Meeting with Yigit was so helpful to me. I knew where I wanted to start in my exploration of Turkish -- numbers, the alphabet, colors -- but having a language partner was really nice because I could make sure I was learning things correctly. He didn't directly teach us grammar or anything, but he laid out some of the basic foundations of Turkish so that we had some building blocks that we could start teaching ourselves from. We started really basic, like days of the week and colors and counting and the alphabet. And it was very helpful to start from here, because at least for me, I need to be able to visualize and pronounce a word to remember it. So I needed to learn the alphabet accurately and early on before anything else would stick. I had looked up the alphabet and numbers on youtube and other sites that gave pronunciations, but it was nice to have a language partner because I could repeat it back and make sure I was saying it right too, rather than just listening to someone else say it. It was the same case with learning other words -- It's easier to hear a word and learn it if you hear it from someone in the same room rather than an online recording. One thing that we went over in the Language Partner sessions that helped immensely, that I think I would have had a really hard time trying to teach myself, was the organization of the vowels by Front and Back and High and Low. I didn't realize that Turkish was set up that way when I started learning it, but it's pivotal for understanding other grammatical constructions like making the vowels match in words and verb conjugations. Certain vowels correlate with other ones, and this comes into play when a word changes in one the 5 States. After the first few sessions where we learned the basics to start on, I used the meetings mainly as a way to ask any questions I had with what I was learning. I also asked to clarify some specific things, like how to refer to family members, or more complex phrases that I wasn't sure I was translating correctly. This kind of set-up was ideal, I think, because I could tailor my learning specifically to what I wanted to know, and yet I also had someone to ask just to make sure I was doing it right. Read more…
Posted by Yazmeen Nunez on November 29, 2010 at 5:30pm
I very much enjoyed the Culture Shock video, and felt that it had a lot to offer anybody who watches it. I personally have gotten to know many international students at the University of Richmond, and have almost more international friends than I do American friends. I converse with them and really enjoy spending time with them, and I imagine that they feel likewise. Although some of the ideas that were expressed in the video I have heard from my friends, there were some particular concepts that were shared amongst the many international students in the video that I had never attributed to those that I have met.
In the video the example was given of international students banding together and making friends with one another more easily than they can with American students. Something that I unfortunately hear often on campus from American students is that they think international students think that they are "better than" American students because they don't associate with them as much as they seem to with other internationals, or that they don't want to be friends with American students. They address this very well in the video and note that international students would really like to interact more with American students, and vice versa, but that cultural divide is far too significant, and the culture shock far too intense, for the two parties to truly become close to one another.
Another important aspect of the culture shock is the educational aspect. School is the reason why the international students come to the University, and unless they went to a United World College, each nation has its own educational guidelines and expectations that are very different from one another. In the video, some of the students talk about their experiences with these differences, particularly in class. The instance of the Asian student who was uncomfortable with speaking in class, but whose grade relied on her in-class participation, struck me while I was watching the video. She was never asked in her home country to speak out in class about her opinions or the subject matter because the way that her classes were structured were different in that respect; it is mostly lecture-based, if I remember correctly. Yet she forced herself to adapt, despite how uncomfortable she felt and how hard it was for her. I think that a lot of domestic students do not understand the significance of this difference in culture that international students feel every day, because for some students from particular cultures, every interaction they have with American people is different from what they would have done had they been at home. This immense pressure and culture shock must be incredibly overwhelming for them.
All in all, the culture shock video was not only informative but also helped me to relate to the international students a lot more. I can understand a lot of the frustrations that they hold when coming into a different culture, whereas before I knew I thought that I could simply never understand. I feel as though understanding the differences between culture definitely helps you to learn a language, as we have covered before in previous discussions. Understanding the way that the culture works is a large part of being able to utilize your acquired language skills, as you must understand non-verbal cues as well as colloquial phrases, something with which many of the international students in the video seemed to have trouble. The video shows me that above all, even if I wanted to try to go test my language skills in Turkey right now, I would still be lost; I could ask for directions and food, but even international students who have been studying English for years still become overwhelmed every now and then.
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