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I have started to write in Korean by keeping a notebook where I practice writing down vocabulary and sentences or phrases. I prefer to write in freehand since it allows me to practice my stroke order. I have started to notice patterns emerging in the structures between words, clauses, and sentences. One such pattern is the fact that certain Korean words are commonly used in formal and informal contexts. The character 요 is commonly used at the end of formal phrases. I did not notice any explicit patterns in the words of a specific topic. Even though I learned a lot of vocabulary topic by topic there has not been an immediate connection in what letters are used. The relationship between simple and complex sentences can often be just an omission of certain words in the sentences even though the overall meaning is the same. Thus, the complex sentences can be stated more succinctly. I have not made any complex sentences on my own since most of my sentence building has been done in the conversational introductions or one off phrases. Knowledge regarding parts of speech, government, and agreement have been essential in communicating in written contexts because grammar is fundamental to sentence construction. 

Some short meaningful writing exercises from Korean that I have recently worked on are telling time, naming the body part, introducing oneself, naming the animal, the date, and my favorite: naming a food. :0

During these two weeks, I have interacted with the Korean culture in a joyful manner! Choongman Chicken opened up in downtown Richmond! Choongman chicken is a franchise Korean Fried Chicken restaurant and it is known to be as close to authentic Korean Fried Chicken you can get to here in America. So as soon as I heard that they have opened, my roommate and I went to Choongman chicken on my birthday. Let me say, it was a birthday well spent. At first bite, tasting the Korean fried chicken brought back very dear memories from Korea. I remembered the time after our family read through the Bible together, we would celebrate by ordering from the closest Korean Fried Chicken place. Without shame, I can share that I came back the following week with my roommate and indulged in some good Korean food. During the times at the restaurant, I was able to briefly practice my Korean. Not to mention, I saw a familiar face working for the restaurant, my friend Jun. I highly encourage anyone reading this to try Choongman chicken!

I also watched an episode of Hospital Playlist, a Korean drama that explores the daily lives of doctors. It specifically follows a friend group of five doctors who all met during college and are working at the same hospital. It kinds of reminds me of Grey’s Anatomy. Watching the Korean drama helped me reminisce about the times when I visited my brother in the hospital after he had gotten into a car accident. I also learned that it is common for patients to call doctors “teachers” instead of doctors, especially if a doctor is in a higher position. I also have been practicing my pronunciation by signing some Korean hymns. Playing the guitar while singing these songs truly does give a nostalgic feeling as I grew up within the Korean church. Korean hymns also tend to be more emotionally in terms of both lyrics and melody compared to English hymns. 

I have been practicing my conversational skills with So Myung as well. In one instance, I asked her in Korean, how her family was doing. She told me that her sister was actually having trouble attending online classes. In fact, she has to call home to remind her mother to tell her sister to get to class. She then asked me how my family was doing. I told her that my mother’s body was recovering well after kidney stones. We then strayed from conversing about our families to talking about how each of us deals with anger. I told her that I usually express my anger through passive-aggressiveness and through intentional disregard towards the person I am mad at. So Myung also told me that when she is mad at someone she gives them the silent treatment as well. She then told me of the struggle of wanting to invite people over to her dorm but not being able to due to COVID. Her little brother is high-risk to COVID so she has to be more careful than other people.

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In my personal experience, one of the most renowned deaf individuals in history is Helen Adams Keller. She was born on June 27, 1880, to Arthur H. Keller, a retired Confederate Army captain, farmer, and local newspaper editor, and Katherine Adams Keller, a young educated woman from Memphis. Helen was the older of two daughters and in February 1882, just before her second birthday, Helen succumbed to an undetermined disease – possibly scarlet fever or meningitis- that stole her hearing, as well as her sight. Because she lost these two major senses at such a young age, Helen never learned to speak, thus she communicated with her family members through the physical touch of facial expressions! Additionally, due to her “disability”, she was not offered a formal education until the age of seven. It was at this point that Katherine knew of her daughter's intelligence, despite her lack of vision and hearing, and she demanded her daughter's education at which point Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was contacted by the Keller family in the summer of 1886. The famous inventor suggested contacting the director of Perkins Institution for the Blind, Michael Anagnos, to request a teacher for Helen.

       Anne Mansfield Sullivan, Anagnos’ star pupil and valedictorian, became Helen’s manual sign langue instructor on March 3^rd of 1887. Because Helen could not hear, nor see, Sullivan had to be creative to teach Helen manual sign language. Her method, although originally met with resistance, was to teach Helen the alphabet and then spell out words as Helen encountered them. This was a technique developed by Samuel Gridley Howe, Perkin’s first director. For instance, on April 5^th,1887, there was a breakthrough moment in which Helen discovered that “ everything had a name” during which one of Helen’s hands was being exposed to water while Sullivan spelled W-A-T-E-R on the other hand!  Below is Hellen’s reflection of the experience:

“Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something is forgotten—a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! …Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.”

       A year later, Sullivan took Helen to the Perkins School in Boston where Helen learned to read Braille and use a special typewriter for the blind. Helen’s success and perseverance began to get attention in the press and she was even invited to meet President Grover Cleveland in the Whitehouse. Helen's education blossomed as she went to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf for two years to improve her speaking abilities in 1894 and then went to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in 1896. After, she was accepted into Radcliffe College where she graduated cum laude in 1904. However, it is important and inspiring to note that even before graduation, Helen published two books, The Story of My Life (1902) and Optimism (1903). These books were the catalyst that jumpstarted Helen’s carrier as a lecturer and writer.  Since then, Helen has written dozens of articles and books and becoming an advocate for the blind, women’s suffrage, and ultimately was the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Helen Keller never married or had any children and she died on June 1^st, 1968.

https://www.perkins.org/history/people/helen-keller?gclid=CjwKCAjwz6_8BRBkEiwA3p02Vf_I1k54VhZJRWeye6VIH9WhbboPwozajPbr5J4irDx6ujKHzKtdsRoCb0IQAvD_BwE

https://www.afb.org/about-afb/history/helen-keller/biography-and-chronology/chronology

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/helen-keller#:~:text=Undeterred%20by%20deafness%20and%20blindness,the%20American%20Civil%20Liberties%20Union.

On Friday, October 9^th, 2020, Netflix released an original TV reality series – Deaf U. The series consists of eight-episodes, each episode around 20 minutes long. The show’s executive producer Nyle DiMarco is actually an American model, actor, and deaf activist who gained his original following from the 2003-2018 series, America’s Next Top Model where DiMarco one season 22 competition and from Dancing with the Stars, which he also one. It is important to know that DiMarco is also deaf and despite the challenges he has faced, he has been a major contributor in the spearhead effort towards deaf activism. Interestingly enough, I remember when DiMarco was on America’s Next Top Model, and during his time on air, he did express the difficulties of being the only Deaf person on a show where all other models were hearing. Although I have wanted to learn ASL since I was young, DiMarco proved to be major catalysts in my learning of the language and his work is often someone I look for in inspiration towards learning the language and learning about the culture.

       The show follows a group of students at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Three of the students are young men and three are young women, both groups from different races, classes, and sexualities. Additionally, For those who do not know about Gallaudet, Gallaudet is a federally chartered private university for the education of the deaf and hard of hearing, although hearing students do attend the university. This reality TV show is similar to that seen on other platforms such as MTV and the American Broadcasting Company. The college students being followed share their stories ranging from topics of sex, dating, love, family drama, and friend drama. However, what is so unique about this show is that these issues are inspected and shown through that of a deaf perspective. The show does address the difficulties and experiences of deaf people living in a hearing world; however, the show’s normalcy in the topic and exhibition of everyday life is to show the hearing communities that deaf communities are not too different from our own. As noted in idiewire.com’s article, Deaf U lifts “ the veil and dispel notions about the deaf community that can often extend to all disabled communities out there.”

       From this show, you will not only begin to normalize the deaf community, but you may also begin to see some sides of the deaf community that you may never have thought of. For example, the show reveals that, in this situation, there is a bit of a hierarchy in the deaf community where deafness is revered depending on your upbringing (hearing vs non-hearing communities) and how many members of your family and generations have been deaf. The purpose of showing all lights of the Deaf community is not to create the generalization as to that the community is awful or good, but rather show hearing audience members that this is a community like all others-filled with some good people and some bad people. This step sets a serious step in the right direction towards the representation of the deaf community and I can not wait until more series and moves like such are released.

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/10/deaf-u-review-netflix-1234590049/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/deaf-u-ep-nyle-dimarco-netflix-series-is-no-after-school-special

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/deaf-u-ep-nyle-dimarco-netflix-series-is-no-after-school-special

Hello again! I hope everyone is doing well. These past two weeks have been amazing for my ASL journey. Reba and I have been able to hold conversations much longer than previously before and we are also practicing new vocabulary words and modifiers. Also, the amount of fingerspelling I have to do is much less than previously before and I can read Reba’s finger much faster than before. Reba also provided me with the opportunity to attend her American sign language course on Tuesday evenings for the school of continuing studies from 6:00 through 7:00. Faith,  another member of the ASL SDLP program, was also at the meeting! Primarily, I served as a translator for Reba as she taught the new students to question words, colors, where they were from, names, and practiced greetings and fingerspelling with them. All in all, there were about 9 students.

       I did not realize the difficulty of teaching more than one person sign language at a time! Gosh, it is very difficult!  Much of the language requires the speaker to point to another person when asking a question or addressing the said person. However, on zoom, that part of the language cannot be expressed in a group meeting. If Reba points her finger at the computer screen, the question or addressing could be towards anyone of the members. I have been thinking about different ways to combat the issues I had noticed while teaching sign to a large group through zoom and I think one way that might be helpful is to have the professor sign the initials of whoever they are addressing beforehand. That way, specific individuals will know when they are being asked or told information. Additionally, I noticed that Reba often got very close to the camera, had it positioned in an unpractical position, and would constantly ask if she could be seen. I expressed this concern to Mary Catherine Raymond as she is a student in the course and she has been traveling to Reba’s home and helping figure out the best ways to teach such a language through the internet.  

       All in all, I am fairly happy with the rate and way in which my singing language abilities are developing. I can understand a lot more than at the start of the semester and Reba actually shared a deaf news source for me to watch and learn from. The news source is called https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdANpi-iksc&feature=youtu.be  and is approximate 7 minutes long. The news anchor covers topics around the world in a summary ranging across all topics. It was really neat to watch someone sign for a larger audience, but at the normal playback speed, I did have trouble understanding the signer. It wasn’t until I slowed the speed down to .75 x playback speed that I was able to understand more of the signs signed. I am excited to watch more of those sign videos, but in the meantime, the reality TV show Deaf U has been both entertaining and educational in learning how other individuals to sign and which signs are colloquial and which are not.

During these past two weeks I learned about the complexities of the Korean language regarding the names of relatives. One thing that greatly differs between Korean and English is that the relatives have different names depending on which side of the family they are on. This process goes all the way back to the grandpa and grandma status from what I have learned about.

Another topic that we touched on again was the importance of conversational Korean phrases. I learned some essential phrases such as excuse me and you are welcome. Though it is interesting that you’re welcome is implied in Korean and rarely used. This is similar to how I already speak so that was nice. The conversational phrases are also affected by who you are speaking to. The informal and formal usages are extremely important here as to complement the prose of the person you are talking with. One aspect of Korean culture that naturally arose from this conversation is the ritual that Koreans have before eating a meal. They often say ‘I will enjoy this food’ and ‘I have enjoyed this food’, respectively before and after eating a meal. This process is absent in American culture and in Chinese culture to my knowledge but is present in Japanese culture though it is out of my scope of study. We also learned how to say it's delicious and it is not particularly good. This is especially important as I can use the phrase in practice during a meal. I extrapolated from this to learn what tastes bad was in Korean. 

Another topic that I really enjoyed learning about was food. I think that food is an essential part of understanding a culture and by extension a language. Additionally, I was hungry so learning about food helped prepare me for lunch. We learned about the basic types of food such as meat, rice, noodles, egg, vegetables, and more. A couple of interesting facts here is that the side dishes are very common in Korean meals and are often irreplaceable. Additionally, some important words that we dived into are red chili paste and salted seafood. Thus I learned the importance of rice, spice, and seafood in Korean cuisine. In terms of learning planning, food is an effective avenue of learning a language since it is useful anytime you go out to eat that culture’ food. It is a bit sad that right now eating out is not appropriate for health guidelines but I hope that next semester there are more opportunities to use food vocabulary to study Korean. In line with that, I heard that in previous years language partners would go out and eat together to study that culture’s cuisine and practice the language they were studying. I hope that Somyung and I can share a Korean meal before I graduate next semester.

So far repetition has been an effective way of keeping up with my growing list of vocabulary. Although I can’t use all of them, slowly I will incorporate certain words into my Korean inventory.

Languages go extinct when there is no one left to speak it conversationally and documentation of the language becomes sparse. One point of interest on this is that many speakers of dying languages are elderly and the language tends to degenerate with the speaker’s health. When a language dies it is quite difficult for it to recover since oral teaching is significant when it comes to linguistics. One technique that has become prevalent for languages is to record one’s language phrases and send them online. This has happened with American Indian Languages like the one mentioned in the New York Times article. Initially the language recordings were limited to those who belonged to the tribe but by sending the audio online, the tribe and recorder learned how much of an interest there was to learn languages abroad. However, the article did note that just understanding how to say a few phrases in a language does not constitute a speaker status since competency is lacking in such a case. Although recording phrases and the language as a whole is a way for linguists to help preserve a language, it is not entirely sufficient because there are ideas that can not be expressed simply through speech. Things like grammatical rules can fall into the category of ideas that require a more complex perspective to understand than simple audio recordings. Another way linguists can help preservice languages is to create educational text alongside these audio recordings which requires significant effort and luck because many dying languages are difficult to learn in the first place because the speakers are ill elderly. One idea is that languages can consume each other to create hybrid languages but overall reduce the number of languages out there or cause language to go extinct as a result. This may be more common in more centralized areas as the need for a unified system exacerbates.

A dead language can be brought back to life given that there were resources left behind by the original speakers and enough interest or requirement to speak that dead language. The American Indian language that was supposed to die has recovered slightly but completely dead languages require those complex resources to revive them. Some efforts currently underway to document linguistic diversity would be the work of linguists like David Harrison and also the enabling of diverse foreign language options in schools. One thing that was mentioned that was quite interesting was the education system stifled the development of dying languages. Since there were fewer speakers in a language, often schools would not offer certain languages despite having a language requirement. I understand that personally as I witnessed how few options students were given in high school and middle school regarding language choices. Even here in UR, there are only a few languages that are not in the independent language student program that I am sure many students would appreciate the opportunity to learn. Thus programs like the Self Directed Language Acquisition Program also help to document linguistic diversity here.

After reviewing my language plan I think that my original structure was not specific enough in delegating the work I had to do to learn Korean. Despite this, my current learning style has evolved and adapted naturally to be more specific without going back to my learning plan that often. One of the main things that I missed in my initial learning plan was the concept of themes for vocabulary. I was too focused on the grammatical types of certain words that I had learned when I should have been focused on what types of words do I want to convey and what words are commonly used and are useful in understanding. One thing that I did plan out well was the learning process for the Korean alphabet because by the time I had written up the learning plan, I had already practiced the Korean alphabet significantly. This isn’t to say that I have mastered the Korean alphabet like my learning plan suggests because mastery is something quite difficult to achieve even for native Korean speakers. There are nuances that a novice learner would overlook like I did that really differentiates the fluency of the Korean language; this is especially true for the fundamental building blocks of Hangul, the alphabet.

One thing that did become quite frequent was the use of YouTube as a studying platform for learning Korean. When I first wrote up my learning plan, I had some idea of what YouTube offered but I did not internalize the depth to which the video platform could be used for learning. Many native speakers offer their knowledge and experience to viewers for free and it is a resource that is always available on campus. Jumping into grammar was an essential part of learning any language and I think that I did not have sufficient information to break down the process of learning grammar at the time of writing the learning plan. Now that I have been studying Korean grammar for some time now, I understand that there are some complexities that I did not consider. Some examples of these are particles and batchims, which have been a major focus of mine for the past few weeks. These rules are necessary for constructing sentences and original ideas, which I did bring up in my presentation of my learning plan. 

Regarding how I have incorporated what I learned in SDLC 105 into my Korean learning, I have expanded my understanding of linguistic proficiency as stated earlier. Additionally, we have recently delved into the concept of language families, a topic that I haven’t considered when looking at the language and culture of Korea. I initially thought that only the close neighbors of an area would affect the language but the distance and expanse that the language families covered surprised me. 

In this next stretch of learning, I need to focus on reaching competency with the grammar and reading of Korean. I believe that my initial expectation of learning speed was a bit of an overestimation and I would like to reframe my learning experience as being more natural. Learn what topics are useful and simple and build up step by step as a native Korean speaker would. It may take a long time to become sufficiently skilled at reading and writing and speaking Korean but with consistent practice, it should be possible to become as skilled as a grade schooler in Korean language haha.

During these two weeks, I have been able to practice Korean on multiple occasions. On Saturday morning I went to Park Joon’s(Korean Salon) again to get a haircut because my hair was getting a bit messy. I was able to use Korean to tell the hairdresser to give me a low fade and just trim my top hair. After the haircut, my Korean friend and I went to Grand Market which is right next door, and ate Korean food. I had Korean bibimbop and my friend has a mix of black bean paste noodles and Korean Spicy Sea Food noodles. I spent Saturday afternoon an evening with my friends from VCU. We ate Korean food together. We ate some Korean BBQ Galbi, Some spicy grilled pork, and some Korean bean paste soup. We also played Korean games together. After eating, we decided to watch some Korean comedy shows. I was surprised I could understand the jokes and the funny scenes with my limited vocabulary. 

I was able to practice Korean with my language multiple times throughout the week. Somyung and I focused on talking in Korean because that is what I am primarily concerned about. We talked about our favorite Korean foods. She told me that her favorite food was naengmyeon (Korean Cold Noodles). She says that naenmyeon has a very pleasing specific flavor and she craves it because she has not eaten it in a while. I proceeded to ask her whether she is able to get it in Maryland, where she lives. She told me that her mom usually cooks the Korean food that she eats. I asked her if she thinks that her mom is a good cook and she said yes. Then I told her my favorite Korean foods which are JJangmeon and Korean Fried Chicken. I could eat that pretty much every day. She then asked whether I was going to stay on campus during Thanksgiving break. I told her no and told her that when I called my mother earlier, she told me that she misses me too much! Somyung told me that she has to stay on campus during the break because she won’t have a place to study adequately at home. She said that there are also too many distractions at home like her younger siblings. I completely understand her situation because I lived and still live in a small apartment for most of my life. 

I also got the chance to talk to my brother over facetime in Korean. He seems to be doing well and he told me that he found a church he could go to that is only ten minutes away from his campus. We also talked about his plans for transferring to another school. He wants to transfer to either Cleveland State University in Ohio or Virginia Commonwealth University. I advised him to email the admissions to if he could obtain an application waiver because the application was seventy dollars. He told me he will, and I helped him form a draft of the email.

For this week, we finished another episode of "Reply 1994" during our group meeting. For the individual meeting, we went over some basic greetings and sentences that we would use very frequently.

Saying hello

During these past two weeks, Reba and I have had many great sessions together! We are continuing with using Zoom so I can record and refer back to the signs. We continued to work on vocabulary and just had random conversations so I could get more practice.

I have been learning the signs for who, what, when, where, and how so that I can start asking questions. Reba usually asks me multiple questions using these signs, so I get the practice of recognizing them. This past week I have been practicing signing opposite words. When Reba signs “right”, I have to remember and sign back “wrong”. We have been doing this for a couple of sessions, so I am pretty good at responding quickly, but I will sometimes only understand one of the words and forget its opposite. This is where the perks of Zoom come in because all I have to do to review the material is to just replay the recording. When learning a new language, repetition is key. Even though we repeat the same words and its opposites each class, some of the signs are still difficult to remember, but I do improve each time!

After learning more vocabulary and trying to teach my friends a couple of signs, I realized that there are many unrelated signs that are so similar to each other. It makes sense that the sign for mom and dad or for sister and brother are similar, but the signs for “deaf” and “home” are also quite similar but are not related.

I also learned new feeling words, which were so helpful! Every time Reba and I meet, we ask each other, “How are you?”, but my vocabulary was limited to good, fine, and okay. Now I am able to express my emotions in various ways such as frustrated, angry, or embarrassed (although I hope I don’t have to use those).

The highlight of the two weeks was this past Thursday near the end of our session when Reba and I shared funny stories from when we were younger. Her stories were so engaging and even though I couldn’t understand each detail, I had so much fun watching her share it. When it was my turn, I was a bit anxious because I only knew general vocabulary. I shared my go to story about falling through the ceiling of my church and my attempt to make carrot juice. I did my best with the signs, but if there was a word I didn’t know, I would fingerspell my way through and Reba would show me the sign for that word. Through those short, 3-minute stories, I was able to practice and learn valuable conversational signs.

When I rewatched this recording, I noticed that I tend to look away from the computer when I fingerspell. Although I do this unintentionally to think about the sign for the letters, I know that I have to work on keeping my eyes on the screen so that I do not miss anything if Reba tells me something. I also want to practice fingerspelling more often during the week so that the letters come more naturally to me.

For the past weeks, I have been focusing on learning Vietnamese grammar, especially classifiers. I found that similar other languages like English, Japanese, and Chinese most of the classifiers indicate the shape of objects e.g. "strand" as a classifier usually indicates an object that is thin and flexible such as hair or fur. According to Giang Pham and Kathryn Kohnert from the University of Minnesota, “Vietnamese has been reported to have as few as three words that arguably could be considered ['classifiers' to as many as 200].” For the sakes of learning one thing at a time, I have decided to focus on “unit classifiers” which are words or affixes that accompanies a noun to indicate the unit of said noun.

A few words I have picked up in the past week that can be considered “unit classifiers” are:

• cái                                                                   used for inanimate objects                                            
• chiếc                                                               used similar to cái                                                             
• con                                                                  used for animals and children
• người                                                              used for people
• bài                                                                   used for compositions
• câu                                                                  used for sentential constructs
• cây                                                                  used for stick-like objects
• chuyện                                                            used for a general topic
• lá                                                                     used for smaller sheets of paper
• tòa                                                                   used for buildings
• quả/trái                                                             used for round objects
• quyển/cuốn                                                       used for books
• tờ / trang                                                           used for objects made of paper
• việc                                                                   used for an event or a process

I have used most these words before in countless conversations but there are some that I know but do not ever use such as: lá, tòa, quả, quyển, tờ, and việc. An explanation for this is likely regional dialect and education. I was taught to use the southern dialect, so I suspect certain classifiers are simply more common in the southern dialect and therefore more comfortable for me to use. For things like books, I have always used cuốn rather than quyển, and for papers, I have always used trang rather than tờ, et cetera. The Vietnamese classifier system is said to closely resemble the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese classifier system in that the noun can often be omitted if the subject had previously been established.

Additionally, something that I found extremely interesting is cái – often used as a universal classifier similar to the Japaneseつand the Chinese 个 – is almost never translated when used because there is not really an English equivalent. I think that cái can be roughly translated to “it” which is not a classifier, but the word is general enough to carry the same weight as cái in terms of a definition. For example:

Con cần mua bút                                I (child) need to buy pens

Máy cái                                                 how many (of it)

2 cái                                                       2 (of it)

But of course, this excessive usage of “it” or “of it” would make any conversations or sentences sound unnatural and since there is no other English equivalent (unless one wants to continuously uses the noun) cái is usually dropped when translated.

 Another thing that I’ve learned in the past week is that there is a difference between “classifiers” and “measure nouns”. On the surface, they are very similar but they have different characteristics.

These readings helped me to contextualize the history of Indonesia and the role of language in this development. I knew that Bahasa Indonesian was only recently established as a nationally unifying language, but I did not know how this particular language became the official one and how other cultures helped shape this history. I also did not realize how many people speak Bahasa Indonesian: this language is actually often ranked as the sixth most commonly spoken language in the world. Beyond Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesian is spoken in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia, among other places. These readings helped me to contextualize the history of Indonesia and the role of language in this development. I knew that Bahasa Indonesian was only recently established as a nationally unifying language, but I did not know how this particular language became the official one and how other cultures helped shape this history. I also did not realize how many people speak Bahasa Indonesian: this language is actually often ranked as the sixth most commonly spoken language in the world. Beyond Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesian is spoken in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia, among other places. Indonesia is part of the Austronesian language family, which includes the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and some parts of Australia. The language has overlap with languages spoken in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Madagascar, among other places. I enjoyed looking at a chart that compared numbers 1-10 in different Austronesian languages - there is a lot of similarities in the languages. Indonesian comes directly from Malay, which began in Sumatra as an official court language and continued to serve as a common language for business exchanges. Today, Bahasa Indonesian is the Lingua Franca, or official language students study in schools and use for formal business encounters and navigation of daily life. It became the official language in 1928 through the Young People’s vow. This unifying means of communication strengthened the Indonesian collective identity and led to independence. At home, though, most Indonesians speak a local dialect. There are more than 700 local languages across the archipelago of Indonesia Bahasa Indonesian is still not the first language for many people - Javanese, Balinese, and Sudanese among others continue to be more widely practiced. 
Indonesia was colonized by the dutch, but unlike many other colonized countries, Bahasa Indonesian did not absorb much influence from the Dutch language. Religious groups did participate in the development of the language: Malay, or now Bahasa Indonesian, was the language used by missionaries, and Muslims helped switch the script used for the language from Jawi to Arabic. My Indonesian instructor has told us that many Indonesian names have Arabic influences because a large percentage of the population practices Islam.  Given that Indonesian is a lingua franca, it is designed to be pretty easy to learn - simplified grammatical constructions. Throughout the archipelago, there are many dialects and variations. For example, the way people use verbs that begin with ber- varies. Knowing the history of Bahasa Indonesia clarifies that if I am in a rural placement as an ETA, the primary language of my host community is not Bahasa Indonesia. To participate fully in their culture, the part below the iceberg, I will want to learn the local language. Fortunately, knowing Bahasa Indonesian will allow me to navigate daily life across the archipelago. Languages change over time based on who is using them. When people stop using the language, they inevitably die because people do not pass them on to the next generation. Politics and history also play big roles, as seen by the influence of colonization in many places. Indonesia is a unique case where it did not absorb the dutch language. Increases in technology and increased contact with speakers of different languages, so that languages begin to merge and common vocabulary becomes necessary for everyday exchanges. 
I think that geography, the why of where, can be an extremely valuable discipline for linguists to track, predict, and extrapolate changes in languages. For example, there are many ways to create maps that would help track migration and population and interactions between different cultures. Physical proximity seems like it would be a key indicator that a language has the potential to change. Language is always changing, though national languages may make such evolution hard to perceive. I think linguists can learn a lot about how language is being used informally through social media. In this informal, realtime, virtual space, linguists can study how people actually are engaging with language as forms of communication and notice trending slang words. 

One aspect of Korean culture that is not traditional but is still an essential part of modern Korea is the idea of electronic sports or esports. The competitive gaming scene in Korea is a multi-billion dollar industry where individuals or teams represent their sponsors in video games. This may seem like a strange concept to foreigners and especially older folk who have only seen physical sports in their lifetime but electronic sports have taken over the Korean culture for many reasons. 

One possible reason is that the newer generation has grown up in a time of relative peace and luxury. Technology has accelerated and people are always searching for something new. Video games became a fundamental part of many of these younger generations’ lives. This is highlighted by the existence of PC Bangs or gaming centers where people can pay a fee to use computers to play video games. These PC Bangs often double as restaurants and studying locations that students would visit after school. This is reminiscent of the arcades that were popular in North America in the previous decades, just significantly more advanced. This abundance of time and convenience inevitably led to great competition among the youth and one video game exacerbated that, Starcraft.

The Starcraft game franchise brought in millions of players across the world and its popularity was at its peak in Korea in the early 2000s. Starcraft is a real time strategy game or RTS for short, where players build a base and units to fight against each other. This game dominated the esports scene in Korea like nothing else and made esports a legitimate industry worth investing in. Many Starcraft tournaments were televised and thus drew in more people into the community with prize rewards in the millions. With the availability of computers through PC Bangs, video games became even more popular and the best of the player base became professional esports players much like professional athletes. Once this path became a possibility, the esports scene only grew and more people strived to become the very best like no one ever was. Once major corporations got involved in team sponsorships and prize money, esports became a mainstream part of Korean entertainment. Many esports players essentially became celebrities because of how quickly esports became the norm. 

Although Starcraft dominated the Esports scene in Korea and made competitive video games a culture phenomena in the Korean Peninsula and abroad, eventually more games offered a similar competitive drive and monetary reward for professional esports players. The next titan of a video game was LoL, League of Legends, one of the most popular video games ever created. Video games may seem like an insignificant part of entertainment that are only for children but recent years have demonstrated how large of an industry it is. Esports is a link between Korea and other countries because some of the best esports players in the world are Korean. Although Electronic sports is not limited to Korea, esports is without a doubt an essential artifact of Korean culture. 

The task that I worked on this week was to review the batchim rules that I had learned last week. This also included diving into pronunciation and a bit of sentence structure. Somyung and I also reviewed some particles that I had watched videos on. This mainly focused on subject and object markers in a sentence. These are 은/는 and 이/가 respectively. These particles are essential to marking where the subject and object in a sentence are and most sentences will not make sense without them. We briefly discussed the other particles but they will come up when necessary. 

The other topic that we touched on were verbs and the appropriate tenses that are associated with them. We looked into present tenses and learned that many Korean grammar rules aim to make speech as fluid as possible. Thus, rules are often based on if the word or words end with a consonant or vowel and giving bachims where appropriate. In present tense verbs, this was crux so that was not too difficult. The rules for past tense were much more complicated than this. There was a mechanical style to updating a verb to be past tense that involved removing 다, which signified a verb, and adding 었/았 depending on some conditions. There seem to be several rules that I have to learn through consistent usage and practice here. After adding these new characters, 다/어요, were added back to the end to conclude the transformation. After this, there are certain words that can be omitted. I have not yet learned the extent to which simplification is done but it is a part of Korean language to shorten things for convenience thus far. 

We also jumped into the topic of facial features and body parts in general. We created a diagram of a human in an online whiteboard and named each part incrementally. This is very useful and fun since I did the drawing and writing of body parts. However, this does seem quite difficult to memorize. 

One part of my practice plan that was quite helpful was using youtube videos to learn difficult grammar. The set of videos to learn Korean on youtube is quite extensive, which I appreciate and my language partner already had quite a few sources that could help me learn in depth some difficult topics. For example, I learned the significance and usage of some particles from watching channels like Korean Unnie and Talk to Me In Korean.  I will continue using youtube to learn more about Korean grammar and also use it as a tool to immerse myself in Korean culture. Another aspect of entertainment that has been quite useful in learning Korean is Korean variety shows. One thing that I learned recently was how some English words and Korean words sound the same in a song even to native korean speakers. This technique was discussed in depth in the show How Do You Play regarding the song Maria. The word Maria is pronounced the same as the korean word for mean, 말이야. This type of word-play is very common in Korean entertainment.

The Korean language is a part of the Altaic family. The Altaic family of languages originates from northern Asia and encompasses other languages such as Mongol, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic. Some words in Korean are written using a combination of borrowed Chinese words which demonstrates the dominance that Chinese culture had during these last few thousand years. This is a common occurrence in most languages in Asia; nearly all of these areas were heavily influenced by the Chinese language. However, unlike Chinese, Korean dialects are not completely unintelligible to each other. There are differences in pronunciation and stress but do not alter too much. In the case of Chinese dialects, each is completely different from another dialect. This can be tied to the size of China and the size of the Korean Peninsula. In this case, size does matter to the history of Korean language since it exemplifies how development was fairly centralized in comparison to China. Additionally, Chinese and Korean come from different language families anyway. 

These considerations are significant in that they reveal how the flow of language progresses over time and it was quite different than what I had initially thought. Thus certain cultural factors can be accounted for as a legacy of linguistic history. I am not too familiar with the other Altaic family languages so I can not make a definitive comparison between Korean culture and the other Altaic languages. I can however take into account the history significance of Chinese culture on Korean culture. I am not sure what pragmatic questions of usage would be necessary for Korean or what contemporary realization entails but I would be interested in what native Koreans feel about the connection with their language family. It could be that there is no real connection that natives feel about this linguistic history.

It is interesting how the article discussed using a computer to determine the location of a certain language. Initially, an archeological discovery was made that fueled a theory regarding the origin of Indo-European languages. That theory turned out to be accurate beside the results of the computer calculations but there is still some dispute regarding the research done. To extrapolate from this example, the linguists of the future may use machine learning to break down all of a language’s history. I have studied a bit of machine learning and artificial intelligence and have learned that human error from misrepresentation of statistical data. In the case of determining a language family’s origin, I do agree that there is room for error based on how the parameters were initially set up. 

This also dips into the discussion of how languages change over time. Some parameters discussed where the present geographical location of languages were. Thus a conclusion we can draw from this is that languages drift and take on the culture of the locations that they pass through. This is significant because every language is an amalgamation of the areas that I passed through and is continually transformed by other languages and cultures.

Howdy, Howdy, Howdy! I hope all my fellow readers have had an amazing two weeks. These past two weeks, we started examining the difference in signs in terms of directional verbs. In this, I mean Reba, and I started discussing the differences in the signs of, for example, “receive”. If I were to receive something from someone, the sign for such a gesture is different that if I were to give something to someone else in which they received something. Just to be clear, clear, and receive are different signs. However, when referring to receive, depending on who is the receiver will change the sign. The change in the sign is subtle though. At first glance, one might even say the sign is the same, but once Reba slowed down the sign, it became much clearer. The receiver of the received item will dictate where the sign starts either motioning away or towards the body. Another example of such directional verbs is the sign for “invitation”. Reba and I had a 10 minutes discussion in which I was trying to understand the difference between the sign of “I was invited to a Christmas party by you” and “I invited you to a Christmas party”. The difference in the verb “invite” once again is modified based on the starting and ending point of the sign. Although I do understand that ASL is a complex language and different from that of English, I am continuously baffled at the subtle complexities of the language. Much of my past learning has been pure terminology strengthening and expansions. However, as I begin to progress towards the development and creation of phrases and sentences, it becomes ever more evident the complexities of the language. I find myself, when signing, speaking English, and then translating into ASL. This is a bad habit on multiple accounts as 1) English and ASL are not the same. In fact, ASL originates from French sign language which originates from French. Thus, my grammar and sentence structure have somewhat deviated from the proper terminology. 2) ASL lacks small transition words such as “a”, “the”, “as” and etc. When I think of my thoughts in English and translate them to ASL, in addition to having to remember the sentence structure as well as the correct sign, I also have to eliminate my usage of said transition words. 3) All of this thinking when I am signing interferes with my ability to express my signs in my face. Due to the fact that ASL does not have vocal tones, expression, meaning, and intensity are greatly indicated by the speed and expressiveness of one’s signs as well as their facial expressions. As I work hard and think about the language, I know my “thinking face” often inhabits my expression, altering my expression and meaning. Of course, when learning a new language, there will be difficulties. Regardless, I do hope to improve and fall out of these bad habits soon. I know it may take time, as well as a greater amount of emersion.

Vietnam is already world-renowned for its cuisine, particularly street food, so it is not surprising that Vietnamese drinks are also very popular and have a culture of their own, albeit not as globally recognized as other cultural aspects. In addition to street food stands, Vietnamese markets and roadsides are also home to a variety of street side drinks carts, roadside bars, and makeshift cafes.

One cannot talk about Vietnamese's food and drink culture without mentioning Cà Phê Sữa Đá [Vietnamese Iced Milk Coffee]. Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer. Initially brought into the country in the 19th century, coffee not only quickly became a daily staple but also a cash crop. Today, Vietnam produces more than 1.73 million tons of coffee a year. While Vietnam is the world's second largest exporter of coffee, bit primarily invests in the production of Robusta coffee.  Robusta coffee beans has about twice the amount of caffeine of regular coffee beans and strong taste as well as higher acidity. Authentic Vietnamese coffee is almost always drip coffee and is brewed using a Phin, which is a small cup with a filter chamber and lid to catch dripping coffee. It is then mixed with ice and condensed milk to counter the bitter and acidic taste of the brewed coffee. The drink is enjoyed throughout the day, despite its high caffeinated and sugar content, and can be found all over the country.

Another way to enjoy the bitter Robusta coffee is Cà Phê Trứng [Vietnamese Egg Coffee]. Cà Phê Trứng is made using sugar, milk, coffee, and of course, an egg. Milk and sugar are whipped with egg yolks and heated. Then coffee is poured onto the egg mixture to create a coating layer of foam. This type of coffee is primarily found in Hà Nội as it is not very popular among the southern Vietnamese population.

In addition to being one of the top producers of coffee beans, Vietnam also a producer of fresh fruits, primarily tropical fruits such as coconuts and oranges. As a result, fresh fruit juice is a staple in the Vietnamese daily life. Unlike the packaged juice in the west, however, the fruit juice sold on the roadside are made to order in that the fruit is cut and juice as needed rather than being prepackaged. A traditionally popular fresh drink, however, is nước mía (sugar cane juice) – a type of reed/grass. The stem of the reed is put through a compressor to extract the ‘sugary nectar’. The nectar is then mixed with the juice of a calamansi to make a sweet and tangy drink.

Finally, trà sữa trân châu or just trà sữa (boba tea) is a personal favorite. Although it did not originate from Vietnam, trà sữa is gaining popularity in the recent years among the younger population. The drink is a mixture of tea and fruit or milk, topped with tapioca balls (boba) or a variety of flavored jellies. The drink can be found all over the country, but most chains are primarily found in southern cities like Hồ Chí Minh cities near active night life areas and schools.