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I want to further improve my writing skills and vocabulary. I will continue to read academic articles on Korean Economy and attend my weekly classes to achieve this goal. 

For a change, I will read something else in addition to the economy article. I want to read something with an artistic nature to it like a poem or a short story so that I am not just learning professional language but also artistic language as well.

I went on Naver.com and read articles on Economy and how SK telecom stopped their pyramid scheme selling, which is when you sell a phone to someone, you get a portion of what you sold, when the person you sold the phone to sells a phone to someone they know, you get a portion of a portion of what they sold ... and continued. I actually learned a few vocabs from reading this article. It was interesting.

I have yet to read a short story but I am searching for a proper one to read.

For my Cultural Project,

I think I want to talk about the military system in Korea and how it forces every men to enlist in the army.

I want to learn more about the history. When it was enacted, why , and the societal impact it has.

The Korean writing system is interesting. Other Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese have a totally different system where each letter is a word in itself and have their own meanings. Despite the fact that Korea allowed western influence later than Japan and China, its writing system is very similar to European/ American languages. Korean has alphabets just like English and each alphabets don't hold any inherent meaning in themselves. You make up the word with these alphabets and put them together to form the sentence just like English. This writing system was creating by King Se-Jong because he thought the older version of Korean was way too hard to learn for commoners. He wanted to create a more accessible language that everyone in Korea could use. Needless to say, it was successful and he created a very interesting language.

My artifact conversation went really well (haven't uploaded yet but will soon!). This level of conversation is nothing special to me since I grew up in Korea and am fluent in the language.

As far as my goals from last week, it went well. I read a few articles on Korean Economy again, many of them were about iphones and android phones. My parents noticed that I was using a pretty advanced vocab here and there when I was speaking with them. As far as writing goes, it seems like from the way I have been performing in my Korean classes, my writing is getting better as well.

I want to further improve my writing skills and my vocabulary. I will continue to read articles online. I've found that reading articles on Korean Economy is great because it uses a lot of academic and advanced vocabulary as well as provide me with knowledge that are actually useful in understanding the current state of Korea and the world better.

I know a variety of websites like Naver.com and Daum.com  that have unlimited numbers of articles on Korean economy or other professional matters. Reading articles on these websites will be how I go about achieving my goals for the next few weeks. I am also attending the weekly classes which is helping me with my writing.

I will evaluate my success by talking to my parents of course. They have noticed that my Korean is a little less "child-like". I hope to have them evaluate my progress.  

I wanted to write about "Chuseok" which is Korean Harvest Day ( Thanksgiving).

On the morning of Chuseok, we have Charye which is a memorial service for ancestors. With Korea becoming more westernized and Christainity being a big part of it, this practice is less common nowadays.

For food, We eat songpyun, which is like a rice cake with sweet honey stuffings inside or sometimes a savory nutty stuffing inside. It depends on who makes it.

There is also Hangwa which is like a snack made of grains and honey and other things. It looks like a very intricately made cookie.

This is a day when all family members gather and eat great food and just have a good time much like the Thanksgiving in the United States. Obviously not many Koreans are still farmers like they used to be so this is more about keeping the tradition alive and just having fun with the family. In many ways, it is no different from the United States' Thanksgiving.

This week I wanted to learn more vocabs and get better at writing.

I read an economics article in Korean again. This time, it was an article about how the Volkswagen and audi sales in Korea have been banned. Volkswagen and audi, following their recall due to wrongful advertisement of their MPG and other things, did not give Korean buyers any compensation fee. It is a small market that they just abandoned. Korean government banned the sale of these two brands. In this gap, Mercedez Benz rose to the peaks and took over the sales.

I learned a few words from reading this article and further familiarized myself with advanced Korean. I also wrote a variety of sentences in my Korean classes and took a step forward in terms of mastering my writing in Korean.

Formality and informality is very clearly distinguished in Korean.

Conversation with an elder or an unknown person are all formalized. Sentences end with words like "yo", "da" which usually indicate formality. When you talk to anyone older than you even by one year, you should speak in a formalized way as if talking to an elder (because by definition, even someone 1 year older than you is an elder). Also even words like yes and no are formalized to "nae" and "ah-ni-yo"

When talking to someone your age or younger, you speak in informalized sentences. These sentences tend to end without the "yo" or "da" but there are exceptions. In terms of yes and no, they become "eung" and "ah-ni". Notice how the "yo" in ah-ni-yo is removed in the informalized version.

I took this class for Urdu last year.  BYKI, Mango languages and Diigo were very helpful for learning the language as a beginner. For the purpose of my lessons, which is to further perfect a language that I am already fluent at, those resources don't provide much. The resources in the book shelve aren't ideal for my purposes either. Web-based resources like news articles and academic articles definitely help.

I have begun reading articles from the newspaper to get a better sense of advanced vocabulary. I read an article on Hanjin shipping, one of the largest sea transportation companies in the world. The article said that Hanjin had filed for bankruptcy and is going through changes due to their business not being successful anymore ( gas price going down, less things to transport over sea). This helped me brush up on the language more and I learned a word or two from it. 

My interest in my language is the simply desire to perfect my mother tongue. I was born in South Korea and went to elementary school there. I used to be perfectly fluent in Korean until my family came to the United States and I started speaking English way more often. As my English skills grew, my Korean worsened a little. I am still fluent in the language but not as much as I used to be. My Korean skills are not comparable to people my age in Korea because I stopped learning advanced Korean after I came to the United States. I want to restore my Korean levels and hopefully catch up with people my age in Korea using this semester.

My  goal was to learn the verb “egon” to be able to say verbs like “I am sleeping,” etc., which I accomplished mostly through Amaia, although Aurrera did help me in being able to come up with the vocabulary to say certain things. I practiced many times being able to answer Amaia when she asked me a question, and memrise flashcards were especially helpful for finding abstract nouns to use egon with. I still need to work on this vocabulary though, although I know the basics and when to use egon over izan.

Although I already did a brief description of this in a previous learning journal, I think that I'm going to do my Culture Project on Basque surnames, because it is a concept deeply ingrained into Basque culture, and it helps show off the language in a very simple way as well. My learning goals are to learn some basic suffixes and stems that are commonly used in Basque surnames in order to better understand the language in general, and also be able to make the connection to Basque surnames I might encounter. I want to be able to invent surnames as know what they mean, because I think it can be useful for using the Basque language in general.

My goals for this semester is to re-master my Korean skills. I am fluent speaking the language but I feel a little awkward when I try to write in it. My vocab is not on par with other students in Korea my age and that is an area that I feel that I need a little more practice in. My Korean skill can be considered advanced but it is not on the level of students my age in Korea; I want to reach for that level.

My learning plan incorporates reading articles and books written in highly academical Korean. By reading these writings, I hope to perfect my skills to a point where it is comparable to college students in Korea. I believe there are great deal of grammar, vocabulary, and etc to be learned from these advanced writings.

I am also attending classes with my Korean tutor twice a week to further strengthen my skills overall in a general sense.

I thought "Culture Shock" was interesting because of the fact that it used our own students to talk about the differences between their home country and coming to the U.S. as a student. I hadn't realized how difficult it was for some people because I am so comfortable in my own culture. My own most memorable experiences with culture shock came when I was fifteen and went to France to live with some close family friends for a month. Even though I had gone to France every year since I was a baby, it was very different living with a French family that it was living with my own. I remember it was really tough to be so far from my parents, especially since I'd never been away from them for more that a week before, and it was especially tough to be speaking French the whole time. Although it was tough for a month, I think subconsciously I just believed that it would get better over time, which was why it was so surprising to me that other people had such a hard time adjusting.

• Learning Journal 6:  State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.

a) My learning goals this week were to complete tasks within Task 2: Family Information. More specifically, My goals were to complete the family tree, introduction to family members, and give and ask information about family. Moreover, I began to go more in-depth by beginning to describe family relations, how to negate a nominal, and how to ask where someone is. Lastly, I started written grammar which included possessive pronouns and progressive form.

For cultural tasks, I learned about the use of kin terms used to address and refer to family members and describing physical characteristics -- how people describe others and what is culturally acceptable.

b) I accomplished these goals using two sources: Let's Learn Indonesian (from the global studio center) chapter 2 "Family and Friends" and unit 3 from Indonesia's Ministry of Culture and Education titled "My Family." Plus, I met with my language learning partner for two hours over the course of this week. This week, I worked on my reading comprehension skills, my listening skills, and my speaking skills from activities in both of these sources. I finished learning how to make a family tree and identify my family in terms of familial associations. In addition, I accomplished introducing my self and my family members to others. I practiced how to solicit such information as well. I also started to learn Indonesian grammar. More specifically, the possessive pronoun and progressive form. For culture, I have been reading about more immediate cultural characteristics such as familial hierarchy and basic physical characteristics as well as more elevated "cultural" circumstances such as contemporary Indonesian geopolitics. 

My goal for this SDLC program is to just speak basic level of Turkish which helps me travel Turkey conveniently. Therefore, I think I do not have to study or concentrate on structure of the language. As I mention earlier journal or reflection paper, as a learner of English when I was middle school or high school students, I concentrated a lot in grammar instead of speaking. I felt kind of regretful about that. Now I do not repeat that kind of mistakes again, I will more concentrate on speaking and reading for Turkish. Of course, to understand some words and speak right way, I needs some structures. I think I can only study for that parts. My language partner who helps me a lot speaking Turkish, also helps me speaking right way based on proper structure.

I also think reference grammar is not that useful, because as the article said, not every people in the world use the exactly same structures. If our thinking about the structure of language fixed on specific language structures, then our efficiency for learning new language is going to decrease. For me, I'd like to accept the new language totally in different way with another languages.  

By researching about Turkish Culture, I saw some interesting one of the linguistic aspect which is body languages. I just share the specific body languages of Turkey. 

Turkey has it's own body language. It can be kind of funny or even strange for some other culture to watch those gestures and try to understand what a person is trying to tell you. Understanding the body language is also understanding the culture of a country.

So here are some main body languages that you will see in Turkey. Enjoy !

l   The handshake is not the most common greeting among friends. A man will greet another man by kissing each other on both cheeks. A man will greet a woman also on the same way. Note that if there are two religious people (these is valid between a woman and a man) they would not touch themselves with a handshake or kiss.

l   It is very common in Turkey to see two man holding hands or arm in arm at walking on the street (Turks tend to touch much more than Westerners). This does not mean they are homosexual, they are just good friends :)

l   Turks tend to stare at one another and foreigners more than Westerners are accustomed to. Westerners should not feel singled out or watched when such behavior occurs.

l   If you see someone holding their hand with palm up and bringing fingers in toward thumb, this is a compliment and generally means something is "good." It can be done when they like a food, a cloth, or any object. It can also mean they find a woman or man nice and handsome.

l   The "thumbs up" gesture is commonly used for hitchhiking

l   Shaking your head sideways means, "I don't understand."

l   Raising your chin, moving your eyebrows up and simultaneously clicking your tongue means "NO." (Try it. It is fun ! ). This one is one of the most different gestures of the Turkish body language and can be also found in Greece.Please check the picture at the right hand side showing this gesture. A sharp downward nod means yes.

l   If a Turk waves their hand up and down at you, palm towards the ground, they are signaling for you to come.

l   The gesture created by protruding your thumb between the first and second finger has an extremely offensive meaning. This gesture is called "the fig" and is considered obscene throughout much of the Mediterranean area.

l   The idle habit of snapping your fingers with one hand and then slapping the top of a closed fist is considered obscene. This may be one of the rudest possible gestures.

l   The gesture created when a circle is formed by touching the forefinger to the thumb does not mean "ok." In Turkey this symbol means you are a homosexual. It is quite offensive. Please see picture at the left hand side.

l   It is rude to point your finger or the sole of your shoe toward a person.

resource: http://www.business-with-turkey.com/tourist-guide/turkish_body_language.shtml

Learning a totally different language is kind of difficult things. These articles just helped my understand how to start or prepare to learn different languages. It was also hard and dry readings so I think I can understand what it means 100 percent but It was informative and quite new to me.

Actually I liked the part that explains about the relationship between the language and our brain. I just saying something, while my brain is also doing a lot. As a Korean, I am not a fluent English speaker and of course not even speaker of Turkish. I think if I will practice regularly I could be much more fluent from now. But I think it is really hard for me to be a fluent Turkish speaker. Learning about the differences between the gramma of the different languages made me realize that Turkish is no easy things. According to the reading, different language speakers hear things differently due to the structures, semantics, etc. Fortunately, my goal is not to be a fluent Turkish speaker, but just learn some expression for traveling. Anyway it was really helpful readings for starting learning new languages. 

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