I have been quite satisfied with my progression in Portuguese.
A current issue Brazil is faced with is the gap in social class. Brazil's wealthiest 10% has access to over 40% of Brazil's income. On the other hand the poorest 10% have access to only 1% of Brazil's income. This can is quite apparent when one visits Brazil, as poor, and wealthy often live alongside each other, showing the large difference in social class. As a result Brazil has quite a high crime rate. Crimes such as kidnapping, and mugging are not uncommon. Another issue related to this, is that law enforcement is often corrupted. This discourages people, from reporting crimes, as the people feel the police are of no use. Brazil has taken some initiative to fix this, such as free education, but as a whole, Brazil still has more work to do. Also Brazil has secured its qualification for the World Cup. This has gotten Brazil as a nation very excited, as they will be attending the World Cup in Russia this summer.
The presentation that we did in class regarding some unique aspects of the cultures that we studied were extremely interesting. I learned some interesting aspects of Korean culture that I did not know of before. For example, one of the presentations highlighted Samsung's impact on Korean culture. It was extremely interesting to see how a company could have so much influence on a country's total economy and thus its identity. Samsung accounts for 15% of the country's GDP, an enormous amount for a company to own in a country as developed as South Korea. In addition, whenever Samsung has some embarrassment scandal, it is usually reverberated to the South Korean people, as they identify Samsung as Korean symbol.
The other presentation included the influence of Japanese colonialism on Korea, and how Koreans were restricted from using Korean during the years where they were colonized. This led to a lot of crossover words that were formed from Japanese culture.
