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My roommate also feels interest in Korean culture, and she wants to learn Korean, which gives me a chance to teach her some of what I learned from my learning partner. My two learning partners, Sun Yoon and Alvin Yang, are really responsible. They taught me in a structured, detailed and organized way. I come up with some learning plans and activities that I am going to teach my roommate. I divided this learning activities into three parts, preparedness, learning and appliance.

1)    Preparedness: My roommate and I like watching Korean movies, so I am going to find my favorite Korean movie for watching together with her. Interest is the motivation for learning something, and I have great amount of background knowledge about culture and language. When we watch the Korean movies, I can explain cultural aspect and easy sentence to her.

2)    Learning: I will ask her what topics she wants to learn, such as greeting, food or hobbies. And then I list at least 10 basic vocabularies and useful sentences. Using flashcard to help her memorize vocabularies.

3)    Appliance: We plan to go to Korean restaurant. In my opinion, when people get involved in environment with Korean culture, it will be easier to remember vocabularies and sentences.

• How many new words have you learned in your target language?  How did you learn them?  Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary? 

I've learned a lot of new words in Korean.  I mainly learned them while tutoring with Suyeon Unnie.  Most of the time, we will role play or I will ask for a specific situation and she'll just give me words to say.  By doing that, I learn new vocabulary.  Another way I learn is through watching K-Pop videos and listening to songs with English subtitles.  As well, watching K-Dramas is a great way that I learn new vocabulary.  K-Dramas often repeat what they say, so I'm able to hear and repeat what they say.  I think so far, I've realistically been gaining a good amount of vocabulary.  Ideally, I want to learn more words, but it's extremely hard to do that and be strict with myself to learn so many words within a week.  I'm thinking I will do maybe 15 new words a week, of which are outside the vocabulary that Suyeon Unnie teaches me.  I think this will be more feasible than a long list of vocabulary words I want to learn and forcing myself to do it that way.  I also want to do a better job at writing down the vocabulary, just to be more familiar with the writing.  It'll also help memorization so that helps a lot.  

• Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die.  (You might want to watch the interview with David Harrison posted to the front page of the Ning.) 

From what David Harrison and the article talked about, there's not a concrete thing which is lost when languages die.  It's more of a feeling that something very precious is lost and it's very saddening.  I would also add in and I'm sure they both touched upon this, is that when languages die, so does a whole history and culture.  The aging population of a dying language makes it hard for those languages to continue to try and exist.  But by trying to make a dictionary or get young people to be interested in the language is the solution which people who speak a dying language are resorting to.  They said that every two weeks a language dies and that there are about or more than 7,000 languages.  That is such a huge number of languages, yet at the rate of language decline, it's really concerning.  I think it's so beautiful that we can speak 7,000 different ways, describing life in a different way.  It's so sad that nothing is being done to prevent or further reserve these languages on a global scale.  

Artifact_1.mp3

Annyonghasaeyo (hello)

ban gap sup ni da (nice to meet you).

jae yi leum eun Shuyi yipnida. (My name is Shuyi.)

I am from china: juh(cho) neun joong gook ae suh wat suh yo

I am 19 year old: juh(cho) neun yool a hop sail eep ni da

I am a sophmore: juh(cho) neun dae hak kyo ee hak nyiun eep ni da

practice (sun yun nyun)

I am studying business: cho neun kyung yung hak gong bo ha go (eeth suh yo)

Jae chimi neun young hwa bo gi lang dok seo yip ni da (my hobby is watching movies and reading.)

Oo lee chin ha gae jin hae yo (lets get along)

New Vocab:

nuh lang na(you and me)

oo lee (we)

chin hae (close, good friend relationship)

Annyonghi gaseyo. (Good bye)

age: sal

yul ahop: (ten nine) 19

student: hak seng

China:joong gook

grade: hak nyun

root word for school/learning: hak

year: nyun

school: hak kyo

college: dae hak kyo

chimi: hobby

young hwa bogi: watching movie

reading: dok so

study: gong bo

major: jung gong

Business Admin: kyung yung hak

young hwa: movie

• Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language.

Knowing a language's history can help you learn the language because its' history shows the development and change of the language.  As well, it reflects on how the people of the language think.  The development and change of a language over time is very important.  For instance, the Korean Alphabet was created in 1466 by King Sejong.  The creation of the Korean Alphabet is esteemed as one of the most efficient written languages and as well, Korea has a Hangul Day which celebrates the creation of the Korean Alphabet.  Just this history of the Korean language shows that Korea has a lot of pride and respect for their language.  History also reflects how the people of the language think because what part of language is lost throughout time, shows what the people care more about.  For instance, some languages have gendered nouns while other languages do not.  Some languages do honorifics while others do not.  These small notions in the language showcase a part of the culture in the language one can be learning.  So knowing the history of a language really aids you in understanding the long-term development of it.  

• Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language.  What do you need to improve your communicative competence?

Suyeon Unnie and I have been learning a lot of great Korean culture and language together.  She's sooooo awesome!!! <3 So far, we have been on top of things and have been able to go through 5 tasks.  We've done the following:

• Greetings/Farewells/Introductions 
• Family & Relationships 
• Time/Question words 
• Food --> types, ordering, asking 
• Directions 

This week is review week because I really want to be able to enforce everything we've learned and it's just been about a little over halfway the semester.  With Korean, I've learned that honorifics play such an important role in understanding the language.  Age and experience are so important to the culture and sometimes this makes it harder to learn the language.  To me, it's like learning two different dialects in a language, even though there are legit dialects to Korean.  But, the nice thing is that most of the time, there are just suffixes which are added to make sentences honorific.  Our last session (Monday) Suyeon Unnie and I were able to have small talk.  Konglish?  haha.  She and I were super proud that we were able to have a semi-conversation!  Not just about what I had been learning, but putting everything I know together to make a sentence pertaining to the topic she was talking about.  Also, I realized that my comprehension of Korean is really good, I can mostly pick up on what Suyeon Unnie says.  It's the speaking my own words/thoughts that is really difficult.  I think to improve this, I need to study more vocabulary so that I can build up my ability to speak.  As well, I feel I can do a better job at writing, so I am going to work on that.  What's been really helpful, because I'm an auditory learner, is when Suyeon Unnie records herself for me on the main things that we learn in a session.  For instance, she recorded my introductions (formal and informal) and throughout the week I was able to just listen to it and repeat after her.  I didn't have to worry about wrong pronunciation.  I think I'd like her to do that more often for me.  We've just been doing a lot of the situational cases that I've asked, but if we finish all the main tasks and I feel comfortable enough with everything, we agreed to go do some more grammar so I'm excited!  I'm of course learning grammar while I learn to do each task, but it's nice to just understand the organization of the language in detail.  So far, everything in Korean is great!  I'm really excited to go to Yonsei and Korea with the knowledge that I am gaining! <3 

• Reflect on the Culture Shock video and your own experiences and expectations of culture shock

The Cultural Shock video was interesting.  I feel that for a video that's quite old, I think it's been 5+ years, it still has a lot of meaningful and relevant culture shock reflections.  

It touched upon a lot of academic differences.  With how papers are written, expectations, and styles of teaching.  I found this to be very true as well.  When I studied in Morocco, class was less structured and more "free".  In a sense, my relationships with professors were a lot more intimate and there were no unprecedented expectations of being a top notch student.  

There's also a lot of talk about understanding the English lingo/street talk.  I know for most of my international friends, they have a hard time understanding American sarcasm and I think this is real culture shock to go through.  One can learn so much about grammar and vocabulary yet not understand a conversation happening because there's so much cultural reference.  I didn't so much experience this in Morocco with Arabic but I'm sure that it's just because I wasn't there long enough to really immerse myself in that kind of way.  

I think something else that the video didn't touch upon much is the culture shock of returning home from abroad.  Just a summer can change your perspective so much and hit you closely once you come back home.  Things you get accustomed to while abroad are usually no longer relevant in your home country or valued the same way.  I found this hard when I was back in the US from Morocco.  

In my first artifact I went over through a basic conversation, asking how my friend was doing, what time he wanted to eat lunch and what else he had been doing these days (and I responded to his similar questions). Throughout I incorporated some new vocabulary/phrases I have been learning, such as "I would like to...", "difficulty (struggle)", "where were you?" 

There were moments in recording where I was quite happy with my accent (particularly those phrases and words I have known for longer and used more often), but other times I could hear my "American" accent coming through quite clearly. This usually occurred for new words, particularly those borrowed from Arabic/Persian (e.g. "mushkil" is borrowed from Arabic). However, I think what I did most poorly was having to slow down to properly enunciate words that are normally slurred together by native speakers. Particularly for the imperfect past tense, where the imperfect is said by combining 3 words (2 of which are conjugated). It is not that the native speakers mispronounce the words, but they are used to saying them and can string them together effortlessly. I, on the other hand, found it very difficult to properly enunciate without slowing down and breaking up the sentence so that it sounded quite unnatural.

As far as linguistic accuracy, I did a good job, using the correct pronouns, verb conjugations, sentence structure (my friend help me piece together one of the more complex sentences). Likewise, I believe I did a good job with cultural appropriateness. Addressing people with the correct pronoun is important in Pakistani culture (even if that person is not present), and because I was having a conversation with a friend I used the informal second-person pronoun and verb conjugations. Furthermore, the general gist of the conversation was not very formal, for example using slang like "tik tak" (meaning "pretty good") rather than the grammatically correct "tik hu" ("I am good").

Conversation reviewing material from last semester and new material.

Voice%20004.m4a

During the first two weeks I focused on reviewing vocabulary and grammar (e.g. sentence structure and verb conjugations). Having spoken and heard very little Urdu during the summer (much less than during the school year), I forgot a lot of the basic aspects of Urdu that I had learned last semester. I began by writing out important vocabulary that I could remember, as well as a list of English words that I knew I had learned (based on work I did last semester) but had forgotten, like family and school related vocabulary. Similarly, I wrote out a couple verb conjugation charts in the present tense for a few different types of present tense conjugations. After doing this I studied the things I needed to re-learn so that the vocabulary/verb conjugations etc. could come to mind quickly, not just after thinking for a long time. Finally, I practiced speaking Urdu with my language partner and other friends. I did this to accomplish two goals: first, to continue familiarizing myself with the things I had been reviewing and, second, to practice/review other aspects of grammar, like sentence structure.

When the semester started I was around my Urdu speaking friends, and noticed that I understood less than I was able to at the end of last semester, but my interpretive skills had not decreased as much as my speaking skills. It was only when I met with my language partner for the first time that I realized how rusty I had become at speaking the language. Not only was I much less confident with the things I could say, I also realized that even though I would have been able to recognize many words/understand sentences spoken by others, I was blanking on many words/verb conjugations/sentence structuring that I had been fairly comfortable with last semester. What has surprised me the most though, was not how much I had forgotten, but how much harder it has been re-establishing my level of competence to that of the end of last semester. I have taken long breaks from speaking other languages, like Spanish, however it usually only takes me a little bit of time to get back to a similar level of competence. It has not been the case with Urdu, but I am not too worried about this – there have been long periods of time when I have spoken lots of Spanish to the point that my competence was quite high, and I believe it is easier to “get back into” a language which one has known for a long time and can speak well, as compared to a language which one has known for a shorter period of time and at a lower level of competence.

https://youtu.be/nBznznhQ4bo

Edit: In *English" you would say "I don't have any brothers," not ASL. 

The next big topic of grammar that I went over with Suyeon is Verbs and Tenses. All verbs are composed of two parts: the verb root and the ending. For example for the verb to go, the verb root is "kha" and the ending is "da". So the infinitive form of "to go" is "khada". The verb root usually stays consistent in past, present and future forms of the verbs whereas the ending changes depending on the tense. Therefore the different tense forms of "to go" is as follows:

Present: Kha 

Past: Khasso

Future: khalkoya

Present continuous: khaguisso

All the above are used in informal situations. To make them formal, "yo" is added to the end of each form, sometimes with slight changes such as "khayo" and "khalkoaeyo". However, Korean conjugation of verbs is a little from that in English and French. In English, there are different forms of verbs for different tenses as well as for different subjects. However, in Korean there are different forms only for different tenses and they do not change for different subjects. For instance, "I go" is "choeneun khayo" and "he goes" is "ke khayo". This is very similar to Bengali as verbs are conjugated according to the tense rather than the subject. 

Along with the rules of conjugation, I also learned 20 common verbs and practiced their conjugations.

I have learned about 160 words. I know a lot of random words, but I'm currently working on putting together sentences. I need to learn more verbs. 

Most of the words that I know are objects or actions where the sign is similar to what you actually do (like painting or writing). The nouns are normally easy to remember because if you picture the object in your mind and either move your hands to look like the object or move your hands to show what you do with the object, then you will probably guess then sign. I think I actually exceeded my vocabulary goals. Learning basic words was much easier than I expected it to be. If I practice a sign a few times, it becomes almost like muscle memory and it becomes much harder to forget. 

I think my goals have been pretty realistic so far. I actually didn't know I would be able to learn so many words so quickly, so I'm pretty happy with how many words I know at this point. 

Since I have already had Korean learning activities and not finish my learning plan last semester, so I have experience how to make a plan that I can effectively finish through this semester. Time management is important factor to affect the schedule. I start to learn Korean from speaking and listening, which really helps me to study reading and writing. So far I have learned basic conversation about 10 topics. Based on these topics, I try to learn the related Korean character. It is really helpful for me to meet with Alvin Yang every week, and this is the interacting process. When I meet with any questions, I can solve with learning activities easily and quickly. Watching Korean movies with my Korean friend is also really fun and fast-way to learn a lot of vocabularies, sentences and different aspects of Korean culture. In addition, exploring Korean movie is my recent culture project. Therefore, when I talked with them about the plots of Korean movies, I have better and deep understanding. An effective learning plan helps me think, allow interacting and asking questions, use my background knowledge, and build new skills of learning language. I hope to continue my original learning plan without any changes. The only thing I want to add into my learning plan is that I will  read a small and easy paragraph weekly for helping me apply vocabularies and sentences that I have learned from last semester and this semester. 

Reading the article reminded me heavily of Pakistan. Although Pakistan is home to more than four dozen languages, the official language the leaders chose was not from any of the originally spoken in the country.

After Pakistan became independent in 1947, Urdu was made the official language of more than 200 million people. The language 'migrated' from North India into Pakistan. To the non-Urdu speaking population of the country, who formed the majority of the population, this was a major setback. They felt that a minority, that was less than 4% of the population, was enforcing its own culture and traditions upon them. Such was the intensity of this feeling of cultural hijacking that East Pakistan broke away from the center to become Bangladesh, in order to preserve their own language, traditions and culture. For the people who remained in Pakistan, their language, culture and traditions eroded away with time. This is visible in the degeneration of Sriaiki, which is increasingly becoming an oral tradition. There is a major scarcity of Siraiki literature in circulation. The Urdu and English languages are supplanting local languages. This means the new generations are giving up their own traditions and practices in favor of Western and Urdu cultures. In essence, replacing the language has meant replacing the entire cultural identity.

Nerelisin?

(Where are you from?)

add other questions about what nationality are you? what country are you from?

In order to say where you're from, you take the country and drop suffixes such as "ya", "istan", or "iye" and you get your nationality. There are exceptions, as there always is, and those require memorization or further knowledge of Turkish grammatical structures. 

When talking about the language of a country, there is a suffix that attaches to the end of the word using vowel harmony. For these vowels: ........... the suffix is ca while it is çe for these vowels: .............

Ülke (country)

Milliyet/uyruk (nationality)

Ülke                            Milliyet

Italya                           Italyanca

Türkiye                       Türkçe

Japonya                    Japonca

Arzu and I practice introductions every time we meet. We do different variations of things we can say to each other (according to the very limited vocabulary I have). Today I found out that she is an English teacher in Turkey! This explains a lot about her style of teaching- she's very aware of teaching/learning methods that would be useful to me. She gives me a lot of worksheets to work with at the start of class to review concepts/words we talked about in our previous meeting. A lot of them are matching, which I like because sometimes I won't always remember a word or a phrase, but seeing it in front of me helps me put them together. This in turn helps me recognize it next time while simultanouesly improving my memory of it. Arzu suggested I text her in Turkish with what I know in order to keep the knowledge I have going, so I might start doing that. I don't feel like I need to go any faster than I am right now in terms of pace because it's not a classroom setting. I do want to get started on more grammar though to understand the foundation of the language. It helps me put perspective to what I'm saying and the words that I encounter if I know the grammatical makeup/structure of it. 

Looking back since the beginning of the semester, I realize that I have made significant progress. I memorized numbers, names of days, months and have put a significant effort into building my vocabulary. However, it is one thing to know the information by heart and another to actually have the ability to use in real life. Therefore, what made me sure that I had gained significant knowledge of the Siraiki language was when I sat in on a Skype conversation my Language Partner was having with his parents. To my utter amazement, I was able to make out decipher almost the entire conversation. In an attempt to track my progress, I have made this part of my weekly task. I often find myself in my language partner’s room, sitting beside him while he Skypes in Siraiki. I try to decipher what he is talking about with the limited knowledge and vocabulary at my disposal. This has become a really fun task, as I am able to make out the topic of the conversation, if not the exact details. At times when I am unable to fully wrap my mind around the conversation, I have to resort to understanding physical queues of my Language Partner. For example, body language, tone of voice and facial expression tend to play a heavy part in allowing me to gain insight into the dialogue. And no, that isn’t cheating.

To add to that, learning Siraiki culture has been the most interesting facet of this course. I used to believe that Siraiki and Urdu culture would be similar. However, I was proved wrong. My own culture places stress on social hierarchy and this is reflected in the Urdu language as well. The verbs and personal pronouns that we use when addressing elders are very different from the ones we use when addressing someone of the same age. Such great stress on social hierarchy is not present in Siraiki culture at all. And this is reflected in the language as well. The verb and personal pronoun usage is same regardless of who is being addressed, whether the person on the other is old or young. This caused me a lot of confusion because I was unable to tell whether my partner was addressing his father or his little brother when he was talking on Skype. 

But this undertaking has exposed one major chink in my armor. Although I can understand the gist of a statement or question in Siraiki, I can only respond in bits and pieces and that too with an immense struggle. I feel I still have a long way to go before I am able to become comfortable in speaking Sriaiki and not just understanding it. This will involve me shifting gears at a certain point in the semester from learning the language to practicing what I already know. I feel that is the only way I will be able to become fluent in the language.

Second Artificat