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For the past two weeks, Jenna and I have continued to work on my writing and reading in Korean. Different from reading articles and writing summaries on it, we started working towards practicing for the specific types of questions the COM2 exam will have. She broke down what the COM2 exam will contain: A speaking or self-introduction section, listening and speaking portion, a reading comprehension portion, and a writing portion at the end (free handwriting). She told me we should focus on one part at a time for the next several sessions to really pinpoint and prepare for the exam. So, this past week, we started with the self-introduction part of the exam. Although we practiced self-introductions the past semester and a little at the beginning of this semester, Jenna gave me a couple of minutes to talk about myself and things to say and not to say. One big thing that I made a mistake on was introducing myself and my name. I used informal language and Jenna showed me what I should say instead to make it more formal and respectful. Furthermore, she gave me tips on what other things I should talk about in my self-introduction since it must be at least 5 minutes long. So, for homework, she told me to jot down, in English, what things I should say in my self-introduction. Yesterday I came up with a couple of subjects to talk about in my self-introduction including who I live with, my dog, where I live, where I go to school, what my major is, what year I am in, what are some of my hobbies, and what I wish to be when I grow up. There are a couple of words that I am not sure on how to pronounce in Korean so I will ask Jenna next week. Furthermore, Jenna and I planned on mastering self-introductions the next session and then continuing on to the next part of the COM2 exam: the listening portion. I predict that it will not be too difficult for me to learn because I am fairly confident in my ability to speak and listen in Korean. I hope to finish the second section of listening on the COM2 exam by the end of the next bi-weekly journal entry.

I think the effectiveness of my strategies of learning Korean has been working efficiently and has proved to become helpful. I can see my improvement in reading, writing, and listening. In the future, I hope to build on what I have learned, continuing to read, write, and listen in Korean to further my proficiency in Korean. I also think that I have become a lot prouder of being Korean. Before I started this SDLC course, I was embarrassed to speak and write Korean at such a low level. But now I feel like I am gaining more confidence and pride in learning and knowing Korean. I will continue to listen to music in Korean and practice writing sentences, but I will also attempt to find new strategies to help me learn Korean. My short term and long-term goals still remain the same as the last bi-weekly journal entry: Writing full and compound sentences and preparing to take the COM2 Exam.

Week 4 Reflection

            At this point, we are really starting to settle into a routine. The format and schedule that we laid out in the beginning is panning out perfectly and I am very happy with the way things are going. My goals of improving in Speaking and Listening are really developing, but perhaps I could do more in terms of Writing and Reading. While I practice it weekly for the same amount of time that we have our discussions, I feel like it is maybe less intensive and there is less immediate pressure on me while doing it so I do not feel the improvement as much. I do not mean that pressure and situations that are typically more higher stress situations for language learners are necessary or the only way to really learn a language, but in my experience they certainly help. For example, direct language immersion in the region where the target language is spoken is generally one of the fastest ways to learn a language for a variety of reasons, one of them being surrounded by it and regularly finding oneself in more high-pressure situations than a classroom in order to order food and survive there.

            We have finalized our syllabus and are starting in on the first chapters of the book. One of the concepts that I struggled with and that we needed to spend the most time on was the difference between the verbs ser, estar and ficar. Ser and estar exist in Spanish and thankfully the difference between them is the same in Portuguese as it is in Spanish: ser is used for more permanent, unchangeable, characteristic concepts and estar is used for changeable states and aspects. However, ficar was an entirely new word and concept as there is not really an equivalent in English or Spanish. It was similar to estar but with very nuanced differences, in my opinion. It can be used to describe locations, or sometime temporary states usually in the past tense. For example, you could say :the restaurant é [ser] on Main Street”, “Jorge está [estar] sitting in the restaurant”, and “Jorge ficava [ficar] in the restaurant a long time before the waiter noticed him”. So here ficar has a more similar meaning to “stay” than “was/be” (even though they would both work), but you could also say “she vai ficar mad that you canceled the show”, meaning she will get so mad or be so mad, which is closer to “be” than “stay” even though it almost has the connotation of both.

            I tripped up on those in a lot of exercised that we did and I felt like it changed meanings and rules every time, but eventually I got a good enough grasp of it to get the general concept, use it a couple times in our conversation the following week, and leave the larger grasping of the concept of it in every situation that exists for something that will come with practice and better overall knowledge of the language. 

The movie Cidade de Deus is one of the most famous Brazilian movies, nominated for four Oscars. It is a breathtaking story of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between the years of the late 1960’s and early 1980’s. It is based on a novel of the same name written in 1997, and the move was released in 2002.  

The film is committed to showing an authentic vision of grisly life in the favelas and seems to do so with much success. Only one actor in the entire film had previous acting experience, and the rest were recruited from the actual favelas and given a short training before they started filming.     

Favelas, for a bit of background historical knowledge, are settlements that emerged in the late 1800’s as soldiers had come to Rio to fight but had absolutely nowhere to live so they built their own houses that grew to become entire communities on Providência hill, between the city center and the sea. The government gave these soldiers the right to do live there in this way, but as soon as many former African slaves moved in, the areas quickly became overcrowded, dirty, and suffered outbreaks of disease. These communities were largely abandoned by the government, meaning they had no governmental justice system, sanitation, electricity, water, etc. and were associated with intense squalor, crime, and poverty. At the same time, many wealthy white Europeans were moving in (at this time, Rio was the capital of Brazil) and wanted to live near the coast in the center of the city, close to where the favelas are, and the government began their first wave of attempts to vacate the favelas and relocate the people to make room for gentrification. Later on, another wave of people joined as Brazil saw a massive wave of urbanization in the early 1940’s and 1950’s. Leading up to then, many of the cities were succeeding in gentrifying: becoming wealthier, pushing out the lower classes, and as the wealth began to concentrate in the hands of the relatively few elite in urban areas and the majority of the population had become poor and rural, soon many people had to commute into the city to work where all the money was - often traveling several towns over. (Interestingly, this is the meaning behind the song “Trem das Onze/11 o’clock Train” by Adoniran Barbosa comes from, a song we listened to in Portuguese for Spanish Speakers with Professor Abreu, referring to the commuter lifestyle of many at the time.) With this second influx came another wave of attempts to remove the inhabitants out of the favelas during the reign of a militaristic government in the 1970’s.

One of these government housing relocation sites was the famous Cidade de Deus, which exists in real life (also interesting- Former President Obama visited the favela of Cidade de Deus in 2011). However, after relocating them, the government for the most part ceased investing in these government housing locations and they fell back into the same state of favela from which they had been removed. At this time, the drug trade was growing internationally and cocaine became a major element of the crime in the favelas, among accompanying arms trade and gang violence, which are the main elements of the movie.

For my second cultural post, I decided to watch a documentary about Korean foods and street vendors. I searched on YouTube “Korean Food Documentary” and found one particular documentary that interested me. The link attached below, and the documentary was around 40 minutes long. It was aired on the Discovery channel in English, but there are many parts in the documentary that includes Korean native speakers as well as Korean subtitles throughout the whole documentary. I was able to learn about the Korean food culture as well as learn to understand and improve upon Korean speaking and reading. The subtitles were very difficult to read fast at the beginning of the documentary, but by the end of it, I was able to pick up on it pretty quickly. It was really cool to see familiar Korean words in the subtitles and I was able to identify what they were saying in some of the sentences. A couple of times throughout the documentary, they interviewed street vendors as well as customers who buy food in Korea. It was really interesting to hear the different accents and tones of the different native Korean speakers, and I was able to understand most of what they were trying to say. Looking at the foods from the documentary, there were a lot of foods that I recognized and have eaten before from Korean restaurants or from dinner with my family at home. The documentary dove into the history of Korean food culture and how each kind of food became popular in Korea. I learned a lot about the history of commonly popular street foods such as Hoppang. Overall, I was very fascinated after I finished the documentary because of all the new information I learned about my country’s food culture. The biggest difference between Korean food culture and American food culture is the way the food is presented. Korean food comes with an entrée as well as many different side dishes called “bonchon.” Different from American food where it is mostly one main entrée and only a couple of side dishes, Korean meals usually come with at least 5 different sides or bonchon. A great way to think about the layout of Korean means is like Thanksgiving dinner. For Thanksgiving, we tend to create many side dishes to accompany the main turkey and ham. Similar to this, Korean meals have rice and meat as the entrees and side dishes like soup, kimchi, tofu, etc. to accompany their main meal. Many of the Korean side dishes are made from vegetables and that is what makes Korean food so healthy. A lot of the bonchons are fermented over many weeks to create a unique flavor. This is very common for side dishes like Kimchi. Overall, I am pleased with what I have come out with from this documentary. I learned and improved on Korean reading by reading the subtitles in Korean. I have improved on my listening in Korean from the different interviews of Korean natives in the documentary. And lastly, I have learned about the core culture of Korean food and how history plays a big role in the food.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpQ94EkzG6c&ab_channel=miky1209

I met with Jenna again two times the past two weeks. We continued to practice reading and writing in Korean. Before the two meetings, I hoped to master writing simple Korean words with ease. Jenna brought in a sheet with simple vocabulary words and phrases. We reviewed some words, and I took some time to memorize the words and the definitions/spelling. These words were fairly simple words that were easy to spell, such as name, me, boy, girl, mom, dad, brother, etc. There were also some simple phrases like nice to meet you and thank you very much. I had some trouble with some of the spelling, but Jenna helped me understand my mistakes and I learned from it. Jenna took some time to quiz me on the spelling and definitions after studying for it for ~15 minutes. We also continued to read Korean articles about the NBA Lakers. I continued to read about Lebron and Anthony Davis and how the Laker's hopes are at an all-time high with the upcoming NBA season. For homework, she assigned me a quiz on the new vocab words she told me about. During the meeting, she also helped me with my self-introduction. I practiced talking about myself and my hobbies and future aspirations. Jenna told me some pointers on what to exactly talk about during my self-introduction and how much information I should be saying. She told me a simple structure for my self-introduction: Name, school/year/major, hobbies, future goals, and dreams. Throughout the week, I practiced my self-introduction (what kind of things to talk about) and also practiced reading some articles about sports and weather from naver.com. I continued listening to the radio garden in Korea, tuning into different stations across Korea. It was hard to find a specific broadcast I would enjoy, but I eventually found a station that talked about current news and events. I understand some of the words and topics, but not all of them. I definitely think that I have gotten better at listening and understanding harder phrases. In the second session I met up with Jenna, she quizzed me on the new vocab I learned from last week, and I got every word and phrase correct which was a great improvement. Furthermore, Jenna gave me a new sheet of vocab. She gave me new basic vocab words such as name, family, school, friend, hobby, age, health, etc. She also gave me some basic conversational phrases that would be helpful in my self-introduction (Hello, no problem, thank you, sorry, nice to see you, you are correct, thank you for the food, etc.) I already knew most of these phrases but did not know how to spell them correctly, so it was helpful to finally learn how to spell them correctly. All of the vocab she gave me in the past two weeks are words that I would use in my self-introduction. She gave me an outline of what to say. I would first start with a hello, nice to meet you, and introduce myself. Then she gave me some topics I could cover in my self-introduction: age, school, major, hobby. I had dived into each topic with Jenna and she corrected any sentences that I said. For example, I said, "My major in school is science" instead of chemistry. Jenna taught me what chemistry was in Korean and I added it to my vocab list to study for.

Week 3 Reflection

            Now a handful of weeks into class, we have gotten a structure up and running for sure. Making the syllabus and planning out class content was more challenging than I anticipated. I thought it would be something I could do without following a textbook, but it was such a relief from the director side of this class experience to progress through the logical steps and vocabulary lists that someone else has already planned and thought out with much more care than I would have been able to. From the other side, the student side, I had been against using a book because I had found them dull and had always questioned how effective they were in any classroom, not even just a language learning setting, as the majority of students will not read them, or if they do, will not read them closely and effectively. Since I am now wearing both hats, I have a better understanding of why many teachers use books as a guide. I am sure it saves them many headaches and late hours.

            Our goal these weeks has been to get a final syllabus. I also had to find time to photocopy the pages we wanted as it would be much easier to send her a PDF than to have her try and somehow get the book down there, so we had to look at what chapters and what pages we wanted to focus on. As I had used this book before in Prof. Abreu’s class, I had seen a bit of it before, but, as I had mentioned, he also worked hard to incorporate a dynamic element into every class so we would look at the book every now and then but it was not as central as an element to that class as we are thinking it will be to our class. I wanted to be sure to include the vocab list from every chapter so that I could learn about 60 words a week, but other than that I included a brief overview of about ten chapters that we could go through in the following weeks at our own pace. I was sure to include sections about grammatical concepts that were more difficult or that I knew I struggle with.

            I test how well I have learned and really retained these words, concepts and am advancing in my language journey through a variety of ways. Primarily, I implement them all, or as many as I can, in our Tuesday meetings where we fill the entire time with speaking and listening skills. It was shaky at first, but I have been able to progress to a more conversational, fluid pace and I get better, or more “fluent-sounding”, each week. As a linguistics student, I know that oftentimes the terminology used to refer to the bilingual process can be questionable, such as the concept of an “incomplete” bilingual or an inherent notion that every person and learner should always aim to achieve monolingual fluency in a target language when the measure of a complete monolingual is not precisely defined and is such a high bar that it discourages many people from even trying. In this case, however, my goal is to advance as much as I can and get the tools that I would need to be as comfortable as possible talking with and leading speakers with a definite dominance over my target language.

The past week, Jenna and I did some more Korean writing practice. She sent me a google drive doc with some phrases and common sentence endings I can practice with. The practice was focused on present progressives and past tense terms in Korean. She provided a general formula for spelling in Korean and then presented me with some examples of these spellings in common phrases. The present progressive is parallel to the -ing endings in English verbs such as “I am swimming.” I have always gotten the spelling wrong to the endings of Korean sentences using present progressives. Similarly, the past progressives have a very similar spelling formula technique as the present progressives. This involves a lot of bachims that Jenna and I went over a couple of weeks back. After learning and reading about the different progressives in Korean, Jenna asked to write a couple of example phrases down in Korean on my iPad. I wrote down what she said and then we went over the progressive phrases that I wrote for the correct spelling and bachims. After that, Jenna told me to watch a movie or video for next week and write a quick and short summary of it in Korean. She said to use some examples of present and past progressives when writing my summary of the video

            The week after, I came back with a summary of a YouTube video I watched online about the importance of planting trees. I used a couple of past and present progressive phrases in Korean and Jenna was really impressed. I was able to apply my new knowledge on present and past progressive spelling to improve my Korean writing dramatically! The past mistakes I have made the past weeks have always involved these progressive phrases. I will continue to focus on these progressive phrases spelling to reduce the mistakes I make when spelling. The two vowels that sound the same I talked about in the last biweekly learning journal continues to trip me up a lot on my summaries. There are so many words with that vowel and I always am confused about which version to use for which word or phrase. I think that essentially comes down to practice and repetition. I will continue to read new articles in Korean and write summaries or letters to work on my writing and reading. As we progress through this semester, I am confident in my ability to improve in Korean for the duration of this semester and I think I am on pace to passing the Korean test right before the Spring semester begins. For next week, Jenna told me to start thinking about my presentation for my cultural project as well as continue watching a video and writing a summary on it in Korean. I have to get good at not rushing too fast when spelling in Korean and take my time pronouncing the words in my head before writing it. I always tend to make mistakes when I am rushing and not thinking about my spelling. 

Week 2 Reflection

In this initial week of our SDLAP Portuguese journey, we spent the first session chatting and evaluating what kind of baseline knowledge I had. Through our conversation, we both got a feel for where my skills are in terms of each specific category of speaking, reading, listening, writing, and more or less the size of my readily available vocabulary. Our main goal for this week was to create and finalize our syllabus.

We are still not exactly sure of all the details of our class this semester, but we did nail down our meeting times. We settled on meeting twice a week and having a free, loose drop-in time for a couple hours on Friday to answer any questions I had as I went over the material from the week. We determined that we would have an immersive conversation every Tuesday (or Terça-feira) and on Thursdays (Quinta-feira) I would do some type of reading and writing activity to boost multiple types of fluency and performance. I put the Portuguese words for the days of the week because since we coordinate and plan our classes actually in Portuguese, it feels a little strange to refer to these concepts and the mental space and time in English. This, in and of itself, is progress and a certain sign of fluency that I was excited to share!

I have been working with my Language Instructor and had a couple meetings with Dr. Marsh-Soloway about various online resources and databases that would be helpful in developing the skills that I want to achieve by the end of the semester. I hope to incorporate as many platforms, activities, and types of engagement as is helpful. I think that this method – keeping class format and activities dynamic - has been the most effective in my past experiences as a new learner in a language classroom. Professor Abreu would often utilize this, and his class was one of the most engaging and effective long-term learning experiences that I have had. Generally speaking, his approach focused most on imparting the culture and fostering a love and passion for the language by exploring cultural items and concepts while discussing those same elements in the target language. I found that focusing on a piece of music, song, or work of art and expressing my thoughts through the lens of the target language was teaching me both the language and the culture without consciously forcing anything or pushing me or the other students to do so.

With this experience in mind, I am hoping that the structure we have been discussing will achieve this by using different methods on different days. However, true to the nature of the self-directed study, within this framework we will have the option to tweak our schedule as necessary or if it is not playing out as I hoped. I plan to incorporate Brazilian movies into the curriculum as well, which would be something that we could discuss in length in our Tuesday session and could be the topic of reflection on Thursday, giving me the chance to build upon any ideas we had. 

My second cultural artifact is a news article written in Korean about a basketball player in the Korean Basketball League. The basketball player, Deonte Burton, currently plays for the Oklahoma City Thunder in the NBA. I was drawn to this article because the OKC Thunder is my favorite basketball team and Burton won MVP in the Korean basketball league the year after he graduated from Iowa State. This article talks about Burton's potential and future in professional basketball. The article also compares Deonte Burton to Michael Jordan in Korea. Because he is playing so well in the Korean basketball league, people think he deserves the MVP. They talk about his strength and skill set as a young basketball player and how he has quickly and efficiently adapted into the Korean basketball league. They talk about how he and his DB team defeated many teams and is currently playing in the semifinals in the playoffs. I thought this article was very interesting because Deonte Burton isn't as worshipped in America. They use words like "the best" when describing Deonte Burton and compares him to Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in the world. I think this comparison is a little too much, but the fact that Korean sports writers use this comparison really shows how different the perspectives are in America and Korea. Furthermore, I thought that it was really helpful to learn words in the world of basketball and sports such as win and playoffs. I want to continue practicing and reading news articles in Korean about the Korean basketball league. I will begin to watch live broadcasts in Korean to learn more vocab and understand the phrases and language in sports. The article also talks about how Burton has the potential to become recruited by G-League teams in the NBA if he continues to grow as a player.

Reading and understanding this article was difficult at first. There were many words and phrases that I had no clue about, but with the help of Jenna, I was able to better understand the article as a whole. I read the words out loud and asked her what a particular word or phrase meant if I didn't know what it meant. We didn't go through the whole article though, and during my own time, I started to read and translate sentences as practice. I looked up specific words if I didn't know what it meant and used context clues to understand and write the translation of the sentence in English.

I will continue to read basketball articles about the Korean basketball league and articles written about the NBA in America. I found these articles on naver.com. I searched for basketball and looked for different articles written in Korean about either the NBA or the Korean Basketball League. Jenna and I will continue to read through articles together about different topics I am interested in (music, food, and sports). The COM2 language exam is reading through an article and answering questions about the article, so doing this every week will help me become more proficient in reading and writing in Korean.

Jenna and I met for the first time this past week since the semester started. We talked about what we did over the summer and it was great to see her again! We met on zoom due to covid-19 and we went over some basics like what we should target this semester and what my short- and long-term goals were. Firstly, my most important goal for this semester is to pass the COM2 exam before I graduate because I am a senior and do not have the COM2 requirement completed for a graduation requirement. So, Jenna and I worked on a plan to start preparing for the COM2 exam. We targeted my test date to be the end of the semester or right after the semester ends. Jenna and I also talked about what I had struggled with and what I felt confident about going into the semester.

            The most confident part of Korean for me is speaking and listening because I speak with my parents all the time. But the things that I struggle with most are reading and writing. Reading I am better at than writing, but I struggle with both significantly more than listening and speaking. This week, Jenna and I met, and we reviewed some of the key concepts we learned this past semester. Some of the concepts include counting in Korean and some phrases and bachims in Korean. In order to improve my reading and writing, I have to understand what exactly I need to do for practice. I asked Jenna what I could do to improve my reading and writing, and she told me to continue on reading articles online as well as writing summaries of the articles I read every week. For homework, I will be reading one article and writing a summary of it by next week. I am confident in Jenna’s ability to help me reach my goal of passing the COM2 exam and will try my hardest to practice and improve on reading and writing in Korean. I am prepared and kind of happy that we have a set goal and plan for the semester. I know that planning is very important in reaching long-term goals and Jenna and I have created a very straightforward and effective plan to prepare for the COM2 exam. On the side, I will start listening to Korean podcasts as well as watching Korean dramas from Netflix and other TV streaming sites. I hope to become familiar with the different accents of Korean and be able to understand most of what they are saying. Furthermore, I know that most Korean dramas and TV shows contain a lot of Korean words on the screen along with the show in order to facilitate and reiterate what the people are saying. I hope to be able to read and understand the graphics and subtitles fast enough and efficiently by the end of the semester. I am excited to continue this journey and finally reach my goal since I started taking self-directed Korean at the University of Richmond.

Week 1 Reflection

            At this point, I had not yet registered for the class! I was going through the process of applying for a Fulbright in Brazil and was taking a course in the Music Ensemble department on Brazilian Music, but for one reason or another all of the elements had not yet clicked in my brain to point me to wanting to take a Self-Directed Language Study for Portuguese. I believe, in fact, that at this time I was trying to join Japanese 101 to start learning another language, but I quickly saw that even joining a week late that the professor’s teaching style was much more intense than what I was looking for or had anticipated. After attending one class I knew I had to find another solution to fill my spare time and keep up with my pattern of using about three to four languages every week.