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Watching the video was quite surprising as it brought up a different kind of culture shock. Being in an environment that is vastly different than the University was back then, I can not imagine the kind of scenarios described in the video. 

My first memory of culture shock would be the time when I moved from Korea to America at the age of 5. Although I don't remember too much about what I thought back then or the specific things that took me by shock, but I do remember not enjoying my first couple years in America. I do remember begging my mom not to send me to kindergarten because I felt uncomfortable and felt isolated in a classroom full of American students. Being surrounded by children who have completely different lifestyles and a vastly different culture made me dread going to kindergarten and often I cried and made up excuses to not go. 

One of the more recent culture shocks that I can remember would be my transition from California to the University of Richmond. It wasn't too big a culture shock, but there were a number of things that stood out. The east coast felt a lot more business oriented and things seemed a bit fast-paced as to the laid back vibe that I had gotten used to back in California. Everyone here was always busy doing something, whether it was studying in the library or integrating themselves into the community as quickly as possible. And at first I was taken aback at the culture of the east coast because it was something I had never been exposed to. Also a big thing was the diversity of the campus, or lack thereof. Coming from a high school where half the population was asian, it was a culture shock to be coming to a school where the population is roughly 90% Caucasian, and the minorities making up the rest. It was a very different culture and because there was already a culture difference between my asian heritage and the majority of the school, the distance was divided that much further. However, it is interesting to see how this kind of culture shock has transformed me. Comparing myself to the teenager I was before coming to Richmond, I see a lot of different changes in terms of behavior when meeting someone new, or just different little things. When I even look at my friends who are attending schools back in California, I see a lot of differences in terms of what we do and how we go about doing things. 

I was not very surprised when I watched the Culture Shock video. Coming from the West Coast to the East Coast, I felt some of the things that surprised the international students in the video. The subtle small things that were different like the way people talked, or the culture here at UR was very surprising to me. However, the academic aspect of their culture shock was different from that of mine. When I came to this University, I was pleasantly surprised that it was very similar to the academic life I had back home. However, I did make the mistake of taking three different reading based classes, which made me think that UR assigns lots and lots of reading. 

My culture shock coming to University of Richmond was different. I grew up in California with significantly more diversity then Richmond in general. I grew up around mostly Asian Americans and one can even go through all of high school without befriending a single American person. Coming to this campus was a huge eye opener for me. I realized that I lived in a very diverse place and that the rest of America was not like California. I did have a big culture shock because of the difference of culture here, but I learned to adapt to the culture and began to get comfortable here. At first I did feel out of place because of the difference in the way people talked and the way people acted, but after I found my group of friends, I became more comfortable with this place.

The goal of week 4 is to apply what I have been learning with my language partners through forms of communication such as texting. I plan on communicating with my parents through text messages and I could receive immediate feedback from them on how I am doing. This could help me practice my skills on communicating clearly what I want to say in Korean and make sure that I am doing it right. 

My goal for week 5 will be to watch Korean programs without subtitles and understand the general idea of what is being conveyed. I have been using a source that my language partners and I have been using that provides educational videos on a variety of Korean language topics. These videos are taught entirely in Korean with English subtitles and I hope that constantly listening to and learning different aspects of the language will provide me assistance in my goal of the week. I can evaluate that I was successful if I understood the Korean program clearly. If I did not understand at all, I failed.

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. The letters are completely different from Latin script, and each letter is pronounced with its own specific sound. One of the good things about Ukrainian for a learner of the language is the fact that the language is largely phonetic, which means after you learn the alphabet and the pronunciation rules, there is no reason why you will struggle to spell a word that you hear. Ukrainian uses a ь (soft sign) which influences the sound of the letter preceding it, making its sound soft. Written Ukrainian looks a lot different than printed Ukrainian, and everyone writes in cursive. That meant that I had to learn which cursive letters corresponded to which printed letters. Luckily for me, Ukrainian and Russian cursive is pretty much the same, so I didn't have to relearn very much. However, I remember when I first learned how to write Russian cursive, and that was a frustrating process because the cursive is sometimes very different from the actual printed letters.

This week, I wanted to learn how to match personal and possessive pronouns with the correct gender of the words. There are a lot of rules about this in Ukrainian, and it is not as straight forward as in Russian. It took me a lot of practice to start to get the hang of these rules, but once I did, things got a little easier. I also wanted to learn the pronunciation rules of letters within words. In Ukrainian, the way letters are pronounced can be influenced by the other letters around them. Because Ukrainian uses a similar alphabet to Russian, I assumed that the pronunciation rules would be the same. However, after trying to have a short dialogue with my language partner, I discovered that my pronunciation was completely wrong. Ukrainian has an entirely different set of rules about how the letters influence each other, so learning those rules was also a goal this week. To do this, I referred to a Ukrainian grammar book and several different websites with pronunciation examples.

• Learning Journal 5:  Post (a) an evaluation of your First Artifact conversation, and (b) an assessment of how well you met your learning goals for weeks 4 and 5.

(a): Evaluation

I chose to use a letter as my first artifact because it highlights but one of my goals: writing. Further artifacts will showcase speaking (conversation) and listening skills.
I thought I did well on my first artifact. One of my learning tasks it to be able to understand a simple letter as well as to write one. In the letter, I focused on the structure as well as the core. For the structure, I learned basic phrases to begin and end the letter. Next, I incorporated greeting phrases such as "How are you doing?" and "I hope you are doing well." Because the person to whom I wrote recently graduated from college, I wrote "Congratulations for graduating from university." I also told the person that I was learning Bahasa Indonesia. Lastly, I told the person that I wish to meet her within the year. The, I concluded with a common ending phrase.

(b): Assessment

My learning goals for weeks 4 and 5 were to wrap up on greetings and to begin Identity-related topics such as self-identification and identifying those of others, primarily friends and family members.

For greetings, I did two units sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Education. And for Identity, I finished a unit from Let's learn Indonesian, and begun a unit from the Indonesian Ministry of Culture and Education. On top of that, I  watched numerous videos on the internet. Some related to the topics at hand, but others talked about culture and vernal life in Indonesia. This allowed me to work on my listening and interpreting skills.

From the written material, I covered: Listening -- to understand conversations that involve greetings, goodbyes, apologies, and thank you's; Speaking -- to speak using greetings, goodbyes, apologies, and thank you's; Reading -- to understand a simple email, to understand greetings and farewell expressions in an email, and to understand the structure of emails in Bahasa Indonesia; and Writing -- to write a simple, informal email. 

Moreover, for self-introduction, I covered: Listening -- To understand a monologue of others' self-introductions, to understand conversations that involve self-introduction; and, for survival language, to practice listening to a conversation that is mixed with Bahasa Indonesian and English; Reading -- to understand an Indonesian ID card; and Writing -- to write some descriptions of people / places.

Lastly, I have begun working on identifying family members -- family tree. My objectives for this task were: Identify the names of family members; give and ask for identity information; and introduce family members.