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This week, I adjusted my learning goal to include writing a Korean cover letter. Lately, my job applications have been required a cover letter in Korean rather than English. Therefore, I spent most of this week learning how to write one and then writing one. This process has actually been a culmination of all my efforts this semester since it has required me to talk about myself in great detail (in past, present, and future tense), with great use of form and style, and attention to cultural norms and standards. The process has been, in a way, emblematic of my whole Korean learning journey. I have had to combine a lot of disparate knowledge together to make a cover letter. A task that would take easily 20-30 minutes to do in English.

Once I finished writing my cover letter, I sent it to two Korean friends to edit and provide feedback. Currently I am waiting to receive my feedback but I am proud that I was able to write my cover letter in any way shape or form.

I found the readings this week especially interesting because I am bilingual. It felt like these readings offered a little speak at my own brain. I mostly consider my bilingualism between English and Croatian since I speak in those languages more than I speak in German or Korean. While I agreed with many of the points that the articles brought up, especially the points regarding focus, there were many that I disagreed with. For example, one researcher stated that bilingual speakers can completely block one language when speaking in another. I think this is pretty incorrect. Of course, there is the basic ability to suppress the other language but I still slip and use the wrong language. This is especially true when I am just starting speaking after being stopped for a while. In the flow of a conversation, my brain is able to "warm up" in the same way a car does so that I can easily flow in one language. But often in the beginning or when having sudden bursts of speech, the ability to suppress is much lower. 

I think the greatest benefits for speaking two (or more) languages are increased focus and a framework for other languages. Since bilingual people have to constantly make a choice between languages, there is a much higher level of focus. I have seen these in between my friends. I feel that my bilingual friends tend to pay more attention and engage more than my monolingual friends. Furthermore, all the languages I've learned have made it easier to experience and learn new languages. My biggest benefit has not be in grammar but in pronunciation. Since I usually use a wide variety of sounds, my accent tends to not be strong when learning new languages because I am more accustomed to the sounds they may use.

First Artifact

I talk about my trip back home using the present continuous tense and connectors. I feel my pronunciationArtifact%201.mp3 has really improved and I am able to speak longer on one topic. 

Bi-weekly reflection

This week I reviewed present continuous tense. This semester I am really focusing on using the verb tenses to expand my conversational skills. I did a lot of exercises in my Istanbul Turkish book and practiced them in conversation with my language partner. In our conversation, I had questions about how to say certain words. I love how organic and natural my questions were. I was asking how to say words relevant to our conversation rather than memorizing a vocabulary list and only using those words. I have learned how to say "my boyfriend and I went to a winery and drank wine" and I asked questions about her boyfriend. I love that I'm learning how to say things that friends actually talk about, which is such a different experience than a textbook based, traditional classroom setting. I will review past tense next week.

This week rather than learning more material I would like to review what I have learned so far. I will practice my vocabulary and review more soccer vocabulary. I will also attempt to look into how what I have learned has also contributed to learning about Portuguese culture. 

Why are bilinguals smarter? Well one of the articles claims that bilinguals are smarter because when they see an object they dont instantly see the objects name in one language. Rather they have to decide which language they would like to call the object in. This means that the person has more neural pathways, which means that the person probably has a higher neural plasticity. This shows that even though one may only be using one language the user has both languages going at once. Having the ability to comprehend in both languages also improves ones brain's executive function. 

I think progress is going well. After actually starting the bi-weekly meetings with my language partner and doing exercises, I realized that my learning plan has to updated to more vocabulary centered goals. I am far from being proficient in the Korean language in terms of vocabulary and reading. I was really disappointed with my reading skills because I used to be decent with my reading and had no trouble smoothly transitioning from word to word. Now I tend to stutter or have trouble pronouncing some words. I think our reading exercises have been great because I am learning new vocabulary, the spelling and pronunciation  of the words, and meanings that go beyond what it says on the surface layer. I have really enjoyed the historical lessons that Joora, our language partner, provided us in our classes because it is one of the few times that I learned about Korea's history. There is a lot I don't know about the history so the more I uncover the more I feel closer to Korean culture. Overall, I think I should focus on the smaller goals that have more depth to them than just learning how to do some basic interaction.  

I was curious about the student life in Korea, so I decided to do some research on this topic. In Korea, the average high school student has class from about 8am until 9:30pm or 10pm. The reason for this insane amount of school hours is because the competition to get into a good college is very high. Since everyone is working this hard, everyone has to try as hard. On top of that, many students attend hagwons which are private after school learning programs. These programs help reinforce higher education and English skills. As a result of these hagwons and long school hours, the average teenager doesn;t get home until midnight and dinner is served at school. There is also school on Saturdays. I feel blessed to have been a part of the American education system throughout my entire life after learning about what Korean students have to go through. Even in college, my studies aren't as rigorous as these high school students, which isn't something to brag. I think Korean shouldn't push so hard on these students because I also learned that because of the immense pressure of having to get good grades and go to a good college, some students commit suicide because they fail to do so.  I think this is pretty depressing and something should be done to prevent this action.

For the past two weeks we have been going over more vocabulary that is a bit more advanced and can be helpful for practical situations. For example, we went over how we can answer interview questions. We learned vocabulary that related to my major and the extra curricular activities that I participate in. We learned how I can present all these in a coherent way and we practiced formal interactions with what I just learned. Since I plan on going to Korea for the spring semester next year we also went over vocabulary relating to tourism. I think this learning activity could be useful for anyone trying to go to Korea as a tourist so I will be using this activity to teach someone a lesson. My learning partner had found a Korean website that already had translations for common phrases and words relating to tourism, so it made it easier to find what could be helpful to know. It was well organized into categories so we could nitpick exactly what we wanted to learn. We learned phrases relating to interactions that dealt with making purchases, learning how to navigate around, and where I can find information that would be helpful for a oblivious tourist lost in a unknown place. Overall, everything we learned these past few weeks were very helpful and practical which I really liked.

For the past two we went over a brief period of Korean history when Korea was taken over by Japan. This was really interesting to learn because I don't really know much about Korean history at all and it is a difficult topic to discuss with my parents or grandparents because of the communication barrier. We watched videos on YouTube on a channel of a Korean guy who discusses the history of Korea and the important people who were crucial to the specific events. Unfortunately, there were no subtitles so that made understanding the videos a bit difficult. However, I think it was good practice to try to keep up with more sophisticated vocabulary and our learning partner, Joora, was there to help translate and explain what was being said.  

We switched learning partners to Joora so Jacob and I explained where we were in terms of proficiency in Korean. We explained our learning plans so that she can incorporate some lessons relating to what we wanted to learn. For the past two weeks we reviewed basic aspects of the language to get a good review before adding newer material. For one of the weeks we basically just went over the Korean alphabet to refresh our memories on the language. We focused on vocabulary related exercises because this is an important part of the language that I have some trouble with. We did some practice by spelling out some difficult words. We discussed Korean vocabulary that we usually found difficult to spell. She explained why things were spelled a specific way and some tips that could help guide us in spelling correctly. I realize my vocabulary is very weak, so I hope to expand my abilities.

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For my third artifact, I am including a reading exercise I did with my language partner. Basically, I read a story in Korean, annotated the story as went along, reviewed my understanding with my language partner, and then wrote down the unfamiliar words and sentences in my notebook. This exercise has been effective for me and I now repeat it weekly.

This week, my goal was to have a conversation with one of my friends in Korean. To prepare for my conversations, I wrote down a few things I wanted to talk to her about and a few terms I wanted to try using. While talking to my friend on the phone, I could easily understand her but I felt that my responses were shaky, messy, and a bit too slow. It was definitley not a smooth conversation on my end. I think this activity was good because it showed me that I do need more practice in speaking and that my writing ability does not translate perfectly into my speaking ability. Overall, the conversation lasted about 5 minutes until I ran out of things I wanted to talk to her about. At the end, my friend said that she felt I made progress since when she watched me learning Korean at Yonsei.

Within the past week, I purchased a vocabulary building supplement from Yonsei so I changed my goal for the week so that it would include this supplement. Since lately I have been focusing on grammar only, I feel as if I have not done much to improve my vocabulary. This supplement from Yonsei introduces vocabulary by themes, shows how they can be used, and then offers practice materials per chapter. So my goal for this week was to complete the first chapter within the book and use it to create new sentences with the grammar points I've been learning over the past few weeks.

So far, I have learned maybe around 500-700 words in my language. Maybe more, I'm not quite sure. However, I have reached the level where I can usually contextualize unfamiliar words with the words around them, which was quite a big step for me. I learned them mostly by learning first through themes (weather, food, sports, etc.) and then by reading. Reading was a big step because it takes constant reading to feel an impact but the impact can be seen after a few reading. Furthermore, reading is helpful because it shows you what verbs are typically used with which nouns and vice versa. Similar to English, Korean has it's own patterns and rhythms, which are not revealed to you by studying just basic vocabulary lists. Furthermore, I have studied by learning phrases and complete sentences. I feel that my acquisition of vocab is far behind my understanding of grammar so I still have room for improvement. The most important part of vocabulary is memorization and utilization but lately I have been slacking on both by simply compiling lists of words without reviewing them or using them. 

In my opinion, the greatest loss is the loss of culture. Not only do you lose a form of expression in a culture, but you lose the ability to engage with that culture in the future. For example, you can't contextualize artifacts from that culture or understand remaining texts. Furthermore, this loss impacts direct descendants from that culture more than others. By losing their culture and their ability to engage with it, descendants can feel as if they lost a piece of themselves. This is exactly why many people learn languages because they have family members or descendants who speak those languages. People often learn languages in order to feel closer to family members and closer to their own backgrounds. I can say that was the motivation for me to improve my Croatian and German.

My goals for these past two weeks were to:

• A) Do half of Unit 8: Daily Activities, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture;
• B) Continue reading Indonesian comic books, sourced from the internet; and
• C) Use Bahasakita.com (our language), an online resource, to learn the particles "Sih," "Nah," "Nih," "Tuh," "Kan," "Kok," "Deh," "Kek," and "Yuk." These particles are often used in informal contexts and are a part of the colloquial language. 
• D) Meet with my partner for four hours

Strategies to accomplish these goals:

• A) I am halfway done Unit 8: Daily Actives / Hobbies. 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 units' activities. I have amassed a large vocabulary pertaining to the topics that will prove useful in daily conversations. The unit's goals are to learn about the "behavior" of animals and humans (The word "behavior" in Bahasa Indonesia is used to indicate daily activities / hobbies.); To give information about the behavior of humans and animals; to ask for information about the behavior of humans and animals; to give information about objects' functions (think stove, etc.); and to ask for information about objects' functions. 

• B) I continued to read 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.
• These past two weeks, I have used the website Bahasakita.com to learn more about colloquial language. I learned about particles such as "Sih," which is attached to the end of a word to add emphasis and or annoyance and "Kok," which, if used at the beginning of a sentence, becomes "How come ...?" 
• 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.

http://www.bahasakita.com ;

This week my goal is to further my knowledge about soccer in Portuguese. I did this by focusing my weeks practice on soccer. Rather than duolingo this week I looked at a soccer in Portuguese term sheet. I memorized most of the terms on that sheet simply by practicing throughout the week. Other that I watched another soccer game in Portuguese. I found that this time around I was able to decipher a little more what the commentators were speaking about, but I still do not have full understanding.