The Culture Shock video was interesting despite how slow it was at parts. It definitely illustrates the idea of culture shock and the adjustment that occurs afterwards. Culture shock is very apparent anytime you change settings. Even when you’re used to hanging out with one group of friends, and decide to hangout with a completely different group, there is an immediate culture shock. Yes, a microcosm of cross-country culture shock, but still the same idea. I have never experienced culture shock to a large extent, but can understand it due to small microcosms. My realest experience of culture shock was probably coming to Richmond since I’d never really lived anywhere besides Maine for my whole life. It wasn’t so much the culture of the state of Virginia, but the culture of the University of Richmond that shocked me the most. I didn’t have very many expectations because I just didn’t know what to expect, but I found the culture here to be quite different. My school in Maine was public, so I grew up with all of the kids in my school and had known the majority of them since kindergarten. Going to classes here is completely different, and so I act in a fully different manner. I actually found it empowering because I was free to be whoever I wanted to be. Since everyone at a public school knew exactly who each person was, there were expectations in place for how everybody was probably going to act. At Richmond there aren’t. The biggest adjustment that I had to make was to decide what expectations I wanted my peers to eventually have about my behavior. Once people know me, should they expect me to be a kind, well-spoken gentleman, or an obnoxious, haughty kid. The difference between those options is why understanding culture shock is so valuable.
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Things I liked using included: manga, youtube, dramafever, friends, and phone applications
I liked these things because of there simplicity. They correlated with my language plan and also were accessible on the go.
Things I didn't like using: rosetta stone, google translate
I didn't like these things because they conflicted with what my friends and language partner would tell me. Also often times, there were apparently easier ways to say some things, but google translate would produce the longest way to say something. Also rosetta stone produced a lot of random words that didn't correlate with my learning.
My Can-Do Statements:
I can greet others, introduce myself, and ask others about themselves.
I can use "survival" Korean in class or lost in public when I don't understand or need help.
I can say the days of the week and count 1-10.
I can ask/talk about family.
I can ask for/give basic directions to hotels, the restroom. and airports.
I can ask about ordering food and the price of things.
These things relate to my learning plan exactly. I wanted to focus on speaking, but more importantly the "essentials" such as introductions and survival phrases.
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0Yw51sPhGL3
This recording uses introductions and farewells. I introduce myself by saying "hi". Then I mention where I am from, that I'm in college, how many people are in my family, and then reply saying that "it is nice to meet you". I then say "thank you for your time" and "farewell". All of these words can be used in an informal setting, but are not recommended for a formal setting. The only formal word I use is "an nyung ha se yo" as opposed to just "an nyung". I purposely did this because I usually talk to my language partner who is my friend and younger than me. I think this artifact documents my progress and is exactly where I should be in terms of speaking. Korean is not easy and is something that requires getting used to.
After recording the first artifact, I took it to my language partner Sun and asked for advice. In the first artifact, all my words are formal Korean and it's appropriate to speak to people I do not know. Sun suggested me to learn to greet in both an informal way and formal way. Therefore, I learned to distinguish formal and informal greeting words:
Nice to meet you (Formal):
Annyeog haseyo. Sam eyo. Mannaseo bangapseupnida/ bangapwoyo
Nice to meet you (Informal):
Annyeong. Samya. Bangawo.
I am sorry (Formal):
Chansohnghamnida
I am sorry (Informal):
Mianhayo
The mp3 uploaded above is my reflection recording based on the first artifact.
I did my presentation on Korean family words based on the song video and the family tree I drew. I talked about the lyric of the Korean song which includes the most commonly used family words. Also, by looking at the lyric, we could learn some grammar. For example, the first sentence is: 곰 세 마리 가 한 집에 있어(gom se mari ga han jibe isseo). Gom = bear, Se= three, Han=one, Jibe= House, Isseo=are. Instead of saying"Three bears are in one house", Korean would be like " Bear three one house are. The sequence of Korean is totally different from English.
I structured my teaching activity based on my third artifact and I used some of my work to support:
http://koreanjournal.tumblr.com/post/8567002790/three-bears-song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slWkYjjgyT4
I am impressed by two other students' presentation.The first presentation is about Korean weekdays. It was very interesting because these words are related to natural elements like gold, wood, water, fire, and etc. Also, the Korean words for these elements share the same pronunciation with Chinese words. Another presentation was about Indian numbers. It was intriguing because we learned the numbers and single/plural forms so that we can count time. Also, Nuannuan gave us a Korean survival lesson. She introduced some words like: to write, to be written, and danger. She also wrote a sentence: "What does it say?" in both Korean and English on the blackboard. I learned how to put several Korean words into a complete sentence and the correct grammatical sequence.
My Can-Do Statements:
I can greet others, introduce myself, and ask others about themselves.
I can use "survival" Hindi when I don't understand or need help.
I can say the days of the week and say what I did/will do on those days.
I can ask for/give basic directions.
I can ask for/tell the time.
I can ask/tell about family.
How this relates to my Hindi Syllabus:
I am happy with the Can-Do Statements I have and how they contain most of the points on my original syllabus. At the beginning of the semester, I think I had overreaching goals for how much I would learn, but once I reconsidered those goals throughout the semester, I realized that I have learned a lot and have been able to maintain a lot for the short amount of time I had. I was able to complete 7 of the 8 tasks I had planned for myself, and my 8th task was replaced by music vocabulary in preparation for my Cultural Project.
However, I did not delve into a few of these tasks as much as I had originally planned. For instance, although transportation was an important topic on my syllabus, I realize now that perhaps I didn't focus on this task as much as I should have. I can ask for and give basic directions, find the right mode of transportation, and ask for help, but my peer tutor and I didn't incorporate transportation into conversations about itinerary or plans as I mentioned in Week 5 on the syllabus.
Another issue I encountered in completing my syllabus was maintaining the skills I gained in earlier weeks while learning new tasks toward the end of the semester. I am working on that now and have dedicated the past few weeks to review, but had I included review tasks for each week into my syllabus, I may have been more successful at remembering earlier vocabulary. For instance, I could have written "review survival phrases" into my tasks for Week 6 so I would have felt more compelled to review the material before I could check off all my tasks for Week 6.
At the beginning of the semester, we took a few tests to determine our preferred learning styles, and I found that I am a kinesthetic learner and excel at musical, verbal, and linguistic activities. For this reason, I wrote in my first reflection that I would center my language learning around writing and rewriting new vocabulary while studying on my own, then I would incorporate those new words into role-playing activities with my peer tutor. Because I am a kinesthetic learner, I memorize best by writing things down, yet this is not enough in learning to use a language. Therefore, I thought role-playing with my peer tutor would be a kinesthetic and verbal way to truly use the language. This plan worked well, but I still tended to forget what I had learned by saying with my peer tutor more easily than what I had learned by reading and writing down on my own. I tried to solve this a few times during our peer tutor meetings by taking notes on new phrases and words, but these were still much harder to commit to memory than vocabulary and phrases I found online and wrote down in my notes.
Another learning tactic I attempted at the beginning of the semester was using Hindi songs to memorize new words and phrases, as I found that I learn well through music. My peer tutor and I did this a few times at the beginning of the semester, and it worked surprisingly well, but we forgot to continue this activity when we started focusing on other tasks. And although this was an effective way of committing words to memory for me, the words I learned from Bollywood songs often had no relation to the tasks I was attempting to learn. Nevertheless, I will continue to listen to Bollywood music next semester, and I hope to ask my peer tutor for translations. This is a fun and effective method of learning for me, even if the meanings of songs may not be very relevant to common language tasks.
In my original learning plan, I wrote that I wanted to focus on interpersonal communication because it encompassed both listening and speaking, two important things to know when trying to live in a foreign country. I believe I succeeded at focusing on this task overall, but I also think I spent too much time learning to write and read Hindi as well while I was studying, perhaps because it is my nature to write things down to remember them. Although it was my intent to focus on listening to and speaking Hindi with my peer tutor, I often got caught up in memorizing how to write new vocabulary in Hindi script while I was looking up words for a new task. I’d also be too meticulous in my notes and write things in both Hindi and Romanized script despite my plan to focus only on learning to speak and listen to those words. Nevertheless, having conversations with my peer tutor and using Mango helped me get past that obstacle and focus on interpersonal communication.
One of the most interesting and effective methods of learning was teaching a Hindi lesson to the class. I was astounded at how well I could respond to my peer tutor’s questions about time after preparing to teach the class this task. After spending extra time preparing and ensuring that I knew the material well enough to teach it, it felt like I could respond to questions about time almost without thinking about it. For this reason, I hope to continue to teach my friends simple phrases in Hindi so that I will remember them more easily.
To continue learning next semester and beyond, I will make sure that Hindi is incorporated into my daily schedule, whether it be listening to Bollywood music on my way to class and listening for words I know, or watching a Hindi movie or TV show, or having lunch with my peer tutor to practice greeting each other and talking about school. This semester has proved to me more than ever that just surrounding yourself with a language has a large impact on your ability to learn and understand that language. I hope that by the time I return to India, I will be able to impress my friends with all the Hindi I have maintained and all the new things I have learned while back in Richmond.
The content of this artifact is a document containing the english quote from Karl Marx's “Capital” and my version of a translation of that quote. The task was chosen with the goal to develop formal presentational writing skills. In this case, the formal context is that of political and economic theory. This context was successful in achieve the goal of the task not only by making me translate words relevant to politics, but also by making me to realize that when translating words that have specific definitions within the context of an academic theory I must be use a Bhasa Indonesia counterpart of that word which is commonly accepted by Indonesian academics to have the same definition within the context of the particular academic field. Acquiring formal written presentational skills is hang in glove with my cultural goal of being able to communicate to Indonesian academics, express my political views and describe abstract ideas.
I provide the document below. Upon reading the english quote, one learns that it is from Part II Chapter 6 of Marx's Capital. Here Marx has already described his view that the exchange of all material commodities requires the creation of a special commodity called money. Firstly, the quote is talking about how extraction of surplus value from the M-C-M' (use money to buy commodities and then sell commodities to get more money) transaction brands money as capital. Secondly, the quote also hints at how a capitalist can create surplus value by purchasing the labor-power of others.
As I previously mentioned, I consider that the greatest lesson and challenge of this task was finding the Bhasa Indonesia counterparts to certain specific words that Marx uses. For example, I found that capital is modal, use-value is nilai-pakaninya, exchange-value is nilai-tukarnya and labor power is tenaga-kerja. The source of these defined words is Oey Hay Djoen's popular “Perang Gerilya”, which despite being about Che's guerrla war contains the Bhasa Indonesia counterparts to Marx's definitions.
This week (week 13), I translated a section of “Das Capital” into intermediate Bhasa Indonesia to create the artifact entitled “Presentational Formal Writing” along with watching and writing about “The Act of Killing” for Cultural Post 3. Understanding and effectively communicating about politics had previously replaced being able to express abstract ideas in an educational setting as a cultural goal and after this week will join my other cultural goals of surfing and formal communication. My activities not only enabled me to express my political views in Bhasa Indonesia by allowing me to pick up vocabulary essential in a political context but also gave me an improved realization of the political environment within which native speaker of Bhasa Indonesia are brought up. Three of such realizations are listed below.
First, I realized that I had previously only focused on post-Independence Indonesia since I was writing about the effects of the sudden nation building process on language in Cultural Post 2: Formal and informal language(s). Just like Indian political history, I think the post-Independence period of nation building process is significant in that it set the initial conditions for the Indonesian nation state. However, this sudden, arbitrary and unnatural process, which was the frame through which I had previously examined Indonesian language and culture, was also drawing my attention away from a gradual changes in the nature of the Indonesian nation state and civil society that arose thereafter.
Second, I realized that acquiring so much information about the political history of Indonesia was forcing me to reconsider certain familiar relationships. For example, when I lived in Indonesia I went to school with many middle-class Chinese Indonesians who were the sons and daughters of shopkeepers. The history of the 1965-66 massacre made me realize their relatively affluent economic position also must have accompanied the social position of a minority that is liable of being bullied to pay protection money. Along with the Chinese Indonesians, it also allowed me empathize with the Sama people, who I talk about in Cultural Post 5: Cultural Project, that were forced to flea as the violence between the military and the communists escalated. As a second example, in light of the complicity of the government and media with gangsters I also questioned certain things that I had acquired knowledge of second-hand. One such instance was the image of President Suharto. Between 1993 and 1998 he was the President of the nation that I lived in.
Finally, I realized that I had naively tried to disseminate Marx's “Das Capital” without realizing the context in which it would be interpreted. While Marx uses the ideas of classical economists like Adam Smith, as an abstract theoretician he also takes the liberty to describe certain things in his own way. Although I think this is an amazing stylistic tool, it can sometimes cause readers to question the definitions themselves and refuse to read further. Therefore, Das Capital is sometimes impenetrable to people biased against communism. While everyone in the modern era is biased for or against communism, Indonesia's violent history of rejecting communism makes this mechanism of rejecting Marx highly likely rendering the tool of Das Capital useless for Marxism in the Indonesian context.
This week (week 11), I came across Lance Nolde's article entitled “Great is our relationship with the sea.” For my cultural project I wanted to explore the relationship between Indonesians and their seascape. My interest in seascapes and the communities that belong to these seascapes was initially sparked as a result of my cultural goal of understanding Indonesian surfing culture. Learning about this topic has allowed me to pick up Indonesian words that related to the sea such as trepang (sea cucumber) and kura-kura (tortoise). Where my thoughts on the relationship between the Indonesians and their seascape were previously greatly influenced by experiences that I had while in Indonesia (such as noticing people on a boat waiting to get far from the shore before dumping any garbage that they were carrying), this article by the University of Hawai'i historian on the Sama people of Sulawesi that raises and answers key anthropological questions about them has provided me with a verifiable case study of a people with a historic relationship with the sea.
The presentation will cover four important questions. First, what is the “settlement narrative” for the initial migration of the Sama people of Tukung Besi. Second, what is the day to day relationship of the Sama people with their seascapes. Third, what caused the Sama people to journey for months to collect and trade for sea resources. Four, how has trade effected Sama society?
This week (week 10), I wrapped up working on my interpretive skills. First I submitted an artifact entitled “Interpretive Formal Reading” in which I attempted to fill out a EU visa application form in Bhasa Indonesia. Then, this week I also handed in “Interpretive Conversational Listening” in which I attempt to follow my language partner's driving instructions to reach my destination. It was difficult to succeed in these tasks. Therefore I believe that their choice was wise given my level of proficiency and past experience. Moreover they were also successfully designed to strengthen a wide set of skills such as written, verbal, formal and informal skills. I would recommend these tasks to anybody wishing to learn a language. Moreover, Arnanto was an extremely useful resource for the completion of these tasks.
While the tasks were challenging my abilities and I learnt a lot, I had considered my interpretive skills to be better than my presentational skills in the self assessment that I did at the start of the course. Therefore I expect the real challenge to my skills to arise when I work on my presentational skills. To help me achieve this goal I also took some time to prepare for the future tasks by meeting Dr. Scinicariello to get an idea of future tasks might be. Given my cultural goals, her input of the various directions I could take my tasks helped me a lot in finalizing the tasks for Artifact number 4 and 5. In my fourth artifact, “Presentational Formal Writing”, I will translate a paragraph from Marx's Das Capital. In my fifth artifact, “Presentational Formal Speaking” I will give a small speech describing a dive into the sea.
Days of the week in Korean!
Below is a link to download my lesson powerpoint:
Cultural Project Notes - with vocabulary words
For my Cultural Project, I focused on two narrow examples of Indian music and attempted to show how these two songs exemplified certain aspects of Indian culture. I used the "product, practice, perspective" model that we discussed in class to organize my research into the products created - a classical Indian raga and a Bollywood song; the practices - meditation, religious rituals, and showing culture through popular movies; and finally, the perspective - the importance of music in Indian culture seems to stay the same, but is shifting from a religious to an entertainment-driven product. Of course this is a generalization, as both traditional and modern forms of music are listened to across India today. But the evolution of the Bollywood movie industry has created an entirely new form of music being created in India.
I chose the Ravi Shankar video as an example of a classical Indian raga because Shankar is the most popular sitarist known to the Western world and because the raga clearly showed aspects of traditional music that I wanted to discuss during my presentation. For instance, he clearly played an alap at the beginning of his raga and a jala at the end, as I explained during the presentation. I chose Balam Pichkari from the Bollywood film Yeh Jawaani Hai Dewaani because it is was favorite tune while I was in India and because I knew it would be interesting for other students to watch during the presentation.
Links to the two videos used:
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0SfF2VmlEd5
My doing some bargaining and food ordering. Telling them its two expensive and later telling them that the food is good and delicious.
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0kKIAmNuaPG
Me introducing myself, that I am from Philadelphia, and my family is from China. That I live with my parents and that I have one older sister and one younger brother. I go to school. I love my family. I am 22 years old.
I think cultural shock is a very essential issue to deal with if people are learning another language and want to live in another country. Actually, I believe that cultural shock is everywhere. It does not necessarily have to be among different countries. Within a country, different cities and districts might have totally different cultural environment. Cultural shock can be reflected on many small things in daily life. For example, I visited Chengdu and Guangzhou in the past summer. These two cities’ contrasting styles surprised me a lot. In Chengdu, people love relaxing, shopping, eating and partying. In Guangzhou, people seem to be busy all the time: They walk fast, eat fast, and do things very efficiently. Also, these two cities all have their dialects that only local people can understand. When I went to these two cities, my local friends took me around. I cannot understand most of their words, and I feel worried that if I come by myself, I might feel hard and awkward to live.
I grew up in China for seventeen years and I was totally immerged in Chinese culture. However, when I was 14 years old, I decided to study abroad for college. Therefore, I went to an international high school. I had all my classes in English and watched a lot of American movies. Still, when I first came to the US, things did not go along perfectly with my expectations. I used about two months to accept various cultural shocks. The way I became more engaged in this culture is that I joined many university programs and volunteer groups. Slowly, I became more acknowledged about this campus and local community.
In order to avoid cultural shock, I think the first top is not to worry much about it. Keep in mind that cultural shock is coming and prepare for it. For example, we can do some research online about the local culture, read others’ traveling blogs, and ask friends who have been there.
In addition to culture shock, I think the reverse cultural shock is very intriguing as well. There are things that you don’t really realize if you are living there for a whole life. However, after living in a totally different culture environment and go back, you may found the old culture very strange. Every time I go back to China, I would experience this reverse culture shock. Because I am already used to communicate with people in a direct and straightforward way, I found Chinese people talk too indirect and “polite” to be effective.
This week, my language partner and I began preparing for the Cultural Presentation. Alvin helped me finalize the contents of the presentation. I asked about any last things that are important about Korean culture. He helped me pronounce some of the names of famous groups/ people and the not so famous groups/ people such as Hyu-Na. I truly found our discussion regarding plastic surgery to be very interesting. I find the procedure not only scary and potentially health threatening, but the trend and social acceptance of the procedure to be even more scary. Plastic surgery is given to teens as gifts and are greatly accepted. I read that there was a lawsuit concerning how a man had an ugly child with a woman that had plastic surgery. The man was not happy about this deceit and the child and thus sued his wife for being ugly.
Besides this, Alvin and I reviewed words regarding numbers, countries, and colors to help describe differences between western culture and Korean culture. I still do not have the numbers totally down, but it's something I need to learn through application.
