I have learned that making a self-directed learning plan requires specific goals. I believe that the goals I have outline in my plan will help me to learn all the basic necessities of the language. After I have reached the a certain level, I will be able to move more towards learning more cultural aspects of Korean. I was mostly inspired at first from watching Korean dramas and seeing all my Korean friends speak to each other in Korean. I hope that I will be able to accomplish my goals.
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This week, we were assigned to read Figuring Foreigners Out. I enjoyed this reading because this brought to light an aspect of culture that I never thought about. In this article, cultures are defined as having 5 distinct qualities: Individualist-collectivist, nonverbal communication, monochronic-polychronic, internal-external, and direct-indirect communication. As I was reading this article, I was able to classify both the American and Korean culture since I experienced both. I found that I agree with this article and the points it presents, and the fact that the article states that cultures are usually a mix of both qualities made the arguments more compelling. I find that since the Korean culture is more conservative in comparison to that of the American culture, I noticed that there were a couple of cultural differences. An example of this is the idea of monochronic vs. polychronic. In Korean and most Asian cultures, it is important for students to focus only on their studies in order to live a successful life in the future, while in America, student education highly emphasizes a time to discover oneself and to strive towards their desired profession. Besides this quality, I can see both Korean and American culture going either way for different qualities.
I organized my self-directed learning plan using the template provided. In order to assist me in completing my various tasks, I found a website where I can watch Korean programs and I can find vocabulary through Google. I believe, that by learning vocabulary and how to listen effectively, I will be able to better communicate with my family members, which is my main goal for this class. I was motivated to start learning Korean again because I found that my Korean speaking abilities became rusty, and since a majority of my family speaks only Korean, it is important that I learn in order to communicate with them effectively. I have yet to receive feedback from my classmates, so I am just waiting patiently until they do.
This week I learned how to say things in plural and how to ask basic questions. Putting words in plural and asking questions require vowel harmony. Because vowel harmony is so common and I've been using it more as I dive deeper into my Turkish studies, I think it is coming more naturally to me. I learned how to say "what," "who," and "where," and how to say "this" and "that," which gave me enough tools to start constructing questions. I found it interesting how in English we have two words, "this" and "that," that differentiate between the closeness of a reference, but in Turkish there are three words that indicate different degrees of closeness. Using the plural rules that I learned, I was then able to say "these" and "those." I also did some exercises from the workbook Merve provided to practice writing questions and answering them.
Over the weekend, I found out that my friend and her family watch Turkish dramas at home (with Arabic subtitles). She said that she preferred Turkish dramas over American TV shows and recommended a couple that are available on Netflix, so I look forward to watching the shows she recommended to me and seeing the Turkish I’ve learned in context.
This week we learned a lot about the global learning center and its resources in class. I didn't know that we had all these resources at our disposal, so when I get the chance I want to explore the resources they might have for Turkish learners. Later in the week, I learned how to ask introductory questions (How old are you? Where do you live? etc.) and some vocabulary about family. With Merve, I wrote and spoke some sentences describing famous people and my family. However, when constructing these sentences, some of the words required multiple suffixes. For example, "My mother's name is Kristen" would translate to "Annemin adı Kristen," where "Anne" means "mother," "-m" means "my," and "-in" means "her" (referring to my mother's name, which is a possession), and "adı" is "(her) name." Sometimes I find it difficult to know when and in what order to put these suffixes (-m, -in and others), but hopefully I will get the hang of it by writing more sentences. I also made a Quizlet flashcard set of the words from learning the alphabet and have been using it to reinforce new vocabulary. However, when I was going through these flashcards it took me forever, as I added too many words that I probably will never use (I included words like iron and grill, which are words I rarely use in English). In the future I will try to tailor my vocabulary to words that I will actually use.
This week I wanted to learn about the Turkish alphabet, improve my pronunciation, and learn more things to say when introducing myself. There are 29 letters in the Turkish alphabet as opposed to the English alphabet's 26 letters, so I watched a video about the sounds each letter makes and tried replicating the sounds of each letter. Sometimes I find it hard to remember the vowels, especially the sounds of vowels with umlauts versus those without; I think this might be because in English vowels can sound very different depending on the context of surrounding letters, so it is hard for me to "match" up a particular Turkish vowel to a specific English vowel sound. However, exposing myself to different words and listening to their pronunciation through videos/audio has helped mitigate this issue. With Merve, we covered the Turkish four-way vowel harmony, which answered some of the questions I had the week before about the vowel harmony that occurs when saying "I am from ___." This also requires knowing the sounds of each vowel, so speaking words that use vowel harmony has taken me some time to get used to.
Merve also set me up with a pen pal from Turkey! My pen pal’s name is Sezer, and we introduced ourselves (initially, I practiced my newly-learned Turkish greetings, but once I exhausted my Turkish knowledge we talked in English, which he is currently learning). While texting, he translated some of the things I typed in English into Turkish, so I learned a couple of new words from him.
I think the practice sessions with my learning partner are really helpful, especially when there are other students there to practice conversing with. Justine and I were in the same practice session and practiced conversations where we introduced ourselves to each other, asking questions like "What's your name?", "How are you?", "Where are you from?", etc. In Turkish, saying "I am from __" consists of one word, which at first was a little unnatural to me. Turkish is an agglutinative language, so you can tack on endings to a word to form new words that translate into full sentences (which makes it more difficult to look words up). However, when saying "I am from __", it was difficult for me to know which vowels to use for the ending that translates to "I am from...". For example, "Virjinyaliyim" means "I am from Virginia," and "New Yorkluyum" means "I am from New York." After "Virjinya" and "New York," the endings "-liyim" and "-luyum" were used to convey "I am from (Virginia/New York)", but they are spelled differently. Apparently this is because Turkish has something called vowel harmony, which I will learn about more in the future. In my own time, I looked up different countries in Turkish and their endings that translate to "I am from" to get a better sense of how vowel harmony works and to identify patterns in how the vowels match up with the word it is modifying.
Expanding from the greetings that we learned independently, Merve went over the difference between formal and informal conversations when introducing yourself and asking introductory questions during our practice session. We also learned about formal/informal relationships and situations where they are used.
At this point in my self-directed language experience I was jumping between many different resources to learn Turkish. However, I think it would be more helpful for me to establish a routine and to know the resources I should use when I want to learn more about something.
The first half of this week was mainly trying to figure out the logistics of the course (scheduling times with my language partner, Merve, understanding what the course entails, etc.). I was very eager to start learning Turkish and figured that I should start with greetings, but in terms of resources I didn't quite know where to begin. Luckily, Merve suggested some Turkish workbooks for us to work through. So I started from the beginning of the workbook where there were exercises on greetings/phrases for introducing yourself. Because the workbooks were in Turkish and had no English translations, I had to look up a lot of words (I think Tureng is the best dictionary for this) and write them down. I like the idea of omitting English from the workbook, but it was difficult for me to understand some of the instructions, which were written in Turkish as well. I also looked through some YouTube videos from the TurkishClass101 channel, which were useful for pronunciation and for explaining the meanings of these new words and phrases. Regarding the effectiveness of my self-learning strategies, I think I need to find other methods to enhance my retention of new words besides just writing them down.
