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I found the reading about bilingualism very interesting because there is a huge change in researchers’ attitude. For the past many years, people thought that speaking two languages is a hindrance for intellectual development. However, recently, people began to say that bilinguals are smarter than others.

Actually, we cannot doubt the interference that speaking two languages brings. For myself, speaking Chinese and English might sometimes affect each other: When I am speaking in English, I might translate all the words I want to say from Chinese to English. Same thing happens in reverse. When I am talking to my Chinese friends, sometimes my first reaction is to say several English words. Interestingly, researchers found out that this interference could be a good practice in some ways because it pushes the brain to solve the conflict and be stronger.

Personally, I hold some critical views on this topic. First, I think people change their attitude mostly because of the growing need to master two languages. Because of globalization and internationalism, more and more people are willing to and tend to learn at least two languages. Therefore, bilinguals are more common and popular. Second, I do not fully agree with the argument that learning two languages improve people’s IQ. think that people who are smarter might be brave to challenge themselves and choose to learn two languages. 

I thought that I had posted my learning plan, but after reviewing my posts, it seems that I did not submit it.

Thus, my learning plan and final culture project will focus on pop culture. As a business man, I am interested in how to do business in Korea. This means understanding the culture and customs. Thus, by focusing on pop-culture I'll be able to understand which K-pop stars are popular and why.

For the first few weeks I'll focus on becoming familiar with grammar points and introductory phrases that focus on things such as where I'm from, greetings, my age, and how are you. 

Next, I'll go into classroom survival phases. Basically things like "can you repeat that" and "what does that mean?"

Third, I'll start learning life survival phrases such as "where is", "how much", foods, and colors so that I can describe things.

Fourth, I'll go into talking about family, whose in my family and how old they are. This requires knowing numbers.

Next I'll use my knowledge of numbers to attempt to learn time and dates.

Lastly, I want to learn the names of Korean stars and slang terms to know what trends are currently popular. Examples include fashion trends, health trends, and other cultural norms such as plastic surgery.

In many dominant countries including Pakistan, the governments absolutely fail to protect their nations’ prosperity because they do not let half of their society – women – play a role in peace or policy-making in the society. The men in charge have yet to recognize the power or the potential that women could have when it comes to negotiations to bring and keep peace and help society in any possible way. In Pakistan, the culture and religion exclude women from peace negotiation, policy-making and any other general decisions. Women are the victims who do not hold the power, but have the ability to play an important role in peace negotiations and any other role in the society.Although, women work behind the scenes to protect their families and secure basic human rights i. Their exclusion neglects the need for their vital perspectives and skills in the peace building and reconciliation process. Instead of leaving security and all the negotiations only in the hands of powerful men with a limited view of security, i think women should also be given some authority. Women faced inequality, discrimination, underestimated, and deprived even from their rights in Pakistan. Although, women have already found cost effective ways to survive and overcome decades of torture, abuse and exclusion without weapons, validating their intelligence. They know the value of peace, and want to approach everything peacefully and help the society as a whole. There was a very interesting article that i read about Pakistani women struggle against violence and extremists  and i thought to share here too. 

http://www.icanpeacework.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Pakistan-brief-MK-1.9.14.pdf

Urdu%20Over%20Skype%20.m4a

As I mentioned in the summary of weekly reflections, in the first two weeks, I learned greetings, self-introductions, ordering foods in restaurants, shopping cosmetics. In the second half of this semester, I focused more on learning some Korean words, such as body, face, clothes, colors, and etc.

I have a very realistic goals for learning these vocabularies because I want to use them when I go shopping in Korea. For example, I want to know colors and types of clothes so that I can describe what I want to buy to shopkeepers. I want to learn numbers because I have to ask for price and I will tell shopkeepers how many items I want to buy. I learn asking for directions because I might get lost while shopping.

The biggest problem, as I also mentioned in the summary, was that I might read the romantization of words in the way I read Chinese Pinyin. Because I am so used to read Pinyin, it interrupts my conception in learning Korean and I might make the same mistake in pronouncing. One way I solved this problem is that I asked Sun to record the correct pronunciation for me using my phone. I listened to the recording in my spare time and tried to pronounce right after she said those words. This method helped me to successfully memorize many vocabularies that were difficult to me at first. Another method I used to remember the correct pronunciation was taking notes in Chinese and English. Just as the note and weekly reflection I uploaded, I actually wrote down some Chinese and English words next to Korean romantization if they share the similar pronunciation. Nevertheless, I do not think this method is good for long run. I should not rely on using other languages to learn Korean.

After discussing with Dr. Scinicariello, I modified my learning goal from the beginning of this semester into a specific and practical topic: Shopping in Korea. Choosing this topic actually gave me a special and inspiring angle to explore this language. Also, because I really want to go shopping in Korea, this skill would be very useful. Therefore, I slightly changed my original goals and decided to focus on all vocabularies that are related with shopping. After making this change, I found that my learning plan is much more specific.

So far, I have learned greetings, counting numbers and describing ages, countries, majors. I also finished three artifacts, including greeting recording, family tree and cooking Korean food. In my spare time, I also tried to order foods in Korean Garden, a Korean restaurant in Richmond. First, I tried to greet the waitress in Korean and she relied me with typical greeting words as well. Then I ordered some foods such as Kimchi bokumbab gurigo (and) ddeokbokyi (spicy rice cake with fish cake). She said alget supnida (okay) as a reply. Then, she began to talk to me in Korean and I had no idea what was she talking about, so we continued our conversation in English.

Moreover, I really appreciate how reading complements my learning in Korean. Many readings are supported by strong scholarly research, and news readings spawn moments of my deep thought. My favorite reading is about extinct language, which reminds me of the important roles that languages play.

Discussions in class and in cultural posts gave me a lot of inspiration. All discussion topics are very intriguing for me. They are very important questions but I have not thought about them before I actually need to discuss about them. For example, the most interesting topics for me include body language in Korea, how Koreans evaluate time and family. I loved doing research for this topics and hearing from Henry and Nuannuan. Even though three of us are learning the same language and discussing the same topic, we always came up with different ideas and opinions. It helps me to know Korean in a much more comprehensive perspective.

In retrospect, the experience of learning Korean up to now is very different from the experience of learning English in the past twelve years. The way I learned Korean is much more flexible and creative. When I was learning English, most things are learned from textbooks and I seldom do research on western culture by myself. In contrast, learning Korean is much more interesting because it is an autonomous learning process: I made my own plan according to my personal passion and I learned from various sources, including Mango, dramas, songs and presentations. 

Since I have done many artifacts and did much research on Korean culture. In the next half of this semester, I will do more real work on learning vocabularies, such as body, directions, clothes and colors.

It was a great experience working my language partner Sun this semester. In our first meeting, I listed all the goals I wanted to achieve by the end of this semester. Then, we made a very detailed plan and assigned all tasks for each week and each meeting. Actually, meeting with Sun twice a week is very helpful. In the second meetings I usually would recall all the words I learned in the first meeting, and Sun could correct me every time I have wrong pronunciations.

In the first two weeks, we learned greetings, self-introductions, ordering foods in restaurants, shopping cosmetics. In the second half of this semester, we focused more on learning some Korean words, such as body, face, clothes, colors, and etc. The biggest problem I met was that I might read the romantization of words in the way I read Chinese Pinyin. Because I am so used to read Pinyin, it interrupts my conception in learning Korean and I might make the same mistake in pronouncing. One way I solved this problem is that I asked Sun to record the correct pronunciation for me using my phone. I listened to the recording in my spare time and tried to pronounce right after she said those words. This method helped me to successfully memorize many vocabularies that were difficult to me at first. Another method I used to remember the correct pronunciation was taking notes in Chinese and English. Just as the note and weekly reflection I uploaded, I actually wrote down some Chinese and English words next to Korean romantization if they share the similar pronunciation. Nevertheless, I do not think this method is good for long run. I should not rely on using other languages to learn Korean.

Also, my language partner has lived in Korea, the US and China for many years. Her experience in living in these three countries always inspires me. For example, she compared how she wear clothes in Korea and in the US. She told me that she could wear very casual clothes in the US, but her Korean friends would judge her if she does not dress up or make up one day. These interesting stories helped me to better understand the Korean culture and prepare for my presentation.

Reading Korean is really hard for me. I could see that different radicals compose words, but there are numerous different combinations so they have a lot variety and different meanings. Also, when I was learning Korean from online resources, most of them have romanization marked aside, so my first reaction was to read the romantization, which is very similar to Pinyin in Chinese. I did not have time to learn the whole alphabet system, so I chose to learn several really important vocabularies such as family members and my name.

Surprisingly, writing is a lot easier. When I was drawing the family tree and marked the name of family members, I found myself writing Korean characters quickly and smoothly. Maybe the reason is that the construction of Korean characters is similar to construction of Chinese characters. For example, they all have rectangles, horizontal lines and vertical lines. 

Looking back to my learning plan, I found myself accomplished most of my goals that I had in the beginning of this semester. Now, things I could do in Korean includes greeting and self-introduction, numbers, colors, emotions, distinguishing formal and informal Korean, asking for directions. I think the first reason that I have achieved most of goals is that I had a very realistic list of learning goals. Before I actually started learning Korean, I know that time is limited, so I did not expect myself to learn everything. The second reason is that I have a very detailed plan of what to learn every week. My Language partner Sun and I assigned all the tasks into different weeks during our first meeting.

However, there are still goals that I have not been able to achieve. For example, I did not really learn a lot about reading and writing. Most of the readings I learn was from the subtitle of the Korean Drama I watched, It’s Okay. That is love. In addition, I was planning to learn at least three Korean songs.  During this semester, I learned one folk song, Three Little Bears and a KPOP song, Gee, by Girl’s Generation. I learned all of the lyrics in Three Little Bears and had a presentation on it by introducing the vocabularies about family members. However, I did not learn every lyric in Gee. Instead, I picked out all the words that express emotions. I found that learning songs is actually help me to learn Korean in a very pleasure and spontaneous way, and it became a great complementary when I systematically learn words about emotion and family. In addition, I can expand my research based on these songs with a cultural perspective.

Watching Korean drama was not part of my original learning plan because I thought watching drama is only for entertainment. However, after watching several episodes, it became one of my favorite part of learning Korean. I realized that I could learn many Korean words if I pay attention to what actors say and how do the words correspond with subtitles. Even more importantly, Korean drama reflect many interesting cultural facts. For example, I saw that when Koreans are asking for forgiveness they usually rub their hands.

Another favorite part of learning Korean this semester is about presentations. I really enjoyed preparing for the presentation because it pushes me to do a lot of research on Korean culture, which often correlates to history and contemporary social consensuses. The first presentation I gave was about shopping in Korea, but there was too many points to be nicely structured. Therefore, I used PowerPoint in the second presentation, which was about history of Korean. In order to be more specific, I concentrated on the impact of Chinese characters on Korean. It not only illustrate the Korean history, but also help me to know more about own language as well. The relationship between languages and cultures amazed me. For my final cultural project, I talked about fashion in Korea by comparing the traditional Korean custom and current Korean street fashion, and reflecting on the transformation of fashion and its impact on Korean contemporary culture.

My presentation is about shopping Korea because I believe that this is a very practical and useful learning goal. I first talked about the popular places to go for shopping, such as Myongdong. Many tourists booming at there and there are many international brands such as H&M. Shopkeepers there provide multilingual customer service including English, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. In comparison to Myongdong, another great place to go is Dongdaemun, where cloths are very cheap but without brands. Some famous local electronic brands include Samsung and LG. Moreover, the makeup brands in Korea are getting more and more popular recently. Many of my friends gave up using Dior and started to use Etude House instead. Another thing to notice is that Korea is one of the countries that use credit cards the most. Still, shops in Korea definitely prefer cash in order to underreport their tax. Therefore, many shops provide 5% discount if people pay in cash. In addition to these cultural aspects of shopping in Korea, I also discussed the necessary vocabularies I need to learn before shopping. For instance, how to greet shopkeepers, make introduction in formal Korean, talk to my friend in informal Korean, ask for direction, colors, numbers, etc.

Reflecting on my presentation, I found one area for improvement: structure. Since I wanted to show too many details, my presentation lost its integrity to some extent. For the next presentation, I would put more effort in organizing the structure, and I could probably use PowerPoint for support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBuK4dii0GM

A lot of words shown in this video are commonly used to express emotion:

kkam jja gi ya= OMG!

kkam jjak nol lat ja na! = You really surprised me!

u wa! Jeong mal ye ppeo yo. Nu ni bu syeo yo=Wow! You are really beautiful. I’m blinded/dazzled (by your beauty)

Koreanpopculture.pptx

I love the story of the graduate student Ms. Johnson in the reading. For me, the fact that her learning of linguistics helped the tribe build its dictionary was very touching and impressing. I believe that every language has its necessity to exist because it also symbolize the culture behind the language. For example, when I am learning Korean and doing research on it, I am unconsciously seeking for information about Korean culture. Language is closely connected to the culture. To be more specific, the history of a languages cannot be separated from the history of country’s development and human culture.

On the other hand, if the culture of a country or a group of people is destroyed or ruined, the language will lose its meaning and context. If nobody uses the language, it won’t have further progress. Under this circumstance, it’s very hard to save or revive that language. Moreover, commonly used languages like English, Spanish and French are dominating the world. People from all over the world are learning these languages, and it leads to a tendency that minor language will be overlooked.

There are two most common sentence structure in Korean. One is “Subject + Verb” and another is “Subject +object + verb”. For example, if I want to say [Henry comes], I can say [Henry-I wha-yo]. And if I want to say [Henry ears an apple] in Korean, it is [ Henry-I sa-gwa-leul muk-uh-yo].

The grammar of Korean is largely different from English because in Korean verb is put in the end of sentences. That is to say, when listen to Korean, we have to wait until the end of the sentence to get the message. Following are the examples that can show the difference between English sequence and Korean Sequence:

                -English: I get up early in the morning.

                -Korean: I in the morning early get up.

                -English: She watched a movie.

                -Korean: She movie watched.

Here, I found this link very useful in learning the structure of Korean sentences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1COozbv6WEM

The body language in Korea is very different from the body language in the US. By looking at Korean drama, I have observed some really interesting body language that Koreans often use in their daily lives. For example, when they come up with some great idea, they will hit their knees or laps. When they are asking for forgiveness or asking for a lower price when shopping, they will usually rub their hands and look humble. In addition, pinky finger has its unique implication and is often used when people want to make commitment or promise.

I also found the dining etiquette in Korea very interesting. Koreans can arrive up to thirty minutes late without being rude. Most Korean will take off their shoes before they enter the dining place, and then they may sit on the floor and eat foods on a low table. Every time I went to the Korean restaurant YIDABA, which is located next to my home in China, I need to take off my shoes before entering the restaurant. (Actually, sitting on the floor and bending my legs for hours always drove me crazy.) In Korea, the hosts have to greet their guests individually and pour wine (or any drink) for them one by one in order to show respect.

The first reading, How the Brain Handles Language, helps me to know about the process that we actually receive message, decode information, and comprehend context from a biological perspective. Even though I am not a science student, it was interesting to know the scientific background of our brains’ function in terms of different areas in cortex.

It was good know the difference between natural and conventional view on the language. Personally, I agree with the natural view that the sound of the words are intrinsically connected to the real meaning of it. Also, I am very excited to explore the difference between sense and reference by looking at all three languages I learned and is learning: Chinese, English and Korean. For example, in English, we call both father’s mother and mother’s mother as grandmother, but in Korean and Chinese, there are different terms to differentiate them.

By reading the third reading, I realized that learning language could be separated into different steps and parts, including vocabulary, grammar, and phonology. Also, there are two feasible approaches. One is “working through the various levels in a particular order, beginning with a phonetic description, proceeding through phonology, morphology and syntax and concluding with semantics.” Another approach is just the opposite. Even though I do not think I could follow exactly either of the sequence, it is very helpful to realize the integrity and broadness of learning language so that I won’t ignore any certain aspect.

    Rhiannon introduced the traditional Indian music by showing us a concert played by traditional Indian instruments. Also, because she is learning Sitar this semester, she explained the script of the song. Then, she showed us a current popular music Video Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. It's really interesting for meto know that people learn the dance move in the new music videos. She said that it is a mix environment in India because people listen to different kinds of music every day. Also, more western influence is coming in while the traditional Indian music focus on religion.

    There are also two presentations for Korean. Nuannuan had her presentation based on K-POP Culture. She introduced some most popular bands and major music themes. "The Korean wave" includes basically everything that is related to the Korean culture. She showed us a music video called "Love Song" performed by her favorite band BIGBANG.  I found the lyrics in Love Song intriguing because they are also the most commonly used words in Korean Dramas I saw before. Henry also mentioned many aspects of Korean culture such as the K-POP marketing and plastic surgeries. I was impressed by how he related his learning plan to the cultural project.

    My own presentation was about fashion in Korea. I talked about the role that fashion plays in a country's culture, the history and design of Hanbok, the current Korean fashion, and lastly, the reasons for the transformation in Korean fashion and its impact on Korean society. Also, I mentioned some terms like Airport fashion, drama fashion and some Korean vocabularies sounds similar to English words. I focus on how could culture, history and language be related to each other. 

korean-presentation.pptx

Week 3: Vocab oriented week

Colors: Red (bbalgangsaek) Blue (palangsaek) Black (gumjungsaek) White (hayansaek) Pink (bunhongsaek) Yellow (nolangsaek) Orange (juhwangsaek) Green (choloksaek) Purple (bolasaek)

Clothings: top (Tshirt), dress (duresu), sweater (sweta), shorts (banbaji), pants (ginbaji), shoes (sinbal), skirt (qima).

Face, body features: