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My learning goal is to know how to invite someone to do something with me because it is a very common sentence structure to use in daily life.

For my fourth artifact, I watched a YouTube video to use a k-pop song to teach my grammar. It taught me how to ask for someone's intention, such as "do you want to ... with me?".  It appeared couple times in the song.  

To ask for someone's intention, "rae yo" (want to) is added to the end of the sentence.  She also talked about how "rae you" is applied in the song. She explained the usage of "rae yo" very clear. She explained that when the verb in front of "rae yo" has no ending sound, it has to change form.  

For example, to ask someone if he/she wants to have coffee with you is “coffee ma sil rae yo?” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9yVyw0VU0&t=118s

My Learning goals for this week are a continuation of last weeks, which is to continue reviewing the material I've learned and work on mastering these topics in preparation for the review. Recently I have been going over the Korean number system again as I'm still a little confused about when you should use the Traditional number system and when you should use the Chinese based number system. This also includes reviewing topics like talking about the time and introductions. Throughout the week I hope to do some review of the grammatical structures I have learned and also continue learning how to talk about my day. Last week I reviewed topics like introductions and food related vocabulary.

In Matter’s article “Why bilinguals Are Smarter”, he talks about there are fundamental benefits for bilingualism – being smart. Being bilingual has positive effect on the brain, and can improve cognitive skills even not related to speak language.  The reason is that bilingual’s brain has both languages active. When two languages are working at the same time in the brain, it helped the brain to resolve internal conflict, just like a workout for the brain.  The experiment of asking bilingual and monolingual children to sort blue circles and red squares showed that bilingual children are faster and more accurate in performing the task. I agree all the benefits for being a bilingual.  However, there were also concerns over training kids to be bilingual at very young age.  Because they are receiving double the information, they might be slower than monolingual in learning the one particular language because other kids put all attention into learning one language and can practice more. 

SDLC 105 Reflection Paper #3:

Post Final Reflection Paper (500 words):

Reflect on your learning experiences this semester.

(a) What insights have you gained about yourself as a language learner and cultural explorer?  What did you find difficult?  What have you enjoyed?  How will you continue your learning?

(b) Which readings and learning activities did you find most useful?  What would you like to learn more about?

This has been an enlightening semester in terms of learning Korean. I learned that I need to improve my habits as a language learner. I thought that because I already knew some Korean, I would become advanced by the time the semester ended. I believed that I would just have to practice a few phrases here and there, but I would be good enough to be considered fluent. However, after practicing for a semester, I realized that it takes a lot more practice than I thought: something that shocked me. In terms of being a cultural explorer, I found myself more interested in Korean culture than I thought I would be. As I am from Los Angeles, a city with a large Korean population, I thought I knew everything there was about Korean culture. However, I realized that there were so many aspects of Korean culture that I did not know. I found myself researching about the culture on Google and talking about the news in great depth with my language class. Once someone who shunned Korean culture, I now find myself being more open to it, and I am even considering studying abroad in South Korea to immerse myself into the culture even more. My most favorite thing about learning Korean this semester was being exposed to a new side of Korea that I never saw before. I learned about cool places to visit in Korea, new dishes to try, new vocabulary words that do not exist in English, and more. However, this learning was also accompanied with many difficulties. The most challenging thing about learning Korean was conditioning myself to not skip syllables as I normally do when I speak Korean with my parents. As it has been a habit for many years, teaching myself to pronounce the whole word instead of skipping some syllables has been challenging me to rewire the way I knew the Korean language. I plan to continue learning by continuing to speak with my mom in Korean. We often speak in a Korean-English mixture, but I am going to strive to speak in only Korean when I can. I also am going to continue listening to Korean music and read the Korean and English lyrics along with the music. I found that it was beneficial for me, in terms of learning new vocabulary words and pronouncing words correctly.

I found the readings about the dying language of Siletz Dee-Ni interesting. I did not realize how important languages are to the world. Languages are accompanied by perspectives to view the world with, cultural values, and long-standing traditions that are so important to the speakers of the language. Languages are often seen as just a way to communicate with others. However, this article made me realize that so much is tied to the language. It made me more eager to learn languages that are endangered. I liked the learning activity in class where we taught our peers something about our language. It allowed us to get creative with teaching, and it also allowed our peers to be exposed to our language and its cultural aspects. I would like to learn more about how my peers’ languages’ cultures differ from America’s culture. Oftentimes, we believe that everyone else in the world is the same as us. I would like to learn more about which aspects different countries differ from us in and why that is.

• Reflect on your experiences of (trying to) read and write in your target language.

While I initially thought that learning to read and write Korean would be one of the hardest parts of learning the language, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Korean was not the complex character based language that I had originally expected. The Korean alphabet is surprisingly simple and intuitive and I have really enjoyed learning it. The competitions my language partner holds have been really helpful for cementing my understanding of the basics of the alphabet. However, as I learned more Korean I came to realize that there are some strange rules that come into play on rare occasions. I'll see radicals in strange positions in characters or complex arrangements of characters that work together to create new sounds and I won't know how to interpret them. There are also many situations where slang in Korea distorts characters into new words which are hard to decipher. Overall I have found the Korean alphabet to be easy to learn but hard to master.

• Response to the readings on whether or not learning another language makes you smarter

While I thought that both articles on the effects of bilingualism on human intelligence were interesting, I found the second article, "Are Bilinguals really smarter," to have more of a foundation in science. As stated in the second article, when discussing the benefits of bilingualism it is important to define what you mean by intelligence. Personally I think Ossola's definition of intelligence as the ability for a person to absorb and apply information is rather limited. I believe that there are different types of intelligence and that while learning another language may provide an advantage in areas like executive function and decision making, it likely also introduces weaknesses in other areas.

• How many new words have you learned in your target language?  How did you learn them?  Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?
  

It is hard to gauge how many new words I have learned in Korean because many of the words I have learned are part of phrases like 안녕하세요, where I know that 안녕 means hello and that the phrase overall means hello more formally, but I don't exactly know what 하세요 means. In general I have learned vocabulary relating to the following subjects: food, family, directions, introductions, greetings, farewells, professions, school, time, numbers, relationships, and basic conversational vocabulary, in addition to a foundation of Korean grammar and some random phrases. As far as learning new vocabulary I found meeting with my language partner to be the most helpful and effective. I also studied the character sheets  we were given and used websites like quizlet to practice. One surprisingly effective tool for acquiring new vocabulary was watching Korean Dramas, as you pick up a lot of commonly used phrases and words. My goals are still to be able to watch part of a Korean drama and be able to understand what the people are saying, as well as to be able to hold a basic conversation with a native speaker. While I may have to re-watch the scene a couple times I think it is still a reasonable goal to have.

After researching on different aspects of the Korean culture, I found that the main factors that affect Korean culture is respect and nationalism. First, in regards to respect, researching on their clothing I found that they have these specific traditional clothing for respect for celebrations and events. This formal wear guarantees that people are dressed appropriately. For nationalism, it is also true even in clothing because even in the modern age people are wearing the hanbok. For instance, there is a designer that revolutionized the hanbok for more everyday look. 

My goal was to have a fifteen minute conversation without resorting to English. Though it was difficult and I did experience moments where I resorted to English, I tried my best to use Korean whenever possible.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0hAeQoTMsoH

My goal was to have a fifteen minute conversation without resorting to English. Though it was difficult and I did experience moments where I resorted to English, I tried my best to use Korean whenever possible.

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0hAeQoTMsoH

Introduce yourself and your family

http://vocaroo.com/i/s1R2U5AR8Nts

For this cultural presentation, Joora and I worked together to present on the topic of the transition between Ottoman Turkish and Modern Turkish. I learned that Ottoman Turkish was a language of the elite that used the Arabic alphabet and borrowed most of its words from Persian and Arabic. I was also interested in learning the history of the transition between the two languages which we talked about in our presentation. Basically, the first president of Turkey declared that he wanted to secularized the country and one of the biggest reforms was that he was going to make a new Modern Turkish that used a western, Latin alphabet and more exclusively Turkish words rather than Persian and Arabic words. They started by outlawing the use of Arabic number and then later the whole alphabet. They had scholars go around the country to teach the people of Turkey this essentially new language since now they had an entire country that was illiterate. 

The writing system in Turkish is in the Latin alphabet. This is part of the reason I chose Turkish in the first place. As my third language and the only one I didn't learn as a small child, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to learn a third language or that it would be significantly more difficult. By choosing a language that uses a Latin alphabet, I gave myself a better chance because I didn't have to learn a whole other writing system. What I didn't know was the modern Turkish also uses suffixes which means that it is a language that basically just uses building blocks to contract sentences and phrases. I also learned that Ottoman Turkish used to use the Arabic alphabet which would have been really really hard for me to learn in one semester.

I think that my first artifact was a great demonstration of the phrases we learned so far. I liked that I got to do a video with other people, it made it easier to use all the phrases together in conversation. In terms of meeting my goals for weeks 4 and 5, I am glad that we started to use more phrases in class because now I can incorporate the words I have started learning on my own. Although what I am learning on my own and what we are learning in class doesn't always line up. 

In weeks four and five, I would like to continue to bolster my vocabulary. I am still working through the First Words section of the uTalk app and will continue to do this. I like this app so much because even though all of the words are pretty basic and cannot really be used to make real sentences, they are still useful words rather than Duolingo which I find teaches you random words like "Apple" first which are not as practical. I'm using this app to learn but also to help me with my recall. I plan to use the games to work on my recall. I also hope that between this week and next week I can become more consistent in my practice rather than doing big chunks at random times. 

My first topic of culture is Turkish raki. Raki is a liquor that is a traditional drink of Turkish culture. While Turkey has long been a secular state, the new government which is much more conservative and religious is trying to diminish the presence of alcohol in Turkish society by taxing it heavily and making it expensive to drink. However, raki is seen not just as a drink but as a tradition or custom of Turkish society. The tradition of drinking raki is mostly about the conversations you have around the table while drinking this drink with family and close friends. Some instances in which you might drink raki are: a new birth in the family, a wedding, a promotion, a bout of hard times, or even just after a long day at work. I think the importance of raki is that it brings people together to talk about and reflect on life, share advice and be a part of each others' lives. 

SDLAP_learningplan213.docx

In this learning plan, I think I outline realistic goals of what I want to accomplish. For the most part, my goals are related to basic interactions between me and someone else. Directions, ordering and interacting with shopkeepers are my main goals since I think my Turkish would best serve me in a traveling setting. I hope that my focus on certain topical areas doesn't limit my vocabulary too much but i think that is just something to be aware of. 

The hardest part of trying to write in Turkish is not knowing which vowels are making the sounds I am hearing. For the most part I can get very close to the correct spelling as Turkish is a very straight-forward language phonetically speaking, however, I often confuse vowels for one another. To me, this seem like I am pretty close to writing the correct word but I realize that switching a vowel (like in English or in Spanish) could mean an entirely different word. In terms of reading the language, I find that Turkish is really easy to sound out. Sometimes it is hard to string together all of the sounds together to make it sound like all one word, but with a few rounds of practice I can usually get the whole word down. I just don't know if the way I would say the word would be distinguishable to a native speaker.

In the two readings from this week, they discussed the idea that being bilingual may or may not make you "smarter". The New York Times article outlines that the ability to switch between tasks or to stay focused on a singular tasks and ignore distractions because of practice the brain has doing this between multiple languages. The second article also agrees that bilinguals do show higher executive functions, however, that does not make them smarter necessarily. Mostly this second article clarifies that the term "smarter" does not qualify or disqualify certain cognitive abilities acquired by being bilingual. 

For my next cultural post, I did research on the creation of the Korean language. Koreans did not always have their own language, but used Hanja, which was Chinese. There were many problem because of this. For example, the Chinese characters were too complicated for the common people to learn and understand. Using the language meant you were in the upper class and it was generally used by the educated. Another problem was that since the Chinese script was of foreign origin, Koreans were unable to fully express their Korean cultural thoughts and spoken language. The common people who had complaints had no way of submitting grievances. They were also unable to record agricultural wisdoms that were gained over the years. As a result, King Sejong, the king during the Choson Dynasty (1393 - 1910), created the Korean language called Hangul. It was very easy to learn so the problems that existed with the common people began to dissipate. It is apparently so accessible that a foreigner can gain a working knowledge of Hangul after one or two hours of intensive studying. It even allowed children who were around 2 or 3 to be able to express themselves which was considered a rare phenomena throughout the world.