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I will be exploring two major cultural topics through the course of this semester. The first is national holidays in South Korea and the second is relationship values in South Korean society. These two are very broad topics and breakdown of the details included in each topic is given below.

1. National Holidays in South Korea: There are several national holidays observed in South Korea. However, I will focus more on the more popular ones. For each holiday, I will explore the historical and cultural significance, how it is celebrated by the people. Sometimes the rituals performed on these days can tell us a lot about the values and beliefs of the Korean society. I will also explore other days that are not official holidays but are celebrated by the young people. 

2. Relationship Values in Korean Society:  I will be exploring the dynamics of different kinds of relationship in Korean society. Korean people place a lot of importance on formality and hierarchy. As a result, there are a set of expectations and responsibilities associated to the relationship between family members, employer and employee, professor and student to name a few. Examining these relationships in detail will also give me an insight on the founding principles of the Korean society and also how those principles have changed overtime. 

I will collect information on these topics mainly through internet articles and discussion with my language partner. My secondary sources of information will be youtube videos and television shows. However, since information presented in the shows can be biased I will always double check with my language partner for validity. 

Besides learning facts, exploration of these topics will provide me information about the prevalence of issues such as patriarchy, discrimination of race, sex and socio-economic class, freedom of speech in the Korean society. It will also help me identify the differences between the Korean and American culture. 

A) My First Artifact contains a lot more than just a normal conversation, but I think that I can do pretty well just talking to someone, especially someone I have met for the first time. I can sign my name and I can recognize the letters of the alphabet when someone else signs their name. I can tell someone where I am from and I can also tell someone that I am learning ASL, so they know not to expect too much. Because I know so many random signs, I can often watch a conversation and catch a word here or there, but I don't always know exactly what is going on.

B) I've definitely progressed in the everyday language goal. I'm learning different foods, colors, clothing, how to ask for things, etc. The religion goal has been a little bit more difficult, but I have learned some new things. For example, whenever you talk about God, you always sign on the right side of your body. I am right-handed, so theoretically, this shouldn't be too difficult, but when I want to copy what someone else is saying, I have to remember to do it on the opposite side. 

The music goal is a little harder to reach, mostly because it is not something that deaf people talk about often. I did learn, though, that the sign for "music," "song," and "sing" is the same, so you just need to pay attention to what context it is used in. I did learn a few more signs, like "choir" and "artist." If I want to talk about a particular musician, I would just have to spell out their name. 

I found all of the presentations to be very interesting. Since I know a fair amount about modern Korean culture, the presentations about Korea were somewhat familiar to me, but I would say I learned a deeper knowledge about culture through them. I am completely unfamiliar with Pakistani culture, and Hadi's descriptions of how languages developed in South Asia and what this means for the variety of languages in Pakistan today was extremely fascinating to me from a linguistics standpoint. From my knowledge, China has a similar situation in which each region often has its own distinct dialect, but the country has been teaching standardized Mandarin, the national language, for decades now. I guess I never realized a country could lack a national language that unifies communication across every region. I also found his motivation for learning his particular target language really interesting, that learning this language first would then help him learn other languages used in nearby regions in Pakistan. 

Also, having no background in sign language, I learned a lot from that presentation, too. When the student was talking about the importance of using facial expressions for getting your point across, it made a lot of sense to me, but I would never have considered that to be so important in ASL. I really wonder how that is displayed in normal, everyday conversation, and what exactly makes a deaf person that much more expressive that you can tell them apart from a hearing person who is also using sign language.

As I hit the hard part of the learning curve for my Arabic studies, I started thinking about picking up another language to rekindle my love of learning languages. I was heavily leaning towards French up until I went to Istanbul for my spring break trip while I was studying abroad in Jordan. I was thinking about French for a number of reasons- I have an interest in the North African region and so it paired well with my Arabic studies. I have also been putting French off for years now. With my decision to spend a fifth year at UR, I was looking at places to study abroad again. Morocco was at the top of the list, but my decision became heavily swayed after falling in love with Istanbul. After much deliberation, I decided I wanted to go study abroad in Ankara. I wanted to be in a place where traveling is a lor more feasible than in a place such as Jordan or Morocco. Turkey has an amazing dynamic of Islamic and western culture mixing and it's an aspect that I am deeply curious about learning more about. This is where my desire to start learning Turkish from stemmed! Although I will be taking language classes at Bilkent University (assuming I get accepted into the program), I want to get a head start on learning more about Turkish culture, history, and especially the language. 

I met my language partner Arzu Avci on September 22nd! We decided to meet three times a week for 50 minutes: Mondays 3:00-3:50, Tuesdays 12-12:50, and Fridays 11:45-12:35. However, between that time and now my schedule changed so we adjusted our meeting times to Tuesdays 12-1:30 and Fridays 11:45-1:30 PM.

Resources:

I found a Turkish TV channel on YouTube for kids with videos about random things- such as numbers and alphabets. Everything is completely in Turkish, but there is a lot of repetition and exposes me to words I wouldn't know otherwise! For example, I began watching the video on the alphabet (which is about 40 minutes long), but I learned that "aslan" means lion! I was excited about this discovery because I thought of Aslan the lion from the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Since there is so much repetition and the video is so long, I can watch these videos while I'm doing Turkish homework or just play it in the background while I something else and get used to Turkish sounds and words. I prefer immersive language learning, so it helps that everything is in Turkish.

In order to get more exposure to Turkish, I thought it would be fun to watch a Turkish drama. There's a specific one that I've been meaning to watch about Layla and Majnun- which is just about the equivalent of Romeo and Juliet for eastern cultures. It's been hard to find the show with English subtitles, so I'm going to try watching this version with Arabic subtitles (so far it's been manageable!). I think this would also help in picking up tones and styles of speaking in Turkish. 

Among all of these, I also have Mango Languages and Byki to use as resources. I think these two help with reinforcing things that I practice with Arzu. I'm also thankful for all these resources because it means I don't have to plan my lessons as much- I can use Mango and Byki as my template for where to go next in terms of beginner's learning and just reinforce it through outside resources.

1.     Directions
   1. Lean at least 10 country names, several city names. Learn how to ask directions, understand how to say left and right and go straight.
2.     Numbers, colors, dates, birthday
   1. Learn how count from 1 to 100, tell others my phone numbers and ask their numbers. I will learn how to tell the date and day of the week, as well as months, seasons.  
   2. I will learn how to say when is my birthday, and ask others when is their birthday.
3.      Cloth/shopping
   1. I will learn the vocabularies of at least ten colors and different clothing. I will learn how to tell others what color I like, and ask others what color they like, ask what color is their clothing, tell what clothing I am wearing, and what clothing are they wearing.
   2. I will learn how to ask how much a cloth costs.
4.       Time - what time is it
   1. I will learn how to tell others the time and ask what time is it now. I will learn how to say I have class on the exact time, and ask what time others have class on.
5.       Jobs
   1. I will learn how to ask what they do, where they work at, how do they like their jobs. I will learn at least ten job names. I will also learn what I would like to do, and where I would like to work at.
6.        Weather
   1. how to tell others today’s weather, tomorrow’s forecast. I will learn words of different weather types, such as windy, sunny, raining, cloudy, and windy. I will also learn how to express my personal feeling on different weather type.

The second part（Reading and Writing）

http://www.howtostudykorean.com/unit0/

Learn to read, write and pronounce Korean.

1. Learn most basic and common letters in the Korean alphabet. Aiming to not only read these letters but also how to arrange them to make syllables on my own.
2. Go deeper into learning how to read Hangul by learning more letters. (Maybe harder) some of these letters are complicated because they are so similar in appearance and sound to letters that I already learned.
3. Basic Korean Grammar
4. Read and write basic sentence in Korean

Learning Plan:

I want to learn the basics of Turkish to be able to travel through Ankara without running into any trouble. This includes developing survival language skills: 

1. Greetings/introductions

2. Numbers

3. Asking for directions

4. Transportation vocabulary

Despite being interested in learning the language on a holistic level (including grammar and developing conversational skills), this remains my priority and I hope will lead into everything else. 

I want to be flexible about how I learn Turkish, but I definitely want a lot of interactive tools to help me throughout it. I plan to use Byki and other applications on my phone such as Babbel (which I've used before for Arabic). I'm also going to create notecards on Quizlet for vocabulary. I've also found that Quizlet has a lot of vocabulary sets for languages so I'm planning on joining Turkish classes on there and look through the vocabulary lists they have available. Also, since I'm taking Turkish to help prepare for when I go to Ankara (fingers crossed that this plan works out!) and I want to reach out to non-profits working with Syrian refugees, I want to be familiar with refugee/crises vocabulary. Pronunciation and accent is something I'm very particular about so I know that I'll be trying to perfect that as much as possible throughout my learning- I'm going to use YouTube as my main source for listening to Turkish sounds. In that process, I will probably be uncovering Turkish music to make the process a lot less boring and more enjoyable! 

In this semester, I am going to discover two Korean cultural topics. One is the identification, sentiment and effect about Korean TV drama and the other is related to culture, gender, and self. The perspective of second cultural topics will be going to expand from individualism-collectivism relationship in Korea. Why I am going to choose these two topics here. Since I learned a lot of Korean words and sentences from Korean TV dramas last semester, I discovered some interesting aspects on Korean TV dramas, and I knew a lot of Korean movies are from their eye-catching news in everyday life. What kind of social values are these Korean movies going to transfer? Obviously the big picture of two cultural topics that I am going to talk is social values.

I have already found several journals about Korean drama affects and Korean individualism-collectivism relationship. In addition, I plan to talk with several friends coming from Korea, and know about the real social hierarchy and value in Korea. At the end of semester, I hope to come up with the specific social values how people will behave these social values, whether or not the accelerated economies is influenced by this kind of social values. 

Reflection Paper 1