It was very interesting to hear about the different cultural aspects of Korea, Turkey, Czech, and Portuguese during the presentations. Different countries have many unique aspects of culture that is not always apparent, such as food, clothing, dance, clothing, etc. I didn't quite understand how meaningful a drink or an item of clothing could be to a group of people, but these presentations made it clear that many people value things unique to their country. It made me think about certain aspects of American culture that I hold dear, and it's weird to think that some of our behavior would be just as strange to someone not from here as vice versa.
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I know a decent amount about the structure of Spanish, such as adjectives come after nouns, verb endings change depending on the subject, pronouns can be attached to verbs, etc. There are also plenty of online resources to learn more about the language structure, so I have numerous ways to learn more. I think a reference grammar is useful in learning a language faster, and English is a suitable reference language for Spanish. There are many cognates between these two languages, so vocabulary is a little easier to learn.
This week we met with our language partner and quickly discussed what we would be learning about for this semester. Minkyung gave Jacob and me a packet that had problems related to listening and speaking. We watched a brief Korean news video and tried to answer who, what, when, where, and why questions. It was a little difficult to understand everything so we watched multiple times and analyzed what words we had trouble understanding. She asked us questions about the video and we had to answer in all Korean. This exercise helped me review all my learning from last semester and made me remember how bad I was at speaking fluently in Korean. Afterwards, we read an article related to the news video. Our language partner helped us define difficult sentences or words that we didn't know.
Spanish is one of the romance languages, so it has many aspects in common with languages such as French and Italian. Additionally, Spanish stems from Latin, so it shares similarities with many other languages too. Verb endings change depending on the subject, adjectives follow nouns, etc. Many words are cognitives to those in English, so it is easier to learn than other languages that don't.
Due to SDLC 110, I believe that my listening and interpersonal communication skills have improved. However, I came to the conclusion that I need to focus on my reading and writing. My vocabulary is very limited, which hinders me from becoming a better reader. I cannot understand many words, so I lose the meaning of what is being conveyed in written work that is all Korean. I hope to tackle this problem this semester by learning more vocabulary that is related to common topics of conversation as well as in writing. I also find some Korean words difficult to spell because it contains vowels or consonants that sound the same, but have a totally different meaning. I plan on working with my learning partner on this problem.
My cultural learning goal for this semester is to learn more about the history of Korea. It is where my roots come from and I know nothing about it except for the few things that I learned from last semester while doing the cultural projects for SDLC 110. The few things I learned through those projects were fascinating because I was learning about the history of my nationality. The only time I came across Korean history in my life in the American education system was in my history class in high school and it was on the Korean war. However, the information was very brief and it was contained in a small paragraph that was about a few sentences. I hope to explore these topics with the help of my learning partner. I plan on finding online articles as well some educational videos on YouTube that teach historical topics about Korea. Through the exploration of Korea's long history, I hope to gain some insight on the Korean people and why things are the way they are.
My goal for week 4 is to learn about the different types of majors and minors, such as Mathematics, History, and Geography. I can achieve this goal by doing prior research before my tutoring session with my language partner. I want to learn about majors because I always struggled with finding the right words, whenever I tried to talk to others about my major, Chemistry. In order to carry on this conversation, my learning goal for week 5 is to apply my learning of majors by expanding my knowledge about different career paths, such as pharmacist, accountant, and lawyer. I can accomplish this task also with prior research on how these types of careers are used and with which types of majors they are typically associated with. After learning these two tasks, I can evaluate my success by having fluid conversations with my family and friends about fields of study courses and careers.
In order to learn Turkish I need to know about the grammatical rules, vowel harmony, the Turkish alphabet, and key vocabulary. I hope to acquire this knowledge by completing in class exercises, watching videos in the language, and also having conversational exchanges in Turkish. I also believe that I can work on learning these structural components of Turkish by completing writing and listening exercises. I do believe a reference grammar can be useful because it will help me to memorize and grasp the different rules that go into speaking the language properly and it will serve as a great resource if I happen to have any trouble or questions.
It was very exciting to hear my classmates present on a variety of cultural topics in different countries! Since I am learning Korean, it was very interesting to hear about the different aspects of Korean culture, such as the use of “us” and formality/informality. However, I was also very interested in learning about other cultures too! For example, it was fun to learn about how differently coffee is viewed in Turkey, when compared to the United States. People living in Turkey seemed to see coffee as a delicacy by serving it in smaller portions and by using the leftover coffee as a way of telling your fortune! It was also nice to learn about how time in Spain is multi-active, which is why it can be appropriate to have 2 hour lunch breaks and the ability to push back time, if necessary. This can be compared to how time is portrayed in Korean culture, which is monochronic. This provides an opposing view because Koreans tend to follow their set schedules and not appreciate interruptions that mess up their schedule.
The structure of Korean starts with the basic technique of putting vowels and consonants together to form individual words. Although this sounds very simple, the struggle comes when deciding which type of character goes under the consonant + vowel word. I can acquire the knowledge needed to learn this by focusing on improving my writing through one of my learning tasks. I know that I can write simple combination of words, but I would like to challenge myself by further exploring how I can become a better Korean writer. A reference grammar book may be useful to answer any questions I have. A better way to learn may be to actually practice this task by developing my writing skills with my language partner.
One prominent theme in Korean culture is the use of indirect language. It may be difficult to completely understand Korean communication because they are not very direct in what they want to get across. This means that yes may not always mean yes. As a result, this leaves us to decipher the meaning of the words and even provide our own interpretation. This theme is used because Korean culture does not want to upset the harmony, so they can tend to be passive aggressive and avoid conflict.
Another part of Korean culture deals with collectivism, which can result in indirect communication because many ideas are assumed as a part of the common language. Collectivism also deals with teamwork, which is present in Korean culture because Koreans like to do activities together, which explains their low individualism.
Koreans may view time as monochronic because following a set schedule is a part of their culture. For example, Koreans may keep and follow their tight schedule of academics and social activities, without missing classes.
The last factor shows how Koreans are external, which relates to the first two themes of collectivism and indirect, because Koreans tend to be low risk takers. This results from their high ranking of avoiding uncertainty.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to have a conversation in Portuguese as I have no language partner. However, the few times I have been able to practice Portuguese it has seemed to be fine. In my Capoeira class I have practiced singing in Portuguese, and I have not been corrected for pronunciation. I feel as though I have met my learning goals for this week quite well. I have practicing my duolingo daily, and I have been able to watch a few soccer videos in Portuguese.
Reflect on the classmates presentations
I really enjoyed the presentations. Listening to the Korean ones helped me reinforce my own culture (especially hanbok and the beauty culture) and the ones about Turkey were very interesting. I spoke with my Turkish friend afterwards about raki and he told me that he would bring me some. In general, all of the presentations were very well thought out. I wish I could have made mine a little more interesting. I think I spoke a little too fast and I wish I used my Czech the entire time, but because nobody would have understood it, I refrained from doing so.
I thought that the presentations were good. I learned a lot about many different aspects of Korean, Turkish, Czech and Spanish. I felt as that through the presentations I learned not only about the differences in language, but also the differences in customs. For example, we learned about the Korean clothing which is drastically different to that of Brazilian clothing. Another example is how Are spoke about the greetings in Korean. This was different than in Portuguese as in Portuguese having no eye contact or physical contact is seen as disrespectful.
This semester, I will focus on modern day Ukrainian political music. Originally, I thought about doing my project on folk music, but I realized (by accident) that the modern day politically charged music coming out of Ukraine is more relevant and interesting. The conflict with Russia, Russian backed separatists in the East and the widespread government corruption in Ukraine all shine through in the music that is popular. As far as I can tell, there was a large increase of political pop music during and after the Maidan Revolution. This element of Ukrainian culture is complicated and difficult to understand because there are so many moving parts, however, I believe that researching this topic can begin to show much about Ukraine's current culture in the wake of multiple political and social crises.
Based on my work from last semester, I would consider myself at level 1 intermediate. Because I have been accepted to an intensive summer Ukrainian program, I decided that for this semester, I will not focus as much on grammar, but instead I will focus on listening comprehension. In order to do this, my language partner and I will watch Ukrainian films (starting with children's cartoons and working our way up to something more applicable like the news or a sitcom). We will also work together on things like listening to a dialogue and answering questions. We will spend the first month working with very simple material (cartoons designed for children) and then we will move to watching a show designed for more advanced audiences (sitcoms or game shows), and for the final month, we will try to watch the news. I anticipate that the news will be the most difficult to understand because they often speak quickly.
This artifact reviews what I learned in SDLC 110 and includes what I have learned so far in weeks 1 - 3 this semester.
Evaluation:
1. Accent:
- I believe that my accent was more or less good. Of course, I have to continue to assimilate newer letter-pairing sounds into my wheelhouse. For example, words that contain "n" and "g" next to each other are very difficult for a native English speaker to pronounce.
2. Cultural Appropriateness:
- I believe that the monolog was culturally appropriate. I adhered to the norms that guide the Indonesian language. For example, some words do not translate cleanly into English. And I used the proper words in the monolog's context.
3. Linguistic Accuracy:
- The monolog was linguistically and grammatically accurate -- for the most part. It is difficult to judge a monolog based on its grammar, but, linguistically, I remained very much in the realm of an informal, or "slang," as many Indonesians like to call it, type of conversation. The words were modified to account for the informal conversation.
In all, I think I can improve my spacing in between sentences. The awkward timing between sentences will abate as time goes on.
- Reflect on the presentations of your classmates.
It was interesting to learn about different cultures around the world and to see what aspects of them interested my class mates. I learned new things from all of them but it was interesting to learn about the different use of the words we/our in Korean from Delila's presentation. It gives new insight into Korean culture and social behavior. It was also interesting to learn about K-Pop and the process of being trained as a Korean idol from Abigail, and about the prevalence of plastic surgery in Korea. I also was interested in the different rituals cultures associated with drinking, as shown in the presentations on Turkish Raki and Coffee drinking. It was also interesting to hear about other rituals, like Joora's presentation on holiday's in Turkey ,and Angella and Sharon's presentation on traditional Korean clothing. Lastly, I enjoyed Tom's presentation about the slower pace and different culture of Spain, and Oliver's presentation on Capoiera dance fighting.
