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As this was the week before presentations, and I was doing a deeper presentation on hip hop, I decided that my goal for this week was to enhance my listening capabilities and break down some of the lyrics that I was listening to in order to explain to the class the unique aspects of language these lyrics were using.

My goal for this week was to improve my reading capabilities. I did this by reading an article about a Korean hip hop artist that I liked, providing an interview with that Korean hip hop artist. Since I was interested in the topic, I attempted to translate some portions of it. I attached the translated portions into one of my artifact pieces. Not only did this improve my reading comprehension, but it expanded my vocabulary and helped me understand some grammar and syntax as well.

My goal for this week was to improve my writing, as I haven’t practiced that in a while. Thus, in order to fulfill that requirement as well as work on my artifacts for it, I decided to write a mock presentation about what I wanted in a girlfriend to be a future wife. I did this not only because I thought it would be fun, but also it would be relevant to me as my parents expect me to marry a Korean girl. By incorporating some vocabulary words that I had learned over the past couple weeks, I was able to correctly write a short essay about what I needed in my girlfriend. This definitely improved my writing ability.

My goal for this week was to expand my vocabulary again. I did this by testing myself on a list of ten vocab words for Korean Intermediate levels that I found online, and practiced how to spell them and how they are used in a sentence. I then facetimed my parents and practiced using these words, and asked in which contexts I would be using these vocabulary words. It is important for me to constantly try and use these words so that I don’t forget the meaning of these words.

My goal for this week was to improve my reading comprehension ability. I had been doing plenty of oral practice, so I figured it was time to improve my ability to read in Korean. Since I can read fluently, but slowly, I figured the best practice would be for me to read content that is similar to my level. I did this by continuing my practice in Mango, where I went to the advanced chapters and practiced my abilities. In addition to translating the English phrases, I noted the words that I didn’t recognize or was unfamiliar with so that I could incorporate for future use. For example, I had always used only one version of the word “very” in Korean, but now that I remembered there was another way to say it, I will start diversifying my vocabulary a little bit more.

My goals for this week were to practice my listening comprehension in Korean. In addition to that, to expand my vocabulary. Since I would be doing a presentation on Korean hip hop soon, I figured one way I could get ready was to listen to as much Korean hip hop in order to understand the meaning of some of these songs. This would have been helpful to my presentation. In addition, by constantly reinforcing the meaning of these songs, I would not only be able to expand my vocabulary, but I would have the pronunciation of these words engraved in my brain. Also, some syntax and grammar would be practiced by repeating along the lines of certain songs.

Although I have definitely been making progress in expanding my vocabulary and oral communication, I still feel I am lacking in taking the opportunity to really learn more Korean. I wish there was more of a classroom setting for me to be able to learn Korean in so that I could constantly challenge myself by having the pressure of quizzes or a professor evaluating my output into the course.

I feel as if I have not been utilizing Mango enough. Although I am doing my own individual methods to learning more of the language, I should use some form of textbook format to help me improve my capabilities towards the language. In addition, outside of the classroom, I will watch more Korean movies/television shows/interviews for my past time, as they can be both enjoyable and educational.

My goal for this week was to go about improving my listening skills in Korean. Sometimes if someone talks too quickly in Korean using too many vocabulary words I don’t know then I have trouble discerning the meaning of the statement. I accomplished working on this goal by listening to these Youtube videos dissecting films in Korean. Although these tasks were pretty difficult, I had the ability to slow down the video and to rewind or pause whenever I wanted. This helped tremendously for me to discern the meaning of the statement. Of course, there were still lots of vocabulary words I didn’t know, but by using the context of the statements, I was able to piece together the overall meaning of the video.

Goals: Expand my vocabulary in the Korean language; Practice speaking orally so I get the pronunciation of the words correctly

Resources: Korean-English dictionary on naver.com. Asking parents and other peers the meaning of some of the words. Practice speaking with them through the phone or face to face.

Evaluation: Ask them how I did, what I could do better speaking orally.

Tasks: Listen to five Korean songs, highlight words or phrases you don’t know, and look up what they mean; talk to my parents through the phone and make sure I incorporate these new words or phrases as well as practice speaking orally with them

I will evaluate my success in learning the new vocabulary words based on a quick vocabulary quiz that I can take for myself. However, since there is no grade, I will constantly be working at it so that I know how to spell it correctly, pronounce it correctly, and understand what it means. From now on, I will attempt to incorporate these words into my studies.

In practicing my oral communication, I will ask my parents at the end of our conversation how I improved in my Korean, and whether or not the way I spoke was any different from previous sessions. If it has, then I will assume that I was more successful than previous times.

            Over the years, I have had the opportunities to learn two languages through formal classroom study: classical Latin and modern standard Arabic. I started learning Latin in 6^th grade and continued throughout middle school and high school because it was the only language offered at my school. Concurrently, during sophomore and junior years of high school, I attempted to learn Pashto, Farsi, and Turkish in order to supplement independent study on greater Middle Eastern history and Islam. I found the Semitic origin and somewhat alien phonetics of Arabic to be too daunting for me and so I was hesitant to learn it, despite its obvious relevance to my interests and academic goals. When I entered college, I started learning Arabic because it was most the relevant language to my interests and suggested by my summer academic advisor. I had initially thought to do it only temporary then switch to Farsi, which I had really wanted to learn. As it turns out, I have ended up majoring in Arabic.

            With that in mind, I have found that the most interesting and rewarding part of language learning for me is the syntax and morphological aspects. I always remarked, perhaps too much, to my Latin teacher that it was a large puzzle or logic problem that had to be solved. The same applied to Arabic. Each language, and English for that matter, had completely different grammatical structures. Latin changed suffixes to change the tense, mood, and other grammatical features of verbs and nouns. Arabic, on the other hand, used a system of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes to do the same that made it more difficult, but even more satisfying when I finally figured it out and was able to use. Adding another layer of complexity with Arabic is its system of irregular plurals, in contrast to the highly regular nature of Latin.

            Unfortunately, the irregular plurals of Arabic revealed my weakest spot when it comes to language learning: memorization. I have found no other way to learn the plurals of Arabic besides memorization and application. I struggle with memorization, and in absence of many native speakers with whom to practice, I have been unable to fully learn them as much as I wish I could. In future language studies, I hope to be able to identify the tricky areas that require a lot of practice and memorization and to practice these as much as reasonable with my language partner or with other language speakers. In general, practicing on a more frequent basis with the spoken language will probably be the most important feature for my future language learning. Latin is almost entirely a written language and I struggle to remember even the most simple words and sentences despite having read Catullus and Vergil only two years prior.

I know it’s a bit off topic compared with things such as the body language, but when I was doing a bit of research about time, I was shocked that the terminology used for time was inherited almost entirely from Arabic. Persian has a long history of linguistic independence from Arabic, especially poetry, colloquial speech, and the Persian calendar; however, everyday telling of time, hours, minutes, seconds are directly taken from Arabic. This seems surprising since it intersects so much between a uniquely Persian thing (their calendar) and colloquial speech, neither of which I would expect to see Arabic influencing much. I am curious if this means that Persian conceptions of time and their approach to talking about time is taken from Arabic.

It seems a bit confusing on how to tie today’s readings to my language learning. The neurological processes are important for language, but it’s unclear how to turn this information in practical guidance and information regarding my language learning. That being said, the other two readings (“How we mean” and “How we analyze meaning”) seem to indicate a difficulty that I must anticipate. Words and grammatical structures do not mean much in isolation so any study of a language must be able to account for the different contexts, nuances, and connotations that are relevant.

I was listening to my Turkish podcast a few days ago and they were covering how to form adjective clauses. An example of this clause in the podcast was yanımda oturan adam (the man that is sitting next to me). I thought that this is an incredibly useful tool to know because it seems like something that I would use all the time. I understood the clause for the most part after rewinding the podcast a couple times. However, my goal for the week is to see more examples online and to practice making my own sentences using the clause. I am also going to confirm some things with Gökhan because there is another suffix that is used in some similar cases. In addition to this, my goal is to also continue practicing the past and future tenses by reviewing my notes and writing random sentences.

 This week caught me off guard! My intention was to continue practicing the past tense but then Gökhan asked if I wanted to learn the past continuous tense, which is a mix of the past tense and the present tense. Of course, I said yes! We covered it and it seemed to click well for me so we went on to the FUTURE TENSE!!! I was beyond excited because I believe that this opens up more doors for possible sentences. I was also happy because I could remember the conjugations and it made sense to me. I honestly felt like a kid opening up Christmas presents for the first time. I was so excited that I even shared it on my snapchat story so I thought that I’d share it here. :)

 The time has come! I have been very impatient with this and have been getting sneak peaks of this in the Turkish podcast that I found. My goal for this week was to learn the past tense!!! I want to be able to make as many sentences as possible and I don’t want time to be one of the things that is going to hinder my goal. I scheduled an extra meeting with Gökhan in which we loosely went over all of the conjugations. I think Gökhan was nervous to cover everything at once and overwhelming me. Interestingly however, I did not have a hard time getting used to the conjugations as we were covering it. I think that I am not as phased by them because I have seen so many different conjugations from Spanish to Portuguese to Italian to French and to Catalan. This isn’t my first rodeo. I think the examples that we covered during the lesson were very useful and make it easier for me to remember. I am goıng to keep practicing the tense!

 Last week, Gökhan created a Quizlet that contains all of the past vocabulary that we have covered in addition to some new material. My goal for this week was to use the quizlet to review the old words and learn the new vocabulary that he has posted. I actually intended to use quizlet to facilitate my studies a while ago, but it just slipped my mind. The vocabulary in the quizlet includes: weather, food, jobs, greetings, questions, colors, animals, family. The only ones that we had not covered in class were the animals and family members. At the same time, I continued reviewing the present tense conjugations of the verbs that I had learned.

My goal for this week was to learn the conjugations for the other words and to begin combining nouns with those verbs to make complete sentences. This was fairly easy. I just went online to find the other conjugation endings and I started putting things together. It is a little tricky because some verbs are irregular and the vowel harmony changes what I would expect the word to be at times. Outside of this personal goal, we actually just learned how to make sentences!!! We learned how to make there is/are (isn’t/aren’t) sentences. An example of one of these sentences is: Sınıfta üç öğrenci ve bir öğretmen var (There are three students and one teacher in the classroom.) These seem to be pretty straight forward but I am going to make a lot of sample sentences for Gökhan to check just to be sure.

My goal for this week was to learn some basic verbs and how to conjugate with them. To carry this out, I scheduled an extra meeting with Gökhan in which we covered sevmek (to like), içmek (to drink), yemek (to eat), dinlemek (to listen), and a few more. We only went over the first person conjugation for these verbs but I was still happy because I felt like I was one step closer to making sentences. In class with Manya and Joora, we continued to review vocabulary we previously covered and we also began learning how to tell time.

I am not that pleased with my progress thus far. I thought that I would know how to form more sentences by now. Many outside commitments are taking away from time that I would like to spend studying the language. I think I may have been overly ambitious with my learning plan. I am able to participate and engage during our class sessions perfectly fine, but I want to be able to make more sentences.

I do not want to make any changes to my learning plan because I feel like all of the topics that I outlined in the learning plan are essential for beginning a language. Instead of the changing the learning plan, I am going to blot out more concrete times that I will study the language. I have mostly been studying when I have free time but I see now that I need to force myself to study to reach my goal. I am also going to schedule more meeting times with Gökhan so that I do not have a choice but to review the new material that we cover in class. I also need to look at my learning plan more frequently so that I remember my goals and expectations.

For my first artifact, I chose to share a brief excerpt from a conversation that I had with my pen pal saying “hello how are you”. As you can see from the excerpt, she hoped right into difficult questions that I had to ask Gökhan and my best friend Google translate for help. A farewell is not in the artifact because we never formally said ‘goodbye’ in the messages but goodbye is görüşürüz.

With regards to my goal from weeks 4 and 5, I think that I have met them fairly well. Every time I walk in class, Gökhan and I exchange Merhaba nasılsın? to one another so I have gotten the hang of saying the phrase. Also, we usually say görüşürüz or güle güle upon departure instead of goodbye.