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Both weeks Emily and I met, we went to Dhall and worked through the workbook.  We watch a funny comedy skit where the guys were talking about being abducted by aliens.  He made a lot of jokes that I did not understand.  Emily and I listened through it all the way through then, we stopped after every sentence to translate  I did not know many of the words.

Looking back on what I have been able to do these past few weeks, I am definitely happy with my progress. However, having spent the majority of my time these last few weeks working on writing lengthy sentences and short paragraphs, I felt that I focused too much on writing. Undoubtedly, I had neglected some time that could have been spent working on my reading / listening comprehension and pronunciation; which are aspects of my language learning that I also wanted to focus on.

As a result, I attempted to spend more time on my comprehension and pronunciation during weeks nine and ten. My language partner suggested I watch some videos of people speaking Dari (e.g., news, television shows). Likewise, while watching the videos, she insisted that I also try to listen closely to how the people spoke and took a moment to understand what was being said. This task was a little difficult as my vocabulary was not wide enough to understand everything being said. Nevertheless, I was able to grasp enough pieces of information from what I heard to get close enough to being able to provide a  brief analysis of what was being said. My language partner was also very helpful in assisting me along the way during moments in which I struggled with understanding somethings that were being said.

Sixth Cultural Post: Attitudes about Time in the Target Culture

In the Korean society, work is the most important thing in life. Students intensively work in High School ad College to be able to enter in one of the few "재벌" (Chaebol), which are the conglomerates like Samsung that dominates the country. Adults work overtime most of the time and students study minimum 12 hours a day. This stressful life-style can be embodied by the popular phrase "빨리 빨리" which means "Quick Quick". Every time someone is about to get late or not working fast enough someone would say this phrase. In fact, being late in Korea is extremely disrespectful and late Koreans can be ashamed. For this reasons, the pressure to be on time is always present and it will be extremely rare to see a Korean late to an appointment. 

This culture can be seen in many aspect of the Korean life. For example, restaurants have a call button at each table so that patrons can summon the wait staff at a moment’s notice. Shopping malls are everywhere, including underground walkways, so that customers can buy clothes and shoes while they are on the go. Many stores stay open till 5 or 6 am. Street food is available round the clock, too. 

I decided to teach my friend John the Hebrew body parts and it was quite an experience.  I was not expecting the difficulties of teaching her how to pronounce certain words.   I have become so used to certain sounds that words are beginning to flow and just sound right pronounced a certain way.   The following is my outline for the lesson.  It turned out really well.

Learning Plan for Teaching the Body Parts in Hebrew

• Repeat after me

• Review body parts five times
• Sing "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" - ""ראש. כתפיים.  ברך.  רג
• Review Body Parts again

Both weeks Emily and I went through the book and we spent some time off campus and spoke Hebrew.   I am getting better and feeling much more comfortable speaking and listening to her talk as long as she speaks slowly, which is still annoying for her. :/  

With the Winter Olympics at Sochi coming up in a few months and my cultural project's focus on sports, I thought it would be interesting to explore Afghanistan's presence at the Olympics over the years. That said, Afghanistan's participation in the Olympics has been rather interesting over the last few decades. Afghanistan first sent athletes - 14 in total - to the Olympics in 1936, when the Summer Games were held in Berlin. However, of the 18 Summer Olympics since 1936, Afghanistan has only participated in 13 due to a variety of reasons. In addition, likely unsurprising to most, Afghanistan has never competed at the Winter Olympics. Afghanistan followed up the Summer Games at Berlin by sending 31 athletes to the next Summer Olympics that was held in London in 1948 - there was a delay between the London and Berlin Summer Games due to World War II; those 31 athletes were the highest number representing Afghanistan across its 13 appearances at the Olympics. 

Afghanistan  did not compete at the Summer Games in Helsinki in 1952, but the nation returned in 1956 to participate in the Summer Games at Melbourne. Of the first three - 1936, 1948 and 1956 - Summer Games that Afghanistan participated, the only sport that it consistently sent athletes for was field hockey; this was really interesting for me to learn about as I never really knew that the nation had enough exposure to the sport to the point where it could have a national field hockey team. The nation continuously competed at the Summer Games until missing the 1976 Summer Olympics at Montreal. Afghanistan did make a return to the Summer Olympics by competing in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Afghanistan's participation in the 1980 Summer Olympics is quite interesting as many nations chose not to participate at the Summer Games in the Soviet Union due to its recent invasion of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, primarily due to the nation's Communist rule. Likewise, it also skipped the 1992 Summer Olympics at Barcelona. Furthermore, the nation was banned, due to the Taliban and its treatment of women, from participating in the 2000 Summer Olympics at Sydney. Consequently, Afghanistan's participation in the Olympics alternated heavily (i.e., did appeared in 1972, did not 1976, did 1980, did not 1984, etc.) until recent years. Afghanistan has competed in the last three Summer Olympics (2004, 2008 and 2012), correlating with its progress over the last few years. Even more important, Afghanistan won its first Olympic Medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing with Rohullah Nikpai winning a Bronze Medal in taekwondo. Nikpai returned to the 2012 Summer Olympics at London and repeated his previous feat by winning Bronze in taekwondo, again. 

You can read more about Nikpai, Afghanistan's first medal winner, here.

Below are some useful expressions (I figured pronunciation would be more helpful than actual script) that one who does not know Dari can learn quite quickly after some practice:

Can you help me?   Mey toaneyd beh men kemek keneyed?

Do you speak English?   Aya shoma anekeleyesey sehebet mey keneyed?

What time is it?   Saat chand ast?

What is your name?   Asem shoma cheyesete?

How much is this?   Chequeder ast?

Hi!   Salam!

Good morning   Sobh bekheir

Good afternoon   Baad az zohr bekheir

Good evening   Asr bekheir

Thank you   Taashakur

How are you?   Chetoor asti?

Good   Khob

I feel like how Emily and I are working on Hebrew is really helping me and I am improving a lot.  I feel much more fluent in my reading.  There is still a lot of vocabulary that I do not know.   This is evident when I try to have conversations with Emily.   There will be many times in our conversations that I will slow down, stop, think and then start talking.  She will immediately correct me.  Because of my limited vocabulary I need to be innovative with my words and find a way around what I am trying to say instead of outright using vocabulary I do not know.   Emily and I are working on this, I still find it difficult to remember vocabulary that she has told me during the day.    We are working through this by writing down some vocabulary that I do not know.  However, this is impeding the flow of our conversations.   We are still working on ways around this.

As promised in my fourth bi-weekly report, here are some of the short paragraphs that I wrote. Like I noted before, I did not know some of these words beforehand and much of my ability to write them was due in large part to guidance from my language partner.

Note, I typed them out as means to build my typing skills in Dari; unfortunately, for me, this took much longer than compared to when I originally wrote it by hand, and the keyboard I used often messed up some of the characters. Luckily, my language partner was able to email me a revised copy of my typed paragraphs in order to show me my mistakes - I made some errors transcribing my written work to digital. Nevertheless, here it is:

هر کس حق دارد که از آموزش و پرورش بهره‌مند شود. آموزش و پرورش لااقل تا حدودی که مربوط بتعلیمات ابتدائی و اساسی است باید مجانی باشد. آموزش ابتدائی اجباری است. آموزش حرفه‌ای باید با شرایط تساوی کامل بروی همه باز باشد تا همه بنا باستعداد خود بتوانند از آن بهره‌مند گردند.

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

آموزش و پرورش باید طوری هدایت شود که شخصیت انسانی هر کس را بحد اکمل رشد آن برساند و احترام حقوق و آزادی‌های بشر را تقویت کند. آموزش و پرورش باید حسن تفاهم، گذشت و احترام عقاید مخالف و دوستی بین تمام ملل و جمعیتهای نژادی یا مذهبی و همچنین توسعه فعالیتهای ملل متحد را در راه حفظ صلح تسهیل نماید.

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

During these last two weeks I had focused on trying to write and type a larger amount of text, as opposed to just medium length sentences. As mentioned in my previous bi-weekly reports, I wanted to be able to take my newly strengthened ability to write moderately long sentences and push myself towards writing short paragraphs. Much of my ability to do this was reliant upon me working with my language partner to get a better understanding of what to write about and also to have someone check my work.

Admittedly, while I felt comfortable writing long sentences, I was almost certain - which was the right sentiment in hindsight - that I would make a few mistakes in writing  paragraphs. The task I used to begin writing short paragraphs was based off of a reading assignment - interestingly, although not entirely relevant, this assignment was based on some of the articles that comprise part of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights - my language partner found from a Dari language instruction website. She read the paragraphs to me, albeit in a slower than fluent tone as I did not know some of the words, and I wrote them down. The primary challenge in writing the short paragraphs was trying to determine how to spell the words I did not know, while still trying to comprehend and write everything else that I was hearing. To get a better a sense of what I did, refer to my third artifact. 

Fifth Cultural Post:  Identify a topic for your culture project and your learning goals for your topic.

South Korea is the gaming capital of the world with 30 millions out of 50 millions citizens playing video games on a weekly basis. The first multiplayer games that became played by millions of fans online were Starcraft and Warcraft in the early 2000s. Asia received the games particularly well since the scenario, the environment as well as the characters were very mystical and resembled a lot to the manga-like ambiances. Some players became extremely good and soon some gaming tournaments were organized to determine the best player. With the success and the popularity of these tournaments, more and more players started to exclusively play on these two games in order to perfect their skills. That is the point were cash prizes started to become more and more usual and important.

With the mix of high skilled players and high cash prizes, a new profession was born: professional gamers. Some gamers, actually became so popular that they have fan clubs reaching up to one million fan and an annual income of 350,000$.

My goals are to be able to determine if professional gaming is an actual profession and wether or not it is possible to make a living from it.

Reading Hebrew is different than any type of romance language because, for the most part, the vowels are not in the alphabet; they are their own category of signs and are only use in writing for kindergarten level. So i guess I am a kindergartner. It does not make sense to me how you can see a word and know what letters will make what sounds. For example, when you see a "bet", you know it will make some sort of sound that begins with a B but you do not know if it will sounds like ba, bu boo, bo, bi, be, bee, etc. In Hebrew they just know because of context and different patterns in the language. As a beginner, this is way over my head. So I am sticking with the vowels for now. 

When reading "Figuring Foreigners Out" I thought of a class I took with Professor Scinicariello called "French at Work". It was a class about how the business world works in France. We learned about many cultural differences which ranged from eating dinner to giving gifts to punctuality. That class really showed me how important it is to be culturally aware when interacting with people from other places and that actions you may find rude or inappropriate are commonplace for them. 

For Israelis specifically there are a few main differences to be aware of: their straightforward and blunt attitude, their concept (or lack) of being politically correct and their informality. Attire for a wedding in Israel consists of jeans and naots (the Israeli version of birkenstocks). That is unheard of in the US and would be insulting unless you understood where someone else is coming from; it is also good to know if you are going to a wedding in Israel (it would be awkward to be the fanciest person there!). 

This reading enforces the importance of cultural relativism and being self aware. Two things that are not only important when living in such a global and interconnected society like we do today but also important for those of us learning another language and wanting to travel to new places. 

Both weeks Emily and I met up and I worked on my book some more.   I was able to skype with Emily's mother and speak to her mother.  This opportunity allowed me to speak with someone else in Hebrew.  In addition writing out my vocabulary words, allows me to work on my Hebrew typing skills and I realized this week while typing that I had the general layout of the Hebrew keyboard memorized. 

 South Korea is an intensely conformist society. When faced with hardship or adversity the South Koreans are absolute masters of change and rebuild.  If things aren’t working, they just change them and they have proved adept at doing this very quickly and very effectively. As an example, South Korea is one of the only few asian economies that have fully recovered (and for a long time now) from the 1990's Asian crisis.

South Korea has also re-invented itself as the cultural epicentre of Asian culture.  Korean pop music, or K-pop, has been exported with great success all over the continent (and recently over the world with Psy) and Korean TV dramas are watched from Tokyo to Beijing.  South Korean films are the enormously popular throughout Asia (with the exception of India) and the level of Korea’s cultural influence continues to grow.

This is not to say that South Korea doesn’t face significant challenges.  The inexorable rise of China and the political, cultural and military influence that comes in its wake is something all Asian countries wrestle with. The politicians in Seoul have the ever-present dilemma of how to deal with hard-line communist North Korea.  In addition, South Korea faces increasing competition from lower wage competitors in the region and will need to draw on all its reserves of flexibility and tenacity to stay ahead of the game.

Having said all this, doing business in South Korea can be a challenge and many business visitors find the Korean approach to business just as alien as the one they encounter in other Asian countries.  Major Korean companies are still run along regimented, hierarchical lines and ‘face’ is of greater importance than in almost any other country in Asia.  You really do need to understand how the Koreans think and act if you are to be able to truly capitalise on business opportunities with Korean contacts. By doing your homework on the South Korean business culture and etiquette it helps securing big rewards.

Our readings and discussion in class the other day was very thought provoking. It is interesting and (unfortunately) unique thinking about the best way to learn something as a student. Our educational system is very controlled and does not leave a lot of room for the students to make decisions about the best way to approach learning. Being able to make my own learning decisions for this class is so out of the ordinary for me that I am overwhelmed and feel it is hard to get started since the options are endless.

Reading these articles, discussing with Professor Grove, and hearing what my fellow students are doing is helping me figure out my own path I want to take. I want to incorporate all of the information I am learning from the articles to make my learning experience as effective as possible.

A tactic we discussed the other day was to place meaning on all of the words, you will never remember something if it has no meaning to you or meaning in context. This makes me want to learn words that will be useful for what I want to be able to say in Hebrew. I will probably try to aim my Hebrew knowledge towards conversational and touristy Hebrew before moving on to more complicated things. 

Another thing we talked about was how to remember words and their spellings. Writing things down is very helpful for me so I will try to do some kinesthetic exercises. Using flash cards is also usually effective but if I am memorizing something without meaning I will not remember it in the long term. I think studying flashcards is useful for a quiz but I forget them right after I take the quiz. In my opinion, flashcards can actually take meaning out of the words you are learning because instead of the goal being to learn a language it turns into memorizing words as quickly as possible; you forget the overarching goal and focus on the smaller tasks which in this case is memorizing the words. Maybe I can combine flashcards with something else to help the words stick in my memory or I can make all of my memorization cumulative.

Something else I am debating is if learning conversational Hebrew would coincide with learning Hebrew from the Torah. This is something I might want to discuss with my rabbi and figure out if I have time for both. 

During weeks five and six I spent a decent amount of time building upon what I was doing in weeks three and four. I have steadily been working towards being able to write short paragraphs by weeks eight and nine. As I mentioned in my previous bi-weekly report, I needed some extra practice  in constructing sentences. Fortunately, I was able to do some work in this area of my language learning as my language partner provided some assignments to help build my writing skills.

However, I also allocated some time to learning some sports vocabulary in preparation for my cultural project on sports in Afghanistan. It was really the first time during the semester that I had to heavily rely on a dictionary to complete my language goals for the week; which was a fun reminder of where I was a few years back during SDLC 105 / 110. Nevertheless, I wrote down the most sports relevant words that I could think of and come across in a Dari dictionary. Likewise, I also consulted with my language partner for some help to make sure I was headed in the right direction. Refer to my second artifact to look at some of the sports vocabulary that I learned during the last two weeks. 

To help prepare for my cultural project on sports in Afghanistan, I took the time to learn some relevant words.  I have written them in Dari below and translated them into English:

goal   گول   (gol)

victory   فتح   (fath)

defeat   شکست دادن   (shekast dadan)

defend   دفاع کردن از   (defa k)

attack / offense   حمله

player   بازیکن   (baztkan)

soccer / football   فوتبال   (fotbal)

ball   توپ  (top)

cricket   جیرجیرک   (chercherak)   (not entirely sure if this is only applicable to insect or both the insect and sport)

lose   از دست دادن

win  برنده   (borda)

champion   قهرمان   (qaraman)

referee   ریفری   (refri)

rule   قاعده   (qaeda)

bat / racket   دنده   (danda)

basket   تکری   (tokri)

sport   سپورت   (seport)

field   میدان سپورت   (maydan seport)

team   تیم   (tim)

stadium   ورزشگاه

By this point in the semester, I felt a lot more comfortable with my language learning. Having a few weeks to sharpen my skills was definitely what I need to get back on track. Truly, I felt that I had worked, at the very least, back to the point I was at when I finished SDLC 111 in December 2012.

During these two weeks my work focused heavily around medium-length sentences. My language partner would tell me sentences, after which I: wrote the sentences, said them and then translated them back into English. This task was rather effective as it incorporated the following skills: listening comprehension, writing and pronunciation. While I did feel more confident in my abilities heading into weeks three and four, I still had some trouble with certain aspects of the task my language partner had assigned. For instance, I noticed that my pronunciation, when working with new words, was  a little sub par and could use improvement. Also, it occasionally took several attempts to feel really comfortable with my work. Likewise, I also had some trouble with properly writing all of the sentences that I had heard. Hopefully, as I continue working into weeks five and six, I may be able to write and type short paragraphs a lot more proficiently than I had in weeks three and four; of course, achieving this will require some extra practice.  

In exploring the role of sports in Afghanistan, I thought it would be best to start my exploration and research with learning more about the national sport of Afghanistan, buzkashi (بزکشی), which translates to "goat grabbing." The sport has a long history that dates as far back to the time of Genghis Khan. Buzkashi is a game that pits two teams of ten players - all riding on horseback - against one another battling for a carcass (usually, it is either a calf or goat) that must then be returned to a designated scoring area. The sport is very unique, and, besides polo, it is difficult to find anything else to compare it to.

The sport is tremendously difficult for both the players and horses. The players have to be strong due to the physicality of the sport, while also being excellent horseman. Likewise, the horses undergo extensive training; for instance, horses are trained to wait in the event that riders falls off of it. As a result, due to the nature of the game, it may take years for an individual to properly train his horse and himself for the sport. 

Some vocabulary related to the sport are listed below:

horse لسپ

horseman اسب سوار

experience تجربه

carcass لاشه

goat بز

calf گوساله

To get a better understanding of the game, spend some time taking a look at the links below:

Buzkashi Video

History of Buzkashi

More History about the Sport

Second Cultural Post:  Target Language's Writing System

Historically, Koreans used the Hanja which were characters borrowed from the Chinese alphabet. At the time however, only people from wealthy families were educated and were able to use the writing system. The system was too complex to learn for peasants and other Koreans who could not afford to go to school. To address this issue, the emperor of the time King Sejong decided to create a new, simple writing system called Hangul. Each of the letters in Hangul is a shape that is based on the configuration of the articulators in the making of the sound. Although this is more then the original version of Hangul, there has been changes made since Hangul was first created.Even if there are some different dialects depending on the regions you are, they are all based on this system. The system was very efficient and in a very short period of time the illiteracy rate of Korea fell drastically, in fact at the time the emperor said that the system was so easy to learn that "a wise man could master it in on day and an illiterate in a week". Hangul is part of the altaic languages and is unrelated to Chinese and similar but distinct from Japanese.