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Currently, I have learned around 200 words in Korean. I learned it by watching Korean dramas and talking to language partners. Essentially, one important and efficient way for me to learn Korean vocabularies is to divide the sentences word by word and then translate them into English respectively. For example: “Jae eelum ee Shuyi ep mi da ”( My name is Shuyi.) In this sentence, “Jae” means “my”. “eelum” means “name” and “ep nida” means “formality”. Then I would try to compose a new sentence with the vocabularies I just learned. Besides, my language partner gives me weekly quizzes on Korean vocabularies, which is a positive motivation to memorize Korean vocabularies. My realistic goal is to learn and master 15 word each week.

I walked around Wal-Mart with Katrina and her daughter, Mindy, who is an ASL interpreter. Talking with Mindy was really great, because she has been speaking ASL for many years and she knew a lot about the culture and how the language had changed. I learned a lot about grammar during this meeting and how to structure sentences. 

I asked my friend Maria to be my student to teach her some Turkish. I decided to do these two things:

1. Repeat the Turkish alphabet 

2.  Greetings and say her name

The Turkish alphabet wasn't hard because they're the same as in English except for a few letters that we don't have in English- however it helped that we had those sounds despite not having the letters (ch and sh, for example). Like me, she had trouble pronouncing some of the vowels, particularly ı because it comes from the back of the throat. 

Maria is a visual learner so when I was teaching her how to say hello and her name, she wanted to see the words written out rather than just hearing it from me. So I wrote it on a piece of paper and she memorized that/used the paper for guidance. It was easy to teach her to say "Merhaba, adim Maria" because I didn't have to teach her anything other than that as a phrase. I think her Spanish helped her pronounce things more correctly than an average native English speaker, too. 

This made me realize how important visuals are for learning- I'm also a visual learner, but I always forget how important that is to me when it comes to learning languages. It easily slips my mind that one of the reasons that language concepts are harder for me to grasp/hold on to if I'm not able to visualize it and then apply it. Teaching Maria made me realize I need to do more visual activities when I study/practice Turkish, among other languages. 

I met with Katrina and China at Ellwood’s and actually talked about ways that I could use ASL in the future. Both Katrina and China have jobs that don’t involve them using ASL, but a lot of people who go to the church I have been attending are interpreters and I am definitely interested in going into that at some point in the future. 

My language partner and I went to lunch at our church. It wasn’t “silent lunch,” but everyone was signing and it was a good chance for me to practice signing while also doing other things, like eating. 

Katrina asked me to pick a scripture from the Bible and then memorize it in ASL. I originally thought this was a good idea, but I realized that I could memorize the words, but I didn’t actually know which signs were which words and I had no idea how to figure that out. I knew what I should have been saying, but I didn’t know the actual words involved, which was disconcerting.

Side note: on jw.org, there is a video version of the Bible in ASL and that is how I knew which signs to use, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what each sign meant. There is even an jw.org ASL app, which has been very helpful. 

The history of a language can help a lot in learning the language. This is true especially in the case of Siraiki. As the languages of Pakistan and North India developed together in a limited space, there was a lot of interaction between them. Languages picked up words, letters and sounds from each other. This is true in the case of my mother tongue, which is an amalgamation of Arabic, Hindi, Persian and Turkish. Knowing this fact was very important during late 19th and early 20th century. This was because greatest Urdu poets of the era, like Ghalib and Iqbal, were not trained in Urdu but were taught Arabic and Persian instead. This factor contributed heavily towards the quality of the material the poets produced and therefore, is a excellent example of how the history of a language can play such a major role in helping one learn the language.

Katrina, Jo, and I walked around Target and Katrina just pointed out things to me and asked me to guess the sign. Most of them were common sense, but a few of them I had to think about a little longer. This is how I learned most of my vocabulary, like food, clothing, and other household items. I really enjoyed doing this and I think it was a great way to learn. The words stuck in my mind because I had to work to figure them out, instead of just having them told to me. It's really nice having Jo with us because she grew up speaking ASL and often knows things that Katrina doesn't, even though she is fluent. 

Side note: I am only writing about one of the two meetings I have each week, because one of the meetings is when I go to church on Saturday morning, so I basically only learn religious vocabulary at those meetings, instead of a variety of things. 

I went to Ellwood's with Katrina and Jo. The week before Katrina had asked me to learn 15 new words, so I could show her to next week. I did learn my 15 words, but the website I normally use, aslpro.org, sometimes has out-of-date words, so a few of the words I thought I knew had actually changed signs. ASL is also colloquial, so some of the words may have been signed the way I learned them in other places, but the sign was different in Richmond. One that was different was the sign for "falling in love," which I had learned as one thing, but was actually something else. I like learning the new words on my own, but I wish that there was a sure way of knowing that the sign I am learning is correct. 

I went to a restaurant with Katrina, Jo, and Katrina’s niece and nephew, who also know a little ASL. They were communicating across the restaurant in ASL, which was really cool to watch. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask Katrina, so I asked her about formal and informal language and about communication scripts. There is "formal" language, but that basically just means that when you're talking to an elder or someone of import, you won't use slang or English Sign Language, a hybrid of English and ASL. Katrina couldn't think of any communication scripts off the top of her head, but I'm sure I will begin to notice some as I spend more time with the deaf community. 

Today , we did presentations on our target language cultures. I find it interesting that, although there are several students learning Korean, we did not have any topics in common, which definitely gave me a new insight on my target culture. There were plastic surgery, drinking culture, as well as the growing makeup market in our presentations in regards to South Korea’s cultures. Heather touched on several cultural aspects based on her past traveling experience this summer. The understanding of a culture can be traced to food, drinks and her daily observations, which have a distinct perspective of Korea’s culture. Other classmates also shared their understanding of their target languages from different fields such as history, business and drinking.

Overall, it is good to know about how my classmates reflect on their target language culture from many aspects. I can also learn from their tactics and paths to build up and deepen my understanding of Korea’s cultures.

Yesterday I went to Chick-fil-a with Katrina, her hard-of-hearing roommate Jo, and a woman named China, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness who knows ASL. We ate lunch and sat in Chick-fil-a, just speaking ASL. Katrina explained to me a lot of aspects of deaf culture, like how they sometimes have a hard time understanding some harder concepts because of the slight language barrier. She showed me how I could go to jw.org and change the language to ASL and watch hundreds of videos in ASL. This has been extremely helpful and they are great for listening to something in English and watching it in ASL. 

Today was my first meeting with Katrina, my language partner, and we went to church together. I'm planning on going to there every Saturday morning at 11. She introduced me to a lot of people and I practiced telling people my name, watching people spell their names, and saying “Nice to meet you.” The alphabet is basically all I know at this point.