Blogs

Islam is the dominant religion in Iran.  It governs political, social, legal and economic aspects of the country. Because of the religious stipulation that Muslims must pray five times a day, the newspaper lists specific times at which people are to pray.  These times coincide with specific times of day: morning, noon, afternoon, sunset and evening.  Friday is considered the holy day so everything is closed.  Many businesses will also close on Thursday.  This closely resembles our weekend structure but just on different days.

During Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, business slows down.  This is because they are open at strange times, and for shorter hours.  Muslims must not only fast from dusk until dawn, but are also only able to work for six hours a day.  These limited and strange business hours are good to be aware of if you are a businessperson trying to conduct trade during this time or a tourist in the area.  It not only allows you to forsee possible complications, but also cater to the cultural needs of Iranians. The fast is broken every night after the sun goes down as family and friends celebrate together (again family being a very central part of Iranian culture). 

Another important aspect of Iranian culture is "taarof" or politness. This is a general term that encompases certain acceptable polite behaviors or verbal responses to situations.  Taarof stipulates things like: protesting compliments in an attmept to seem vulnerable in public, appearing humble by diminishing the importance of one's own accomplishments, and declining an offered item at least once, or unitl the other person's insistence becomes greater.

Finally, the most surprising aspect of Iranian culture that I have found so far is this idea of a double identity.  The two identities are a public identity (zaher) and a private identity (batin).  In public people are expected to conform to social and cultural norms so the "zaher" aspect of themselves manifests, but in private the "batin" aspect prevails.  It may be difficult to distinguish the line between these two for us though.  For example, whereas we may think that a business realtionship or setting might merit the "zaher" or public aspect of someone, actually the "batin" or private aspect may prevail.  This is because of the family centric nature of businesses in Iran. While we do have certain personality shifts in the United States based on a public or private setting, I do not think people would go as far as to say that they view themselves as having two separate identities.

I will continue to post on business relationships and interactions in later posts.

Because social dymanics and etiquette vary between countries, I wanted to get a feel for how to operate in social situations in Iran (a Farsi-speaking country).  I found this site:

http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/global-etiquette/iran-country-profile.html

which was very helpful. 

Some of the things that I found to be very useful were the social norms regarding gender.  For example.  During introductions, usually men are introduced to men and women are introduced to women.

Another aspect of Iranian culture that I found to be interesting is the gift giving stipulations.  If invited over to a someone's house in the United States, we would usually bring some kind of gift, whether it is a dish for a meal or some other kind of thank you.  Similarly in Iran, this type of gift is also necessary (usually flowers or some kind of pastry).  Also, all other formal gifts must be wrapped elegantly but you should not expect the recipient to open the gift in front of you.  Most interestingly, when you give a gift you should alwasy "apologize for its inadequacy."  I found that humorous at first but I realize it is probably rooted in a sense of Islamic humility that extends into the social sphere.

The website also talked about family etiquette; parts of which I found surprising.  An example of this is that asking about the female members of of a family including wife and sisters is considered inappropriate.  This is something that would take me a lot of getting used to because in the United States we don't generally make a gender distinction when asking about someone's family.  Also, In Iran, family ties are considered more important than any other social ties and family needs trump all other needs (including business needs).  Businesses might also bend more to family needs in Iran because nepotism is considered a good thing.  This is because it shows that you are hiring people you know and trust.  By virtue of hiring a bunch of family members, and employer would also be aware of and encourage the employees to cater to their families' needs.

There are a lot more aspects of Iranian culture on this site and I will continue talking about them in the following culture posts.

From this week’s reading I learned about cultural competence and how to properly evaluate dialects. There are two main areas of spoken language a person recognizes on a regular basis, a person’s accent and a person’s dialect. An accent is easily recognized in the States through how a word sounds, for instance a Boston accent is relatively distinct with how people from that region say several words. A dialect is how words are framed, like “he did it” compared to “he done it.” In studying dialects it is important to note that no dialect is the correct dialect. We are known to say things such as he or she speaks the correct English dialect. Who are we to decide what is the correct English dialect? Just because someone’s spoken language does not sound like the language we were taught in school, it does not necessarily mean it is wrong.

Another interesting thing to note about dialect is that it is becoming harder to recognize where a person is from based off of what they say. Decades ago people could figure out where another person was from based off of what they said. Today that is not the case with the increased social mobility of nearly everyone. I am from Cincinnati, Ohio, but I go to school in the south and routinely converse with people from the Northeast. These are three different dialects I am exposed to everyday for the last four years. Because of this I have acquired language that I never would have previously known had I stayed in Cincinnati my whole life. Now I use words such as wicked and nice in describing whether a person is really good at something. In Cincinnati when we describe somebody as being good at something we say they are sick or awesome.

Modern dialect studies focuses on the socioeconomic status of a person. It is much more helpful to understand a person’s job, income, or education, than where they are from. Although we like to believe there is no class divide in the United States there unfortunately is. The upper class tends to hang with fellow wealthy people and occasionally middle class people, but never lower class people. Since there is such a drastic difference in lifestyles and life experiences, different dialects emerge. Education may have a factor, but the context of the situation also plays a role. For instance when meeting with the President of the United States the language interaction one should expect is that of something proper and not some street jargon. However, when relaxing among some peers the setting is entirely different and a person can return back to the language and dialect they are most comfortable speaking.

The last thing I want to touch on was the question of why does language cause so many problems? The book answers it by explaining that by choosing one language over another is a universal sign that you identify more with this cultural group. The dialect chosen also provides a clear link to the past. Finally, it is a natural barrier between cultural groups that typically encourages conflict rather than cooperation. Even with my Hebrew language there is a clear difference between certain dialects. The Sadducees were the more recognized and distinguished Jewish people with their priest and wealthy person roles, while the Pharisees were the laymen in the Jewish community. These different Jewish sects developed different dialects and also created a sense of hatred towards each other because neither sect budged on their stance or their form of communication. So language and its dialect is not just a problem today, but something that has been causing problems for 2000 plus years.

            Staying true to my promise to continue to churn out more Voki’s past the required amount, I was able to create a Voki with Maya talking about my Spring Break. Since we could find no information on the Internet regarding how to talk about one’s Spring Break in Hebrew, we resorted to calling Maya’s mother who is fluent in English and Hebrew. She was able to generate all the terms and Hebrew lingo I wanted to use in describing my exciting Spring Break to the Dominican Republic where I was not kidnapped. (Ve lo mich pastee!!!!)

The debate over the origins of language always fascinated me. This week reading particularly interested me as it not provided various theories regarding the origins of language but also focused on the evolution of the languages. Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), a Danish linguist has been a revolutionary figure in linguistics. He grouped commonly held theories and divided them into four group while create a fifth group of his own. He believed these five theories described the essence of languages while describing the origins.

The bow-wow theory refers to a theory which suggests that speech arose through people imitation the sounds of the environment especially animal calls. Word such as splash, quack provides evidence to this theory.

The pooh-pooh theory believes speech arose through people making instinctive sounds caused by pains, anger or other emotions. Words such as Ouch, ooh provides evidence to this theory.

The ding-dong theory argues that speech arose because people reacted to stimuli in the world around them, and produces sounds which in some ways reflect or were in harmony in nature.

The Ye-ho-ho theory believes speech arose because, as people worked together, their physical efforts produced communal, rhythmical fronts, which in due course developed into chants, and thus language.

The la-la theory which was developed by Jespersen himself believed if any single factor was going to initiate human language, it would arise from romantic side of life such as the sounds associated with love, play etc.

Although the theories are essential in understanding the origins of language, I believe one theory cannot be regarded as the most effective theory. All the theories presented by Otto Jespersen, if combined together provide a better understanding of how languages began. 

In this section, Crystal focuses primarily on conversation.  The overwhelming message I took away from the reading is that conversation and language are so complex!  There are seemingly innumerable ways in which they same idea can be conveyed in words.  As Crystal points out, conversation rarely follows the stereotype of speaking on complete sentences, careful listening, question and answer and the like.  True conversation is disordered, with people interrupting, finishing each others sentences, and picking up on the previous person’s thoughts, for example.  I found Crystal’s observations about the so called rules of language to be very interesting as well.  These rules include taking turns to speak, making it clear that one wishes to speak next, interrupting only to a limited extent, and knowing when to ignore or acknowledge certain comments.  The section about different meanings and uses of politeness expressions was something I experienced in India with Hindi.  The expression for “thank you” is used far less frequently in India than in the US, I may say thank you upwards of 30 times a day.  In addition, I was never formally taught a word for “you’re welcome.”  An analogous word exists, but is so rarely used as to be inconsequential. 

I have focused primarily on my cross-cultural experiences in India, as they are most pertinent to my current language study. However, I also traveled to Peru, another substantially different culture.  I went to Peru relatively uninformed about the culture, whereas I learned quite a bit about India before I left and had a comprehensive orientation there when I arrived.  I did not know any Spanish when I was in Peru, while in India I was developing limited skills in Hindi.  These factors, in addition to the much lengthier period of time I spent in India, made my time there much more interesting and culturally engaging.  In any future travels, I will definitely plan to learn about cultural norms and at least some basic language skills for wherever I go. 

I really like this weeks reading because I could personally relate to the topic of language learning and culture as a bilingual person. At the same time it made me realize that I do know about the relationship between language and culture and its importance I just never took the time to analyze it until now. Learning the relation between language and culture is very important because learning a language is ultimately a cultural learning. By using language we maintain cultural ties, for example when I first came to school in the us my first friends were Spanish speakers because it helped me maintain my cultural ties from back home while in the US. It was also a way to find a birth connection with other people here. As times go by language clearly changes, I believe most of us wont notice because we are so involved in the language but we can notice that as some languages like Spanish and Chinese expand other languages other languages start to die like Latin. One way to tell how language changes might be to look closely at the way your mother speaks in comparison to the slang one speaks with their friends, this makes it very hard to communicate with one another, in my experience this happened to me when I came to college were although I have a few Spanish speaking friends I speak English more than Spanish as a way to integrate in the UR society which has made me lose a little my home language.

From this past weeks reading I gathered a few things. First there are far too many language families and its roots to really keep track of or remember it. Also, there are two main ways to evaluate a language and its family. Finally, one can evaluate where a language comes from based on what is not found in the vocabulary.

My first point of too many language families to keep track of is evident through Africa, which has 480 million people and over 2000 different languages. Of course many of these languages might share a commonality but overall it does not help me better understand my current language I am learning.

The two perspectives of evaluating language are genetic and typological. Genetic evaluation is a historical analysis derived from any ancestor languages. This can be traced through the Latin language, which has the romance languages that grew out of it. The other perspective is typological. In which a formal comparison of similarities found between two languages is done. This is less helpful than the genetic perspective but is nonetheless somewhat effective.

The last thing that I found very interesting was how a person studying a language can trace where it came from. For example by looking at an ancient language and noticing that the word “palm tree” is not in the language one can easily note that the language must not have originated from the Mediterranean where palm trees are normally found. Although it does not necessarily zero in on the exact location of where the language started, it can still narrow down the options through process of elimination.

Overall, I did not think this reading was very beneficial. The roots and history of a language does not help me as a language learner understand Hebrew any better. The roots of an ancient language that does not exist any more has no effect on what the present language is trying to teach me. Only studying the origins of Latin, which has the romance languages growing out of it is beneficial to know, because it does have some commonalities amongst each other.  However, knowing the other ancient families that some languages have grown out of does not help me in studying my Hebrew language. 

From my meeting with Maya I was able to learn words to describe weather as well as more than ten plus animals. After learning all of those words I was able to work on an introduction for myself about who I am, where I am from, etc. By completing this introduction I have fulfilled all of my voki requirements, but I still plan on completing more Voki’s.

For better or for worse I took spring break as a total break and didn't really do anything with my language learning.  This Monday though Maroof and I reviewed the lessons that we have been working on over the past few weeks.  We reviewed telling time, saying the date, numbers, days of the week and months of the year.  To continue learning to sound out and read words Maroof typed in words on the computer and I read them.  The words he started typing were words related to family vocabulary.  I learned that there are different words for aunt and uncle depending on whether the aunt or uncle is on the mother or father's side. 

This week's reading about the different families of languages was interesting.  For no particular reason I was interested in Korean and surprised to see that it is also spoken in Russia.  I was also surprised that Chinese and Korean share much of the same vocabulary (this also explaines how it was easy for one of my Korean friends to attend high school in China).  When I originally saw family tree of Proto Indo-European languages I kept looking for Arabic.  For some reason I assumed it would be under the same family as Persian or Pashto because they use the same alphabet.  I later found out that Arabic is classified as an African language.

Knowing the history of Farsi can help me learn it by understanding how it relates to other languages.  My only other language experience is in Spanish and English.  These languages belong to different branches of the Indo-European family so they don't really help that much but understanding that there is a common root between the three languages makes it easy to pick up on gramatical consistencies between the languages or even words that are not quite cognates, but similar.

This section of HLW helps describe and define various types of discoures.  The structure of text and linguistic interactions is important to understand.  There are conjunctive and conference relationships that help individuals draw conclusions to the various meanings of a sentence.  For example, I know that I use the conference relationship close to a million times a day when speaking.  Where there is a declarative statement in the beginning and then a series of adjectives to describe that statement.  I find these types of structures interesting because you hear a lot that you "cannot come into the middle of the conversation" because you simply do not know the subject of what they are talking about.  The subject is established in the beginning and then spoken about afterwards.

HLW even goes as far to say that conversations are a series of monologues put together to create dialogues.  In a way this has some truth to it but conversations require constant breaks and continuations to work.  This idea of turn taking came as individuals need to get a point across which required others to listen.  Furthermore, parents also play a pivotal role in teaching this idea of taking turns.  I can remember as a child how many times my parents would tell me to stop and let them finish or let my brothers finish speaking.

Usually, determining what to speak breaks down into what we want from others.  Either what it is we want them to know or do.  These are broken down into representative, directive, expressive or declarative statements.  These statements are vital to understand and relate to what it is that others want.  Again, this comes back to parents because they would always tell me to use certain statements to either get what i want or make a point.  I can distinctly remember my father always telling me to make declarative statements.... basically do not be indecisive.                              

Language families are both interesting and complex.  One can study language families through the comparative method, a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them.  This method can start with one word and branch into a tree, that links several languages together as seen on page 366. Historical relationships can be shown through trees and diagrams as well.  I found this to be the most comprehensive way to learn about families and language history.

The Indo European family is organized by comparing similar vocabulary of the languages and thus possible conclusions about the geographical origins and life styles of these people can be drawn.  The book then dives into languages ranging from albanian to Armenian to tocharian and drawing conclusions of where these languages started the the roots they were founded on.  Several other language families are found to be in or around the territory where Indo European languages are most prominent, and the book does a good job explaining these languages and forming the relationships between them.  Ultimately the book goes on and on describing languages and their history and their families and organization.  One could argue that this section of the book is boring.  I took some time to learn more about language families outside of the book.  Below are some entries in Wikipedia, they clearly expain this topic.

A language family is a group of languages related because they are descended from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term comes from the Tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. All the apparently biological terms are used only in the metaphoric sense. No real biology is included in any way in the metaphor.

Membership of languages in the same language family is established by comparative linguistics. Daughter languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship; the former term is more current in modern times, but the latter is equally as traditional.^[2] The evidence of linguistic relationship is observable shared characteristics that are not attributed to borrowing. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language (or reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing (convergence). Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations; that is, common features of those languages that are not attested in the common ancestor of the entire family. For example, what makes Germanic languages "Germanic" is that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in Proto-Indo-European. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all Germanic languages.

more about language families can be seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family

What I ultimately learned from this reading was how languages that seem so different and abstract in one way or another relate.  I never understood why Latin was such an important language to some people, its not spoken, its only written.  I actually viewed it as a waste of time, but after reading about these languages and their histories I now see why it is so important.  Languages did not just magically form, they are based on one anther, hence the importance of Latin.  As a reflective learner i think that i am pretty good.  I am not teaching myself a language, however i do take time in this class to draw comparisons and conclusions from the readings to real life and other classes.  And in that sense i believe that i am a good reflective learner. 

I really found this reading interesting because I love looking at how different languages relate.  When learning Spanish, I found that I was often comparing it to my previous knowledge of French and English.  And although the similarities seem to be less frequent in Farsi, I still enjoy learning about the it connects to other languages.  One such similarity is actually expressed in the book with the different words for father in various Indo-European languages.  Although not included as an example, the Persian word for father, pedaer, fits into the model shown. 

As explained in Cultural Post #2, Farsi is a part of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages.  For me, it's interesting to look at the other languages in this branch such as Panjabi, Bengali, or Kurdish, because I enjoy seeing which languages are closest to Farsi. 

Before this course, I never really thought about how knowing a language's history could help me to learn the language.  I never really learned language history while studying French or Spanish and now actually wonder about how it could have helped me in the process.  For me, the most helpful part about knowing the history of Persian, comes from understanding the use of borrowed words.  In learning the history, I learned about the Arabic invasion and conquest, which explains the use of many Arabic words.  I'm also thankful that the language has evolved as it has, because the older versions of Persian were actually more grammatically complicated as nouns had genders and there was a different form used for counting nouns.

Unfortunately, I didn't accomplish as much over break as I would have liked.  I did receive my new book "Spoken World Farsi" and began looking through it.  So far, I really like the way that the book works.  It's set up to be like an actual course, so I'll have to follow the chapters successively as they build on points and vocabulary learned in previous chapters.  There is also a set of cds that comes with the book.  One cd contains the spoken dialogue of the conversations that are transcribed in the book.  This way I can either follow along in the book as I read, or, as I get better I can test myself by just listening to the dialogues.  There is also another cd that is used for "on the go" learning.  This cd contains lessons that are spoken aloud so that I can learn when I'm in the car or at the gym, which is perfect for me as I've had a hard time scheduling time to practice my Farsi.  For the most part, the book contains lessons that are a part of my learning plan so I'm really looking forward to putting this to use. 

Over the break, I also developed new inspiration for learning Farsi.  As I'd previously stated, I wanted to learn the language because I was interested in working for an agency (governmental or non) that would do international work.  I wasn't quite sure about this though, and although I'm in school now and learning, I wasn't sure if this would continue to inspire me to learn Farsi after graduation.  I was recently accepted into a graduate program for conflict analysis and resolution and because of this I know that I should definitely stay devoted to my Farsi studies, as this language skill will be very useful in my future profession. 

The language I was learning in the classroom was Standard Bangla, the form that is written down and spoken formally.  In Kolkata, India, this form of the language is used exclusively.  But as mentioned before, Bangladesh has created their own dialect of the language.  What is incredible is that some of the sounds they speak (like the “z” sound), do not even have a corresponding character in their alphabet.

On top of this complexity, local dialects exist within Bangladesh.  Supposedly Chittagongian Bangla is quite different than Dhaka Bangla.  Also many of the indigenous languages are now forming hybrids with Bangla, so that for example I could understand about half of what was said in the indigenous Chakma language. 

Suffice to say, in Bangladesh the line between separate languages and dialects is blurred.  The only way to really learn to language is to speak it with nationals.  Good thing that was my goal anyway.

Cultural competence is a tricky issue.  I think the key is being self-aware of how often we behave a certain way because of our cultural background.  Also being willing to be flexible, and laugh at yourself helps a ton.  I wish to develop this skill more because I know how important this is to effectively communicate even when the language can be fluently spoken.  The old saying “actions speak louder than words” is often more true than we would like to admit. 

Now sometimes to go a mere three miles in the city, it can take well over an hour.  Many people in the government are looking at different ways such as a subway system to overcome this problem, which immobilizes much of the city. 

Unfortunately the increase in people in Dhaka has also increased the size of the slums, extremely unsafe places to live.  It will be interesting to see how the government addresses these problems in the near future. 

Much of the information for this post was obtained from this article: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20015798-503543.html

One thing I particularly liked about Bangladeshi culture was eating with your hands.  Although you can find flatware, the average Bangladeshis will eat most of their meals with their hands, or more correctly their right hand.  The left hand is traditionally used to “wipe” and is generally considered unclean.  Therefore while eating, the left hand is usually kept beneath the table. 

A response I heard to why they use their hand was “Why let anything get between you and your food?”  Their logic makes sense to me.  Now back in the States I constantly have to resist the urge to eat without my utensils. 

More and more though, eating with utensils is becoming a status symbol, so many of the upper class now have them for guests. 

There is not much to reflect on in this section since Crystal simply goes through all the different families of language from region to region.  The fact that linguists, scientists and archaeologists have been able to piece together a Proto-Indo-European language simply by comparing the sister languages together is remarkable.  It is also fascinating to learn that Bengali is in some ancient way related to Spanish.  A couple of interesting facts that I found while reading Crystals descriptions of all the languages: 1. No one knows where the Austro-Asiatic languages came from and when the people migrated to that region. 2. Korean is related to Altaic i.e. Turkish?? There are over 650 languages spoken in New Guinea.  That would be as if "Britain, one third of the size, would find itself containing nearly 200 languages, separated from each other by distances of only twenty miles" (395). 

As I posted earlier under my cultural posts, knowing the history of any language that one is learning is essential.  It helps one to understand why certain events are tied to that language.  If I had no knowledge of the history of the Turkish language, I would be confused as to why the Uyghurs in Western China have such a connection with the present day Republic of Turkey.  It is because they are connected through ethnic and linguistic ties.  Also, knowing that Ottoman Turkish had lots of Arabic words as well as Arabic influence will help one to understand why some words are pronounced the way they are. 

This has probably been my favorite section so far.  First off, I had no idea that there were so many language.  Second off, I had no idea that they were dying so quickly!  I love language and I think that the need to save dying languages is not only worthwhile but necessary.  Crystal says, "Language death is like no other form of disappearance.  When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, artefacts - in a word, their archaeology.  But spoken language leaves no archaeology.  When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been" (342).  Languages also help to define cultures so when a language dies it brings a culture with it. 

I also find the development of pidgin languages to be fascinating because they can essentially be created anywhere between any two languages AND if they are used enough for a long period they can actually turn into another language i.e. creole language.  However, as Crystal explains, pidgin languages develop out of necessity and when they are no longer needed (for bargaining, trading etc) they will die out.  There are two interesting things about creole and pidgin languages.  1. Pidgin/creole languages reflect the basic preferences in human language.  In a sense, they are the most simplified forms of language and by analyzing them we can find out just how much we can simplify a language and still considerate a legitimate form of communication.  What are the bare necessities of any language? Verbs? Nouns? Grammar?  2. This is just an interesting fact: Most all pidgin languages have traces of Portuguese.  Even, "early accounts of Chinese pidgin refer to mixed dialect of English and Portuguese" (348). 

Finally, how did language begin? Now one knows.  Why does language change? No one knows.  When does languages change? It is unpredictable.  We may be able to link thousands of languages together. Study them, analyze them and teach them.  However, in agreement with Crystal, I doubt that we will ever know the answer to these three questions.  People have lots of theories about how language began but to be able to pinpoint the exact time and location that language, as we know it, came into being is an impossible task. 

In this section of reading, we looked at, very generally speaking, reading and writing.  What's interesting to me is how different writing is from speaking.  Apart from the obvious differences, Crystal makes a point of showing just how divided language and speech actually are.  Spelling, abbreviations, capital letters, special symbols, punctuation and spatial organization are some of the ways in which writing separates itself from speech.  Just as we have phonemes, we also have graphemes e.g. <c>, <b> or <?>.  There are twenty six graphemes that makes up the alphabet in the English language along with many other special symbols.  Looking at the charts, it is intriguing to see how pictograms slowly developed into symbols and then letters.  I also find it fascinating how many similarities there are between the older languages.  Looking at the chart on page 114, we can see that from starting with Phoenician and going to Greek, almost all the languages in between have at least one similar character with another language in that group. 

I always thought that reading was a mixture of both sight and speech.  I did not know that there was a debate surrounding the two.  I think that to say reading it done exclusively by sight or exclusively by speech is incorrect.  Crystal makes legitimate points arguing for and against each view and I don't see why it is such a problem to simply say that they both contribute to reading.  Crystal makes the point that if we come across a word we have never seen before, we will most likely sound it out before continuing to read; however, I find that if someone is really trying to concentrate on reading a magazine, for example, they will whisper out every word.  If two strangers start a conversation near me while I'm reading a book, I will begin to sound out each word rapidly while I read to hold my concentration.  The again, maybe that's just ADD. 

Learning how to read and write are two giant tasks for young children.  When this is hampered by a disability it makes the process excruciating.  I found the topic of dyslexia towards the end of the reading quite interesting.  I have know what dyslexia was since I was young because my cousin has it.  I never really understood what it was other than that she lots of trouble reading.  After reading through the different types presented by Crystal, I know realize how serious of a problem it can be.  yet, what is there to be done about it.  How do we determine if someone actually has dyslexia or whether their intelligence level is simply lower and what treatments are there, if any?

In the last section, Crystal talks about the computer-mediated communication medium (CMC).  This book was written in 2005 and since then, CMC has developed exponentially.  I think that Crystal's analysis of CMC as a mixture of both speech and writing is correct.  He also classifies it as "a new species of communication."  I thought that speaking a writing were pretty much it but we truly have entered a new stage of communication.  Netspeak, texting, email etc.  These all represent a brand new form of communication and will shape new generations.  Any baby born after 2000 will more technological apt than any kid born in the 90's by leaps and bounds.  It will be interesting to see how CMC evolves in the next decade. 

I have not done an artifact yet but I do like the idea of using a Voki if I can figure it out.  Possibly reading from a children's book so I can document my progress on pronunciation. 

While reading this I tried applying some of the definitions to my culture and the Turkish culture.  I found that the American culture tends to be individualist, monochronic, internal and indirect.  My reasoning for this is that most children in America, since day one, has been taught that they are 'special' and can achieve anything (the American Dream).  This puts there locus of control within them.  Americans are constantly trying to find ways to make themselves different.  Personalizing this or that.  We have so many classifications of different types of alternative rock (kind of redundant) that I don't even know what the hell I'm listening to sometimes.  Until the announcer comes on and tells me that what I just heard belongs to the alternative/indie/electronica/dance genre.  Phew, thank god we got that cleared up.  In American culture, time is money making us monochronic.  We are work-a-holics.  Finally, we subscribe to an indirect method of communication because we don't really like confrontation.  I would not say this is due to high amounts of non-verbal communication, although this does play a role in American communication. Our current foreign policies may point to the contrary but peace over violence is the norm in America. 

It was a bit difficult for me to determine the 'settings', if you will, for Turkey.  I found it to be a mix of individualist and collectivist.  In Turkey, the family is very important.  The further East you go, the truer this is.  Acting against the family or openly defying a parental command is not as common in Turkey as it is in the States.  However, most young adults, when they are outside the family, act very individualistic.  From my experience, the males tend to behave more individually than the females.  Turks view of time is polychronic.  Nothing is on time and stores will close whenever they feel like it.  Classes started on time but teachers ran them however long or short they wanted to.  As far as communication is concerned, Turks are direct, very direct.  They tend to get close to you when speaking and get straight to the point.  Whether their locus of control is internal or external I do not know.  I heard the word "Inşallah" almost 5 times a day when I was there (it means, "God willing" e.g. Inşallah, we'll get my car out of the snow).  This makes me think that the locus of control may be more externally located but the use of "Inşallah" does not mean I can label Turks as external.  Perhaps professor grove would like to comment?

This article teaches us that there is much to learning a language than just vocabulary, grammar and syntax.  Body language and gestures, facial expressions, direct or indirect language, volume and distance when speaking and many other things must all be taken into account when learning another language.  The cultural dimensions of a language are just as important as the technical dimensions.  Knowing all the verbs, tons of vocab and the grammar rules is great but without understanding how they fit and are used within the culture, you're still only half way there. 

In this section, we learn the difference between phonetics and phonology.  This acted mostly as a refresher for me because of my previous experience with linguistics but it was nevertheless interesting.  Most people don't realize just how many sounds exist in the English language.  Most people feel that [a] [e] and [i] are pronounced the way that we see them.  However, if we take the word "begin" and compare it with "the", the pronunciation of [e] in both cases varies considerably.  It is also important to note that no two languages have the same tones.  Another interesting finding that crystal makes is just how important stress is.  For example, the word hot dog.  Place stress on 'hot' and we're talking about something you eat, but place stress on 'dog' and we're talking about a dog that is literally hot. 

I think that learning about about phonetics, phonology, stress, tone etc helps me to understand how and why certain languages develop.  It also allows me to appreciate the complexity of language much more.  I find phonology particularly interesting because a person who has no experience with Hindi, for example, can, through phonological tests (like minimal pairs testing), find out which language units are phonemes and how certain sounds are organized in the Hindi language. 

I think it is important to know how language develops in a baby but this section was pretty bland.  The one question I would ask Crystal is: What babies did he study or what studies did he draw on for his research?  Where they English babies? American babies?  What about how a Chinese or Indian baby develops its vocal tracts? Do they [ga] and [gu] when it reaches the babbling stage or do they make different sounds?  The one thing that I thought was interesting from this section was that if you try and talk to a baby in the way that it talks to you, it won't understand you e.g. the "fis phenomenon."  Perhaps when I have kids, and I hope that day does not come soon, I will open up this book and and browse through this section so I can know what to expect.