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Document (a) your goals and tasks for weeks 4 and 5, (b) the resources and activities you will use to achieve your goals, and (c) how you will evaluate your success.

Week 4 and 5

• A) Goal: I will continue to work on subset 1 of my Task / Goal 1:To understand how Israelis communicate on the street in everyday life. 

• Task 1: I want to be able to ask for directions and give directions. 

  Subset: I want to be able to use the transportation.

  • Cultural context — How to pay for, and procure, transportation fare
• B) I will ask a friend of mine to Skype so that I can practice more in-depth my Hebrew -- body language, rhythm and intonations. I will also use it as my first artifact. This will allow me to conceptualize the idea of transportation better. I will also continue to work on Mango. I will find Israeli youtube videos concerning transportation and its pertinent dialogue. 
• C) I will evaluate my process by first dedication 45 minutes to an hour a day towards my goal. This incremental process will allow me to expound upon the knowledge that I have received the day before. Moreover, by the end of the week, I will use my Skype session / artifact as a benchmark to see how well I picked up on and achieved my goal for week 4 and 5. 

In Communicative Competence in chapter 8, the author notes that the current emphasis of procuring a language is centered on its social, cultural and cognitive corresponding units, rather than the structural characteristics of a target language. That author also rightly notes, in my opinion, that this newfound focus has pragmatic implications the student could benefit from, and thus hones in his skills more efficiently, a concept the author brands as language socialization. My communicative competence stems from a social constructivist platform, whereby if I attach language acquisition, with its disparate parts, to the many identities within the socio-culture of my target country, I will be able to learn the language faster. The author puts forth that language learning is “the creation of meaning through interpersonal negotiation.” An interpersonal setting, moreover, enables me to engage from memory as well as to attach new associations to phrases I might have not been able to do so had I gazed a textbook. For example, I revisited and procured material from a video dialogue, then with my learning language partner, I made these terms absolute as I made some terms associable.

My learning language process thus far vis-a-vis my understanding of the Israeli culture and its language is a unique one. Obviously, I had an experience living in the target culture, so my conception or understanding of the “Israeli” sociocultural identity maybe more insightful. That of which I have learned so far has acted as a reminder or reinforcer of previously held knowledge of the target language, for example, its intonations, decimal levels, conversation scripts and body language. Therefore, my focus here on out will be on how I can improve my communicative experience.

The four areas of communicative competence — those of which we discussed in class — could be improved upon. The first, lack of vocabulary, the second, humor, they third, discourse expectations and the fourth, body language. My vocabulary could be improved upon, obviously, and I am working on it. I have been using flash cards for memorization and utilizing these phrases in my mind as well as with my language partner. My understanding of their humor could be improved upon too. While I have a good start on Israeli background knowledge, my lack of vocabulary is what concerns me here as I wont be able to understand the conversation if I don't have a good grasp on what they are saying. I am relatively decent when it comes to discourse expectations. When I was in Israel, I conditioned myself to “regurgitate" the expected conversation scripts, however, only when it came to the basics. I could improve upon this by watching Israeli dialogue, or Israeli TV shows or videos of people having conversations. Then, I could apply these scripts and effectively condition myself once again. Lastly, the body language: I have a good grasp on their body language / mannerisms. This could be bolstered by watching youtube videos of Israelis in their most natural state. 

I went abroad last semester to Sydney, Australia. However, I did not experience the level of culture shock that I experienced when I moved to Richmond from Southern California. I don't think I ever had a "honeymoon" phase. Richmond was not what I expected. I didn't expect a place in my own country to be so different. I was expecting Australia to be very different, so I wasn't so "shocked." 

One of the presentations I enjoyed was the one abrout Israeli McDonald's. Because Israel is a predominately Jewish country, the chain prepares their food in a halal way. The way the meat is slaughtered and prepared takes more time. So I wonder if it's significantly more expensive than in the US? I also think it's funny how they still name certain items with a Mc prefix, such as the McArabia. 

I've noticed spoken Turkish has a tonality that reminds me of Scandanavian. This week we reviewed greetings and the alphabet. We also went over numbers. I learned how to ask for people's age and telephone numbers. In the case of phone numbers, you don't say each individual number like five-five-five, you say fivehundred fiftyfive. So I can't get by knowing only 1-10. 

This week my goal was to perfect the Turksih alphabet. Turkish has 29 letters, eight of them are vowels. The vowels are something I struggle with, particularly the front vowels. I met with Arzu for the first time and we practiced these. We also practiced formal, casual, and very casual greetings. Next week we will go over numbers. 

Korean has a pretty intricate alphabet. There are about 10ish basic consonants and vowels, and they combine in order to form complex words and sentences like in English. There are certain characters that have no sound, while there are others that have different sounds given the context. Many characters are borrowed from Mandarin, so there are apparently a lot of cognates between the two languages. All in all, it's a pretty hard writing system for English speakers to understand, because there are some sounds that do not exist in the English language that we have to cope with. 

My goals for week 4 and 5 were to further improve my conversational skills, by asking basic questions in Korean, such as how to say something. I found a very helpful website that lists Korean terms phonetically, which has a list of questions like that. I also talked to my language instructor to learn more helpful questions. I evaluated success based on whether I could say the phrases in casual conversation, while being understand by my friends who speak Korean. 

My learning goal for this week was to learn the basic consonant sounds in the Korean language. It was not as hard as I thought it would be, but it definitely took a little time investment. Many of the sounds rhyme, so it helped for me to learn the alphabet song. It was helpful for me to have my language partner write out the different characters, because seeing them written by an actual person looked a lot different than the characters you see online. 

I've definitely encountered culture shock before, especially when I've got to non-European countries. People's expectations of how they should interact was a little different in Eastern Europe, where it seemed like it was less socially acceptable to talk to people out of the blue. It took a little bit of time for me to adjust and realize that the people were not actually cold, they just did not interact much unless they already knew you. I also experienced culture shock when I was in Belize and Guatemala, where the people were very friendly but I was unequipped to speak with them. My expectations of culture shock were a little bit different, because I expected to adjust much quicker than I actually did. 

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My main motive to take this linguistics course was to learn about different strategies that would help me learn languages in the future. I have always related culture and language together because I believe that they are very intertwined.  I am currently only enrolled in SDLC 105, so I am not doing language learning like the students in SDLC 110. However, I grew up a native Korean speaker, so I have had the opportunity to see how different aspects of culture impact how language is used.  In this course, I have been able to connect the dots and understand why certain cultures possess certain mannerisms and personalities. It is interesting to see the world from such a different view considering how Westernized my upbringing has been.

As I have continued to delve into Korean culture, I have had the opportunity to put more meaning to the Korean traditions I have participated in the past. For example, I have been celebrating Korean New Years for 22 years of my life, but never really grasped each tradition. In this course, I have learned about cultural norms and implications, which have helped me understand my culture much more adequately.  It is eye opening to see where these major traditions stemmed from and how these traditions have evolved into the present.  It has definitely given me a clearer outlook on my culture and upbringing.

In regards to communicative competence, I have always had the ability to communicate in Korean. I believe there is still room for improvement. Growing up, I went to Korean Sunday school and had the opportunity to learn the very conventional way to speak and write Korean. However, the way people actually speak Korean is quite different. Different regions have different dialects. I did not understand the different dialects until I got a little older. Just like in the United States, different regions in Korea have different ways that they communicate. For example, my grandparents in Busan have a different accent than my family members who live in Seoul. It is interesting to see how regional language can be in different countries.

Learning more about Korean culture has helped me become more adequate in speaking Korean. The major lesson I have learned so far is that understanding the culture is a good portion of learning a language. You can learn all the grammar, vocabulary, writing, and reading you want, but it will never fully translate into fluency until culture is understand. The main reason is because culture affects the way we interact and speak.

Overall, the language learning process has provided me an opportunity to explore another aspect of Korea. I had the opportunity to learn the conventional way of Korean when I was younger and now I am having exposure to the more qualitative aspects of language learning. The best advice that I could give myself for the rest of the course is to continue to expose myself to new information and to continue to connect language and culture.

Culture shock has different progressions. When a person initially arrives in a new country, he/she is exposed to a world that looks and feels different. The beauty of different cultures is naivety to different cultures. I have personally felt culture shock. During the winter of my freshmen year, I had the opportunity to travel to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is fairly modernized, so it was not the appearance that threw me off. I found the food and the people much more different than what I was use to. At first, I enjoyed adventuring and finding new opportunities to try new things. However, as I got deeper into my trip, I quickly realized I missed what I was used to. 

The underlying things I learned about traveling in a country with a different country were:

• Embracing the change
• Understanding that everything is an experience
• Finding ways to connect your culture with the culture your visiting
• Going in with no expectations

Overall, I believe that culture shock is self-imposed. If you go in with the right attitude, you should be able to navigate through a country in a fluid way. 

The classroom presentations provided a great opportunity to learn about the different cultures/languages that are being studied in our class. It was interesting to see what topics different students decided to speak about. In my opinion, I think the more advanced speakers chose topics that were more difficult, while the less advanced speakers choice topics that were more easy to investigate. Overall, the project proved to be a great opportunity to learn more than just the language of Korea, but about underlying themes and lifestyle choices of Korea.

When my family moved from South Korea to the United States, we experienced a lot of culture shocks. From the way schools were run to the way people acted; everything was totally different from where we had come from. My parents, being older than I am and having been more accustomed to the Korean culture back home, struggled to find their niche in the States. They ended up finding a similar immigrant Korean community and merging in with them. As for me, I was forced to be put in to challenging situations like at school where everyone was speaking English and had different mannerisms than I did; I was forced to adapt and learn to assimilate or become like the rest of the Americans. Adding on to the challenge was that I was only an insecure middle school kid when I had to go through the challenge so there was definitely added pressure to assimilate. It took me a while but I absorbed the subtle differences in the nuances and mannerisms and was able to fit in to a point where unless I explicitly tell people, people usually can't tell that I grew up in South Korea. It was definitely a tough and long learning process.

This week I want to learn how to introduce myself and be able to talk about myself in Urdu. I was more concerned with saying hi and just starting the conversation in previous weeks but I feel that the next step should be being able to talk about myself in a very basic way. 

In order to get to this stage, I have been using google search for a lot of questions I have regarding how to say things. I've also been utilizing the resources I was given like byki and mango. Biggest help of all has been consistently coming from youtube videos as well.

I am interested in the "Culture Shock"  video because it did reflect my experience of being an international student who first came to America and started to study here for four years. The idea of "honeymoon phase" made me have a better understanding of my experience here after first coming two months. At the beginning, I did not have homesick due to new environment and things. However, after two months, I realized there were huge differences between America cultures and Chinese cultures and I found some of them were difficult for me to overcome. For example, even though there are plenty of food choice in dhall, I still missed the Chinese food so much and found that I was not able to get used to the oily and fried food here. Moreover, in China, we usually wash clothes and then put them dry under sunshine. But here people use dryer machines. The culture shock happened nearly everyday when I came to America after two months. Although there are lots of differences in cultures, I enjoyed learning the diversity and adjust myself in order to make the transaction more smoothly. 

My learning goals for this week is to finish learning how to ask and answer questions about my identity and to begin leaning how to talk about my family. I have been using various sources such as YouTube videos, BYKI, mango languages, and practicing with my language partner and with my Korean friends. There are also more websites online that have helped me learn how to talk about my family such as this website: 

http://www.lifeinkorea.com/Language/korean.cfm?Subject=family

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The 'Culture Shock' video was very interesting because it showed the experience of an international student or faculty when the first arrive to this university and how they experience the American culture. Because I have lived here my entire life it was very interesting to see what an outsider feels and thinks about when they come study abroad or work here in America. I would have to agree that culture shock is something most people experience, mostly after the so called "honeymoon phase." When I went to study abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland, I definitely remember experiencing culture shock after about a month of being there. At first I found everything extremely fascinating, but after about a month or so it was hard for me to adjust to some of the things in their culture. For example, the food they ate was not always good to me because I felt like they did not have as much of a variety of foods to chose from in the school's meal plan. I remember that one of Scotland's famous foods called 'blood pudding' was served for breakfast everyday, and I really disliked everything about blood pudding. I eventually got very tired of the food they served at the dinning hall and tired of eating the same thing all the time. Another thing I found shocking was the difference in school systems. In Scotland, they only give you one big assignment and a final exam, so basically your class grade was based on two things, which to me was very shocking and terrifying. I did like that I did not have to do homework every night, but I was scared that if I failed one assignment then I would only have the final to make up for it. The grading system was completely strange and confusing, and till this day I still do not understand how they grade things. Finally, another culture shock I did enjoy was that we did not have to participate in class like we do here in America. I enjoyed going to class and just listening to the professor because I honestly hate participating. I hate that they grade participation here in America, so it was a relief not having to worry about that while abroad.