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So far, my language learning has been going well. I have been able to explore topics with more freedom than when I was in Korea because my learning isn’t as regimented. I have also really enjoyed being able to blend resources together for my lessons such as using Naver Webtoons or my poetry books as learning tools. It’s made learning feel more natural and interesting for me. I have really enjoyed learning through tasks. That has allowed me to really focus my language learning on topics of interest and then directly apply my new knowledge. For example, writing my Korean resume was a lengthy process but from it I learned a lot about work related vocabulary and verb endings used exclusively for writing. Along the way, I had to learn how to read job descriptions and find job openings because what good is a resume that is never used? One task can naturally lead to another.

Since Korean is a high context language and Korea is a high context culture, an understanding of both can be very helpful. One example of that would be my presentation from earlier in the semester where I discussed the diversified use of the pronoun “우리” in Korean language and how that term reflects cultural values of inclusiveness and togetherness. Another example of that would be the lack of the use of the pronoun “you” in Korean. Koreans feel that using the pronoun “you” creates distance between the speaker and the listener and can show disrespect. Often you refer to someone by their name or title which shows that you acknowledge them and their status within your relationship. Often, between friends, the word is completely omitted. For example, 밥 먹었어? means “have you eaten?” but it literally translates to “food eaten?” This same pattern persists for a variety of phrases. If a foreigner were to include the pronoun “you” in these phrases, it would show their poor understanding of Korean and Korean culture. Furthermore, if you understand the culture around the grammar points or word choices, it makes them easier to remember. It can be hard to remember that you should use “our” in some instances and “mine” in others but if you consider the Korean cultural aspect around it, it becomes much more obvious on when you should use “our” or “mine” when referring to something.

I think improving my pragmatics would be a huge improvement to my Korean and it would let me sound much more natural. Often, Korean speakers drop particles and condense verb endings to make speaking easier and quicker, however that can cause for a loss of meaning for foreigner listeners. It can be much more difficult to discern between the subject and object of a sentence if particles are missing that denote that. Also, I would like to be able to find ways to reword my sentences so they sound as natural as possible. However, I think that level is many months away from me and I will need to learn the extended, proper, form first before I can imagine using the condensed forms. 

• Reflect on the Culture Shock video and your own experiences and expectations of culture shock

I easily found some common experiences that I also had on the video. The professor in the video defined cultural shock as something you feel you are not belong there and want to go back to your home country. I think it is little extreme but I did feel I do not belong to some communities in America when I first saw different attitude towards people and different life styles. I thought I was open minded person, but still I was not free from cultural shock. I think because I feel I am not a majority in this society, it become careful on my behavior or words. I totally understood the international student who said he did not talk for a long time because he felt like he was wasting other people's time because he spoke English slowly. I felt less confident in the class in my freshman year, too so I had hard time getting used to ask questions and discuss in the class.

One time, I typed "Let's do BS" on group chat and I meant BS, bible study. I got embarrassed when my friends told me it stands for a curse word. There were several times that I was shocked because I did not know some abbreviations and numbers that represent something else. I also did not understand why people judge me using utensils when I eat pizzas, and some finger food. I was eating french fries with a fork in Minnesota and my friends from there were staring at me in weird faces and said we do not use forks for french fries. In addition, transportation system in America was surprisingly inconvenient that I felt less independent in America because I had to ask for a ride to go somewhere.

Actually, the most shocking thing for me was that people do not use an umbrella when it snows!! I always bring my umbrella in the snow in Korea but my American friends said they never use umbrella for snow. I think Korean people care about getting their face and clothes wet more than Americans do. And the clothes they were during the winter are different from Americans, and they don't usually have jackets that have little caps on the top, they might prefer to use umbrellas under the snow. From those shocking experiences, I learned these little daily lives can be really differ from country to country.

It was interesting to watch all the presentations on different cultures of targeted countries. Since cultures are critically tied to languages, it was good to know what kinds of background cultures are there in those countries. I was impressed by the hidden meanings of the black beanie in Czechoslovakia that people do not show off their wealth in public and the beanie represents the characteristics of people there. In addition, it was interesting to watch presentations on Korean culture that I got to know how other students from different backgrounds perceive Korean culture. They interpreted the bowing culture, using a formal language, and the use of “We” in Korean in their own way. I enjoyed watching the explanation of Korean traditional clothes and the global aspects of them. 

My progress so far has been on pace with my learning plan so I have finished all the lessons I listed. However, I feel that I may have made my pace too quick. I feel that I spend all of my time learning the lesson that I don't have a chance to practice and memorize it before moving on to the next one. So now, I have decided to slow down a bit and go back and review and truly practice around the sessions. I feel that I'm currently walking on a road and paving it as I walk over it. I'm not giving myself enough time to truly build the foundation before I move to next lesson.

This could also be because the time I have blocked off for learning and review is much less than it should be. For example, I try to spend 30 minutes to 1 hour on Korean daily. However, when I was in Korea, I had a 2 hour daily Korean class and roughly 30 minutes to 1 hour's worth of homework every day. So I would end up studying 2.5-3 hours a day along with the luxury of being immersed in Korean. My other classes were not very demanding so I was easily able to meet the demands of my korean class but it's much harder to do that at Richmond where almost all of my classes require daily homework. On top of that I have my part-time job. 

I plan to slow down a bit on the learning I do and focus on reviewing instead. I will also try to find ways to make my daily Korean practice more of a priority and more of a fun, relaxing time for myself. Lately, it's been hard to find the motivation to get through the lessons and exercises but I hope to turn that around. 

For my second artifact I will be submitting my Korean resume and Korean inquiry email. This email roughly explains my credentials as a candidate along with my questions for the responder: what requirements do you have for foreigner applicants? do you accept foreigner applications? do you have any openings I qualify for?

Inquiry%20Email.pdf

dalila_resume.pdf

As I learned my first target language in an immersion setting, the structure of the language was basically taught to me through showing us how the language worked. In this case my approach has been very different, and also being older and more able to understand the complex aspects of language structure, language structure is something I found to be the most interesting and also the most important. Luckily, the structure of Turkish is actually quite simple from what I can tell. They don't use gendered words and make use of suffixes to indicate person and tense. In this way, it makes learning the language much easier and faster because the word "love", for example, can so easily be translated into "I love" or "You love" just by changing the ending. I do think that a reference grammar would be helpful actually even more so because the structure is relatively simple. Because of the way that Turkish is set up, it would be easy to see patterns in a reference grammar. 

Reflection%20Paper%20%231.docx

• First Cultural Post:  What is your interest in 'your' language and what do you hope to accomplish this semester?

Last semester I learned Korean and I wanted to continue to enhance my knowledge of Korean. I have been been exposed a lot to Korean culture through my friends in Richmond. I am also currently in the Korean American Student Association on campus. We try to market to anyone interested in Korean culture through both food, Korean games, and movies. I think that Korean culture is also very interesting in terms of their hierarchy and  honorifics.  

I hope to better learn my basics and be able to hold a conversation. I am also planning on earning how to change from formal to informal Korean. Also, I plan to learn some sort of reading and writing, so if I were to go to Korea I would be able to read some of the signs. 

My first artifact is a recording of myself using greeting, farewells, and introductions with a professor on campus that speaks Czech. I greeted her formally and asked basic questions such as "how are you?" and "Have you been to Czech Republic?" I also greeted her with a formal farewell and discusses a little bit about the class in Czech. I am hoping to build on this artifact by going to her office hours and talking to her for at least a couple sentences. 

My goals for week 4 and 5 was to give a presentation in Czech and continue learning basic vocabulary such as colors, animals, and clothes. I have completed the presentation by asking a friend how my presentations skills were such as eye contact, tonality, projection, diction, but I was unable to record it. I thought I did well, I might have took more time to think about my sentences to form. However, I was unable to work on my vocabulary. I have a list from my resources using memrise and czech learning books, but I need to test myself and apply them in sentences. I am hoping to gain more exposure when I visit a European supermarket later in the week. 

This week I want to improve on my soccer vocabulary. I will do this by learning more about soccer in Portuguese, and watching more interviews. I also will watch some more basic new commentaries just to learn more about the Portuguese language as a whole. I also intend to find some books to hopefully practice my learning. 

I found the culture shock video quite interesting. Being from California I did have some culture shock, but I definitely did no have culture shock to the extend of those featured in the video. Coming into college I did expect my life to be different, than my life at home, but I did not expect the environment around me to affect how my life would be lived. For example. coming into college I already knew that Richmond was not as dense as California, but I did not expect this to cause me to feel as though there is a lack of action or things to do in Richmond. On the other hand, unlike those featured in the video, I did not experience any language barriers, or any trouble trying to accomplish daily tasks, as in no way did I feel out of place when I first came to college.

Over the last two weeks, my language partner and I have watched and discussed several Ukrainian cartoons. This strategy of watching cartoons is meant to increase my listening comprehension abilities. At first, I had some difficulty understanding the dialogues in the cartoons, but then we found some with Ukrainian subtitles as well, so it became much easier. I think of these subtitles as training wheels, because of course in real life there will not be any subtitles to rely on. One of my goals that stemmed from using subtitles is to be able to understand cartoons without using subtitles by the end of the semester. I think that it can be possible, especially because of the supplementary visuals that exist while watching a cartoon. 

Here, I will take a detour from my first culture post in which I advertised key areas within Bali's culture that I wished to investigate. This culture post concerns a phenomenon called pasung. This topic hits closer to home because it is a phenomenon with which my language partner and I would like to study this summer.

Pasung may be defined as the shackling of people with mental disorders. Fifty-seven thousand people with mental illness have experienced pasung at least once in their lives, and 18,800 people are believed to be shackled in Indonesia today. Approximately 300 people in Bali, Indonesia, are currently suffering from this practice.ii Because of the scarcity of resources that provide mental health treatment — there are 48 mental health institutions for the country’s 250 million people and only one in Bali, for instance — families with loved ones who have psychological disabilities resort to either social care institutions or their homes. Social care institutions are known for their practices of “arbitrary detention, physical and sexual violence, and involuntary treatment” while administering medication. Furthermore, the conditions in social care institutions are woeful: they are overcrowded, unsanitary, and lack basic amenities, such as bathrooms. People are chained to the floor lying in their excrement and urine with only a bucket of water to bathe themselves.

Despite the government’s long-standing positions and recent initiatives to put an end to pasung, hurdles such as 1) a lack of access to medication, 2) education, and 3) traditional belief systems about mental illness make it difficult to eradicate pasung entirely. Indeed, the government formally banned pasung in 1977 and set into motion a program called “Indonesia Free from Pasung” in 2014. Nevertheless, access to medication remains a large headwind in decreasing pasung. According to the Indonesian Ministry of Health, 90% of individuals are unable to enjoy mental health services. As it stands, Bali only has 25 psychiatrists for the island’s 4.2 million inhabitants.vi In addition, the lack of education is a roadblock: Fewer than 10% of Indonesia’s population have a university-level education, while only 43% have graduated primary school.vii In this light, a common belief that mental health disabilities are the result of supernatural phenomena such as a curse persists. Consequently, many Indonesians conclude that mental health conditions cannot be treated and stigmatization abounds.

It is a devastating topic, indeed. But one that reveals a great deal about the Balinese people's understanding of mental illness. 

My goals for these past two weeks were to:

• A) Finish unit 7 Directions/Instructions, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture
• B) Begin reading Indonesian comic books (I decided that I will utilize free versions of comic books rather than purchase a (short) Indonesian children's book).
• C) Meet with my partner for four hours

Strategies to accomplish these goals:

• A) Over these past two weeks, I have made a lot of progress with unit 7. Nevertheless, I have not completed the unit as it is dense and lengthy. This will constitute a minor hurdle as I planned to finish one unit every two weeks. At the end of each session, I collected the new vocabulary that I learned. In addition, I worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills through the unit's activities. Now, I can describe a building's location vis-a-vis its surroundings. In addition to describing the location of people, things, and animals, I have amassed a large vocabulary pertaining to the topic that will prove useful in daily conversations. For example, I can ask where objects are in a given room and describe its location. Moreover, I practiced equative, comparative, and superlative comparisons. 
• B) I began reading comics whose genres range from comedy to drama to fairytale. Here, this exercise allows me to get a better grasp on the "street" language as these comics use informal speech. It is important for me to not only learn the vocabulary but gain an understanding of the informal sentence structure patterns as well as the culture behind the conversations.
• C) I met with my language learning partner for 4 hours over these past two weeks. During these meetings, we worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills.

• Learning Journal 6:  State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.

My learning goals this week are to:

1. Watch a Korean video on SCOLA and write about it in my journal

2. Listen to a Korean song and write about it in my journal

3. Read my Korean book (I chose the Giving Tree) and attempt to respond to it in my journal

4. Call my mom and have a conversation with her without using any English twice a week

I accomplished these goals by going onto SCOLA and picking a video that seemed interesting to me. I chose a song that I felt was slow enough that I could hear all of the syllables, and I listened to it over and over again. I received my Korean edition of the Giving Tree in the mail today, so I plan to read the book and write about it in my journal. Lastly, I am in contact with my mom through phone and Skype calls to enhance my conversational Korean.

Post Learning Journal #5 on Your Blog in the Ning

• Reflect on the Culture Shock video and your own experiences and expectations of culture shock

I have not studied abroad yet, but I had a small case of culture shock when I travelled from the West to the East coast for college. Like the individuals in the Culture Shock video, I found that discussing the differences between the two coasts with fellow West Coast students made me feel more comfortable. I wasn’t used to the fashion, behavior, and food. Coming to Virginia introduced me to new fashion trends such as Vineyard Vines, LL Bean boots, and generally more “preppy” outfits. I had never seen someone wear clothing like that on the West Coast. Furthermore, the behavior was different because people were generally more well-mannered and hospitable. I was not used to saying thank you when someone held the door for me because it generally did not happen very often. I was shocked by how many people said “you’re good” and I didn’t know what it meant at first. Lastly, I was not used to the food at first. I had never eaten a “hush puppy.” It is called Carl’s Jr on the West Coast, but on the East Coast the restaurant with the smiling star is called “Hardee’s.” To be honest, my initial response to these differences was to believe that  my beliefs are superior. However, I am learning that though we all live in the same country, there are many regional differences that should not dictate how I view an individual.

SDLC 110:

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

For my culture project, I plan to present on the Korean social hierarchical system. It’s an interesting topic to me because though I am Korean, I was born in and grew up in the United States. I identify more with my American culture than my Korean culture, so it feels strange when I am in social situations where I have to abide to the Korean social hierarchical system. In the United States, respect is earned through one’s character, personality, etc. Therefore, it is very difficult for me to abide to a system where respect is given due to factors such as age. It is a form of social ranking that I do not agree with. Therefore, because I struggle with this concept a lot, I plan to research more about it, with the hopes of coming to understand why it was established/ why it still exists today. My learning goals for my topic are to browse the internet for some potential articles to read about this social hierarchical system.

My goal for this week is learning how to describe things. Before, I had learned simple ways to describe things such as "It is big," "the car is red," and so on. But I wanted to expand that so I could describe memories, daily events, or purchased items vividly. Saying "I bought a brown bag" and saying "I bought a brown bag with studded straps and two large side pockets" is very different. Also, the ability to describe things can be useful when giving directions or discussing likes and interests.

So far, I have been working towards this goal by making lists of adjectives and also making lists of features that go with objects. For example, I know the word for book is 책 but then I search the names of different genres, page numbers, topic matter, etc. So now I can say "I bought a nonfiction book about space" rather than just "I bought a book." Also, if I go to a bookstore now I can navigate around the store better because I know the names of genres. Before, I had to skim the books in an area first before I could determine what they covered. 

My next step is to go through a TTMIK series which has photos and provides sample responses. I will be using that to test my progress and learn about new sentence constructions and vocabulary. 

During these two weeks, I was switched between Minkyung and Joora for my language partners. With Minkyung, we learned about a topic that deals with service and customers. I learned that in Korea, service is taken very seriously and that Korea has one of the best customer service in the world. Because of this, many issues can arise, such as customers taking advantage of the workers. We learned about an incident that happened in an airplane that was headed back to Korea from Vietnam. A man that was intoxicated on an airplane was making a scene and causing chaos in the airplane. We learned various Korean words to describe the situation. We also went over the situation in the form of a news article. In this news article, we identified words that we were not familiar with and Minkyung went over it with us.

For the second week, my language partner was switched to Joora. We learned about trendy vocabulary that is used often in Korea, such as "numsabyeok" which means someone who is too perfect at something. We learned various texting lingo and other commonly used phrases that are trending in Korea. The next meeting, we learned about the Korean alphabet along with the consonants and vowels of the language. Although this was review, it was good to start off with the basics again. 

These were very effective for me to start the semester off. I will continue to expand on these topics by learning more about not only the trendy vocabulary, but also other specialized vocabulary that was taught to me by Minkyung and Joora. These class sessions were helpful in getting my mind back in Korean and to get me started efficiently.

I definitley experienced culture shock while I was abroad. Similar to the people in the video, it was a draining experience and led to a feeling of discomfort and unease. The biggest issue was that it lowered my self-confidence and made it difficult to do simple tasks because I was so worried about making a mistake rather than the completion of the task. Being unable to do simple tasks, such as use the washing machine, can make you feel dumb and out of place. 

Prior to going to Korea, I prepared a lot by studying Korean and memorizing key travel phrases and vocabulary. Doing tasks like asking for directions or shopping in a store, were easy for me but there was still a lot of local knowledge I lacked. No one tells you to prepare for those sorts of things. Things like finding where to buy bagels because you're craving them or where to buy a pillow because you need a new one are unexpected obstacles.

I was lucky enough to have a close group of Korean friends who made me feel accepted and were always there to answer my questions. Also, I found a "happy place" for myself where I could go and recharge after having a tiring day. It served as a refuge for me when I felt the most homesick. My advice to others is to find local friends and to find either a place or an activity (such as taking a morning walk) that gives them some sense of normalcy or comfort.