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Last week,I attended a Hillel sponsored lunch & learn with Neil Lazarus, a well known expert on communications specializing in mass media and Israel. The talk centered on the Israeli military action in Gaza in early 2009 and the way that the media portrayed. The general idea behind his talk was that people's perspective on the situation is determined almost exclusively by the exact way that the media wants to portray whatever it is that they are presenting, rather than actually allowing the viewer to gather facts and make their own conclusion on their own. Mr. Lazarus then showed us a video to illustrate this phenomenon (link provided below).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47LCLoidJh4
The general point that he made was that as the video says it is easy to miss something that you are not looking for, or furthermore, that isn't even shown. Essentially his whole point was that we cannot allow ourselves or others to make decisions about the Israeli situation or other situations without trying to gather as many facts as possible.
Also, this week in our meetings, we learned how to greet and say how are you and etc.
Our language partner, Haya, has been very helpful, and she is very good at explaining things to us. I think we are lucky to have her. Also, it is really interesting to get to know Israel from her point of view, as she is an Arab and an Israeli citizen.
I also started working on Rosetta Stone, and I think it adds some to my Hebrew knowledge. I learn some grammer, and some new vocabulary from Rosetta Stone.
So far I have learned that many words that we use in my country are Turkish. Some of these words though are used for a different meaning. I have learned so far 10-15 words and I have also learned main expressions like greetings, formal and informal.
Turkish is in some ways an easy language and in some other ways quite difficult. pronouncing words is not that difficult once you learn the alphabet, because you say them as you read them. I have learned many words about food, family, colors, numbers and how to introduce myself. I need to try and memorise these expressions better though and try to know them by heart. When i read these expressions though i do understand what they mean in english.
We had to take a few tests so we could understand in which ways we as ourselves could learn better. We took three tests from different sites.
The first test I took was at a site called mypersonality.info. In this test my results showed that i am a bodily learner. I got a percentage of 70 which was much higher than my second best results that were visual and intrapersonal.
The second test was at a site called learning-styles-online. In this test my results showed that I am more of a social learner and I would actually agree with that. I like socializing in general. My second best type of learning is physical which I also agree because I like being physicaly active.
The third and final test was at a site called ldrc.ca. In this test my results showed that I am more of a interpersonal learner. The second result was that I am again a bodily learner so it seems that might be correct.
The questions of these sites were quite similar I would say. I hope in the end these tests will help out and successfully learn the Turkish language.
My new plan involves beginning with 25-word-long (or so) lists each week on a topic that I can double-check pronunciation with Sofia on, until I am competent at reading the sounds correctly, before studying them. I'll read about/watch/listen to something cultural on the same topic.
A big focus of the meeting was writing. The alphabet makes so much more sense after Sofia broke up the letters for me into categories - similar letters grouped by whether they change based on their placement or not. I already am much better at breaking a word apart into letters (where before I couldn't at all, and was despairing of learning writing this semester). Now I think reading and writing will be helpful in learning word pronunciation - a complete 180!
The grammar part was to find nouns and verbs in this exercise, by circling the words. After reading the story and understanding the meaning of each word was much easier to find the verb and the noun in each sentence. The next step for me is to write down all those verbs and nouns, translate and use them in a sentence.
Slowly, slowly I am able to read the story without any help but there are still some moments where I can not combine the letter to make up a word that means something, I guess more practice and hopefully I will be able to speed up my reading.
The first time that I met with Sofia, we discussed my goals and my knowledge of the language. I wanted to practice my reading and writing skills, which we focused on. Sofia asked me to write a number of words that uses each letter in the beginning, middle, and the end of the words. The purpose for this exercise was for me to learn how to combine the letters and make a word. I continued using every letter of the alphabet by writing it in the end, middle and the beginning of the word. The most difficult part of this exercise for me was to find the words that have those letter in the middle or the end. When I was not able to come up with the word that uses certain letter, as Sofia recommended, I went on to the web and trying to read words and see if they have the letter that I need. At the end of this exercise I have written many words and couple of them were new for me. This was my first exercise and by doing this some of the staff that I have learned before was coming back to me, my eye was getting used to the alphabet and it was easier to recognize the letters.
For my extensive listening project, I watched a subtitled movie recently posted to my Diigo. I attempted to recognize the vocab and grammar used, and at times I turned down the sound, read the subtitles, translated the sentence in a way that I would say it and compared it to what was actually said. Vocabulary is more difficult to recognize in speaking than in writing, so it was a good exercize to attempt to extract the words used. This is a useful yet time consuming activity.
I will begin to practice writing with example sentences along a similar theme, and eventually turn them into a composition per my learning plan. Additionally, I will go through the vocabulary in various news peieces, listening activities and conversations to compile them into a list for more convenient studying. With an improved language plan, I now have better direction when it comes to specific study strategies and creation of artifacts. I am improving mostly with my language partner, but I need to place more emphasis on creating tasks and topics for conversation.
On the other hand, I viewed Kandahar the other evening as my extensive listening example. Thought, 25% of the movie is in English, I was able to learn a great deal from the other 75% of it. Obviously, almost 95% of what I was listening to was incomprehensible, I could pick up some simple greetings and questions that were posed, such as ," What is your name?" and ,"Where are you from?". At the same time, in a handful of other scenes, those same questions were asked and I did not recognize the statements. Reasons for this could have been that it was a specific dialect that I have not heard before or there are a variety of different colloquial ways of stating a simple phrase. Both exercises continued to help me build a larger and stronger foundation of Farsi.
Mostly I used Byki, which I found extremely helpful. It provides a visual, audio, and a slow-audio. It's mix-up feature also helped me drill those words into my head. It wasn't good for learning to write the words, however. I'm not at the point where I can easily discern how characters change when in the middle of a word (there are 2-3 forms of each character), so it took me a full ten minutes to type one word in Byki. I haven't met with my learning partner yet, but we finally figured out a schedule and hopefully she'll be able to help with this.
I also spent a lot of time looking for Iranian music. It turns out I am not particularly fond of Iranian music. I like a lot of the traditional stuff, but what I could find of good audio quality didn't have vocals. In the end I picked a few songs (some metal - yes! Farsi metal! - some rock, some pop, a particularly well done rap song, and one traditional song with vocals) that hopefully I'll like more when I get used to them. It is really interesting to see the cultural differences, not only in musical styles, but pure vocal styles. The tone of vocals is completely different, more vibrato, in Farsi music. I wonder how that relates to speech patterns and inflection.
During my life in Russia there were many obstacles that would not allow me continue learning Farsi. After nine years of living there I was speaking, writing and reading Russian perfectly, people were saying that even better than some Russians. The Russian language was like my first language and I had no difficult in speaking it and expressing myself. We got a chance out of many people to come and live in United States of America as permanent residents. It was very happy moment for my family, however we were again faced with unfamiliar language and environment. It was very scary at first to just communicate with our teachers let alone the students, who can be a little more judgmental. In spite of this slowly I was speaking English and trying to explain myself, it was very challenging time. After three years living in USA I graduate high school with advanced diploma and was accepted by one of the best colleges in USA. It was very challenging to get here and I worked very hard to be where I am now. Now was the time for me to go back to my native tongue and learn what I was not able to learn before. Therefore I am here to use this opportunity to learn writing and the use of proper grammar.
