Blogs

I thought this particular artifact would be interesting to my classmates. This semester, as a part of Asian Heritage month, I worked really really hard to learn several Indian dances. I joined the Bollywood Jhaktas (an on campus South Asian dance group) and learned some awesome dance moves. I practiced with them for three weeks as a part of a co-ed dance. It was a great time and during every single practice I spoke Gujarati with another dancer named Jay Tekwani. Talking with him was a great experience for me because he isn't my language partner, so he was able to give me constructive feedback on my new language skills and he also taught me new words and slang! Enjoy the video. Bright colored Saris and Kurtas (that we are wearing) as well as high energy and happy music are such integral parts of Gujarati culture. Gujaratis are well known for being an exciting and enthusiastic culture that stands out. By the way, I'm wearing a black kurta (loose falling shirt for South Asian male) and bright purple dupatta (long multipurpose scarf for males and females to wear). Enjoy!

The%20cuisine%20of%20Gujarat.pptx

photo.JPG

This particular artifact shows the breakdown of Gujarati letters with matras, but also broken down into my mastered and "need to work on" areas

In China, people glue couplets on wall to celebrate Chinese New Year. Couplet is written on red paper, and it has to be written in traditional Chinese. The text of couplet is usually traditional poem and contains best wishes and hope to the next year.  I glued this one on the door frame of my home. It was written by a family friend.

I also wrote some couplets by myself. Here is one.

How well did you achieve your goals? What were the stumbling blocks you encountered? How were you able to overcome them? What was most/least interesting to you? What would you like to do next?

Learning the alphabet was relatively easy. I did not have a problem with the pronunciation of the letters at all. I just needed to write them down several time to memorize what they look like. There are certain sounds that can be made by more than one letter, and there are also letters that can be pronounced in more than one way. Unfortunately, most of the time there is no way to tell which pronunciation to use. It only comes with experience.

As far as greetings and farewells, I learned a few words that are most popular among the younger generations in Israel. I made my first artifact using my knowledge from this task, which was the artifact with the two babies meeting and greeting each other. This is my favorite artifact.

Introducing myself and my family was one of my favorite tasks. I was very excited about making the video to document it. The challenging part with this task and the artifact was forming the sentences on my own. I had to use the online dictionary to search for some verbs, while my language partner helped me learn the family words.

Learning the numbers was slightly challenging only because the masculine/feminine is reversed in comparison to other words. While you usually add the ending “-a” to refer to feminine adjectives, with numbers it is the opposite. I recited the numbers to myself at least once a day, in both the masculine and feminine way. Learning how to tell the time was easy since I only learned how to say “quarter past”, “quarter till”, and “half past”.

Learning grammar was a secondary task that replaced my original task about soccer. This task was especially challenging because of the different conjugation per pronoun. I still did not completely master the different tenses, especially the future tense. I feel a lot more comfortable about it now since I started reading the book I borrowed from the global studio and that helped me a lot. My language partner helped me translate while I tried to recognize the verb tenses based on the conjugation.

I did not enjoy learning my other tasks much. I only learned them because I wanted to finish my ten learning tasks. I believe that the reason behind this is once I started reading from the book, I realized that I enjoy reading and translating more than learning tasks. This became an issue since I lost interest in learning these tasks. My least favorite of those tasks was learning how to use the phone, especially because I do not think I will ever need to make a phone call in Hebrew. This was a big roadblock in my way of learning. I had to rethink my way of learning because I was no longer curious about learning those tasks. I started to ask my language partner to give me words related to the task, and as part of my homework I would make sentences based on those words. This way I was able to learn those tasks by engaging my interest in grammar and verb conjugation.

I will take one or two gap years before I go back to graduate school. In those years I will continue learning Hebrew by reading and translating more. I may also use a computer program to help me with the pronunciation. I will devote more time towards memorizing words because I believe that my vocabulary should have been much better at the end of the semester.

We learned about history and the evolution of behaviors inside culture.  I don't know many culture-specific words though.

We had learned about cultural differences and means of measuring values.  Language reflects cultural attitudes specific to a language.  There are many odd sayings in Iran that they don't do in Afghanistan like May I be your sacrifice.

In Iran, there is like all cultures a more traditional segment of the population that is formal and a younger population that is informal.  In being a self-directed learner, my language partner taught us formal academic style but my practice was more conversational.  There is a lot I wanted to learn but the culture was, for Iran, repressed by a political regime.  I wanted to learn how to accomplish tasks and talk about leisure time but my presentation was on travelling which meant religious monuments.  I think there are interesting books and films to see but I was just learning basic nouns and verbs to accomplish a bigger goal.  Culture is closely tied to history but there are segments of the population that are no longer in Iran and just opening up in Afghanistan.  Films show these unrepresented populations. I didn’t use popular culture or film, regrettably although I found some you tube videos.  I haven’t read and spelled as much so I might be weak in reading a book but I would pick up movie words.  We watched some soap operas in partner-class. The families have some old traditions in Afghanistan and I was focusing a lot on Iran because of the internet sources I could find and the travel book. 

I have designed a class for my partner on some occasions, one was a transcript that I had copied down in transliteration from the babel.richmond.edu website where I didn't know the words.  we looked at the context because some words were family words and vocab that we had previously knew.  Its from my artifact!  In the story the woman tells the man how many brothers she has and how many are in school and what they study.  It was hard to understand initially because all I understood was the family names like baradar-e (brother) and school (dabestan).  My partner helped me separate the words because I thought that many words were bigger and it was actually two words.  There was also words pertaining to the difficulty of the courses taken.  I think many words were new to me because of the book we use that I am not used to listening to words.  My partner helped with the little connecting words since I don't normally connect words and we hadn't gotten to forming sentences yet with Mirwais and Malory.  These were complex sentences and I had to pronounce them different ways because of the transliteration, but my partner knew eventually what the sentences meant, even if it was in Iranian dialect.

This is my final learning plan, as I made some changes over the semester.

Task 1: Learn the alphabet and learn greetings/farewells.

Task 2: Introducing myself and my family.

Task 3: Learn the numbers to tell and ask for time.

Task 4: Learn Hebrew grammar, specifically verb tenses and possession, to start reading from a book.

Task 5: Buying food and ordering at a restaurant.

Task 6: Learn about the weather and how to describe it.

Task 7: Talk about sports and hobbies.

Task 8: Talk about health and learn health-related vocabulary.

Task 9: Learn how to use the phone in Hebrew.

Task 10: Read and translate from a children book (ongoing task over several weeks).

I made a dialogue between two friends for artifact four. 

A: You hungry?

B: Yeah, a bit. 

A: Whatya want for lunch? Pizza okay?

B: I hate pizza...

A: What...

B: Is a sandwich okay? (^_^)/

A: Okay.... -.-'

My fourth artifact is written lyrics of a song called "Replay" by the popular k-pop boy group SHINee.

This song was slightly more difficult to understand than the song I used for my second artifact because this song has a couple repeated core vocabulary with which I was unfamiliar: 

1. “부담스럽다” [bu-dam-seu-reop-dda], which means “to feel uncomfortable/burdened/too much. 

2. “뿌듯하다” [bbu-deu-ta-da] means “to feel a sense of satisfaction/pride” after achieving or finishing something.

Here's the video in case the embedded video below doesn't work. (The youtube video includes lyrics in Hangul and in English for listeners to follow along.)  

Students that came from abroad to study in the University of Richmond have various culture shocks. These range from everyday speech to classes. One of the more common things I have heard from the international students is the concept of saying “how you are doing?” or “what’s up?” when one truly is never interested in someone else’s life. As an American, I know this has been embedded in many of us to say to one another without actually being concerned about what the respected person actually has to say. It is what we call here as common courtesy, although it is essential rude in the end because we at times have no true interest in someone else’s life.

Another common culture shock for many international students is the workload. In University of Richmond (not sure about other universities in America), we are given a lot of work to do outside of class so we can either be prepared for the following class for either discussion or as a base for more information to be taught. The workload is a lot to some universities abroad. From what I have heard from my international friends, many of them work endless hours preparing for the college exam and in high school, so they can be admitted into college. After they are admitted, many state it becomes easier. Not that universities abroad are easier, but they usually have less frequent exams and are given work that is a good percentage of their grade towards the end of the semester. But UR has facilities that try to help these students (and others) with things such as the writing center and academic skill center.

Another more important culture shock is trying to leave one’s identity and culture and adjusting to American standards. This can range from the everyday environment, to one’s meal. Many will be taken back by the fact that they are no longer surrounded by their common language, and feel homesick. This is very natural because they are literally surrounded by many foreign and new things (and people). It takes many international students to adjust at times. And at times some international students spend time mostly with people from their respected countries to keep themselves in the comfort zone. But if one is willing to share what their interests are, they might be able to find something similar here as well. For instance, a Japanese student once unconsciously stated she liked baseball. Fellow faculty members then took her to a baseball game in Richmond so that her stay and adjustment can be easier. And to a happy surprise, she was able to adjust quickly in comparison to other international students. 

Korean Presentation - HB and Han

Here is the link for my cultural presentation. 

resources.JPG

MIDTERM

In addition to my wonderful language partners Prachi and Pooja, I have been using Gujarati language books, beginners level children's books, and a book on the Gujarati alphabet and matras. It has been exceedingly difficult for me to grasp writing while continuing to talk in Gujarati, mostly because last semester I wasn't focusing on writing at all. It was much easier for me to understand the language when I'm focused only on speaking, because we spent all of our time in conversation, or me listening to their conversation and trying to pick up on words and context.

At the middle of the semester, the main obstacles were detecting differences in particular alphabets. There are 4 forms of D and four forms of T for example.

Take a look at the versions of D:

Take the

ડ d as in that

દ d as in dream

ઢ dhe as in brother

ધ d as in door

They are really really difficult for me to grasp even now. As are the T's. They have been by far my biggest obstacles in both verbal pronunciation and understanding what letters to write. I have made significant progress though, in that I am correct about 80% of the time with my alphabet selection.

SELF EVALUATION

The book "Colloquial Gujarati" by Jagdish Dave has especially helped me to gradually shift from speaking to writing. I believe that is has been most difficult for me because not only is Gujarati phonetic, however, since English is my first and only language, it is hard to explain to my language partners that I don't grasp word sounds and pronunciation the way they do (both are Gujarati of course) because they grew up knowing these sounds by ear. For example, many sounds from the alphabet sound exactly the same to me. There are also alphabets that don't even exist in the English language. They are created using the throat and the tongue in a way that Westerners do not!

Overall, this semester has been a lot slower than last semester, mostly because learning to write has taken up much more time than I though. I came into this semester thinking that writing would be a BREEZE, not knowing that I would have to juggle continuing to learn the language and speak it so that I wouldn't lose the context of what I was writing. There are some times now where I will write a word, or be able to pronounce a word, and then get frustrated because I have no idea what it means! This is what I mean when I say obstacles. When I graduate in two weeks, I am still going to continue to try to learn Gujarati on my own. I will use the strategies of image to word (Gujarati word and matras included alongside a picture) in order to learn the language. I would do this because I am a visual learner. This fall, I will return to London and attend the Hindu festival of Navratri where I will dance to Gujarati Garba and hopefully converse with many of my Gujarati friends. They can be the judge of how much of the language I have picked up! Although I can't speak it as well as I can speak Spanish, I am still proud of myself for sticking to it for 2 full semesters, learning the alphabet and how to converse with natives!

Final Reflection Paper 105:

From SDLAP 105, I became a self-directed learner, which is that I need to set up my own goals to accomplish my own learning. We did self-assessment test, read different articles related to our topic and periodically wrote journals to reflect our learning experience. Moreover, we did presentations based on our target languages. Also, through blog Ning, we can read other students’ journals and watched their presentations; I really learnt a lot of language history, and cultural background from different countries.

I think all the reading assignments are helpful to me. I especially remember the cultural dimensions and factors. Language enables connection among humans. And culture is a way of life that relates to languages. Most countries and regions around the world are inextricably linked, and communication brings power and influence to individuals across borders of their relationships. Languages underscore the importance of understanding different cultures that is interconnected not only geographically but also psychologically. Having the ability to master a second language makes people become smarter and excellent in the working environment. Language is a direct communication style. At the beginning, when I started learning Korean, I did not learn any cultural background. Later, I think contextual style is important for speakers to focus when they learn a new language. For example, in Asian culture people use words that reflect hierarchical relationship in the conversation. As a result, when I learn to speak Korea, I especially need to choose words that are appropriate for me to speak to different age of group of people.

English is a more personal style language, which reduce the barrier between the parties in low-power distance. Knowledge of the home country’s language is important for personnel placed in a foreign place. More and more people are becoming multilingual, and in the future career life. Companies place a great deal of attention on the applicants’ ability to speak a foreign language without considering if they have other necessary skills. From the readings, I also learnt that cultural differences could cause misinterpretations. Many people use nonverbal communications such as body languages and the use of physical space, but this actually create distance and barrier between people to people.

This semester, during the process of learning Korean, I only learnt Korean in listening and speaking. Firstly, I learn about Korean culture, maintain an element of modesty and humility extremely important in Korean culture, and make direct eye contact when addressing Korean business professionals, as it is important to indicate your honesty and interest. Some Koreans do not make eye contact for any length of time when in the presence of an authority figure as a sign of respect. Second, I set up a plan to learn Korean. I mainly learn Korean through watching movies or dramas. I think it is more helpful to listen to what the sentences are and read the translation/subtitle in Chinese. In this way, I can know how they form grammar, and how they speak their language and when to apply them in different situations. At the beginning it is important to follow their conversation by reading the subtitles, but later I can gradually catch up their sentences and use it as my own knowledge. Again, practicing is the most important thing. When you stop saying that language, you are very easy to forget it. 

I think to be aware of the history of the language is very helpful and interesting to study a second language. Koreans initially write in Chinese. It helps me to learn Korean because there are two levels in Korean, first is formal way and then is the informal way. People speak informal way to the people who are same age as you, and use formal way when speak to elders or people who you first meet. This attribute to its history because Korea has history of dynasty, so it includes some moral standard in the history. I would more like to learn to speak the informal way because it is more casual and widely used nowadays. Moreover, formal way of speaking Korean is really hard for me to learn because it includes so many different required words in a sentence.

In conclusion, from this class, I learnt not only different cultural background, but also Korean. Now, I can speak simple sentences and many vocabularies in Korean. I think my learning experience was successful. In the future, I want to watch more Korean dramas in order to learn Korean while noticing more cultures in Korea as well. I also want to make a trip to South Korean with my friend this summer in order to really have the experience to practice my Korean. This trip is also considered a self-evaluation or assessment on my self directed learning. For my long-term goal, I want to try to learn Spanish on my own with the same strategy that I learnt Korean. Thanks to this class and I want to keep all the knowledge that I have learnt and apply to my future path!

The Influence of Jainism on Gujarati culture

Jainism is a religious minority in India, with 4.2 million followers. Gujarat is one of the three states of India with the highest Jain population. The peace-loving Jains form a sizable and influential part of the population of the state (12%). Their foremost religious vow is ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) - the simple, but unique weapon that Mahatma Gandhi used against the British in order to gain independence. The people of Gujarat are so courteous that in conversation they add the suffix ‘Bhai’ (brother) or ‘Ben’ (sister) to the name of the person addressed -- hence ‘Jah-bhai’ or ‘Pooja-ben’.

As a result of the Jain religion, Gujaratis are mostly vegetarian as it aligns with the religious vow not to harm any living being. Gujarat has a number of Jain pilgrim centres, including Shatrunjaya near Palitana, one of the holiest. The crest of ‘Shatrunjaya’ hill- ‘the Place of Victory over hatred and worldly things" -  has 863 beautifully carved marble temples built over a period of 900 years. There is a constant chanting in the vicinity of the temples which leaves visitors and locals feeling spiritually fed.

I thought it was particularly interested that the Jain religion has had the most influence on Gujarat!

Gujarati Weddings

Gujarati culture is deeply rooted in traditions and customs just as many other Indian cultures are. Gujaratis are very energetic and enthusiastic people who celebrate their special occasions and festivities with high energy and happiness. A Gujarati marriage ceremony is a great example where people dress up in all the lovely colors of the rainbow.

The Gujarati wedding clothing displays their rich and colorful culture. Most Gujarati women choose to wear a sari that is draped in the proper style of Gujarati (over the left shoulder and around the belly starting on the right side of the body). These saris are typically a beautiful, brilliant red in color. It is then accessorized using the appropriate jewelry. Traditionally, a Gujarati groom always chose a dhoti kurta to wear in the marriage ceremony. However, in metropolitan cities currently, this traditional clothing is slowly being changed. Some men are now choosing to use designer Gujarati wedding attire such as indo-western kurta pyjamas. In addition, formal suits are becoming more and more popular as the wedding clothes for the groom.

The wedding consists of many fun-filled rituals along with a lot of food, fun, and firecrackers. The wedding celebration lasts for days beginning with the engagement, or Sagai, to the wedding and the Gujarati wedding reception. This is the ceremony that makes the commitment of the prospective bride and groom to each other official. The bride travels to the home of the groom taking an earthen container, or matli. The matli is filled with gifts and sweets for the groom and his family. Acceptance of the couple by each family is goal of this ceremony. If both families accept, the couple becomes engaged.

Following the engagement are days of blessings (puja), dancing to Garba (a Gujarati specific dance), reception and lots of eating yummy food. Let's just say, if I had a wedding one day, I'd want it to be Gujarati style. Sounds like a lot of fun!

Gujarati Culture, Reputation, Business

Gujaratis are usually conservative Hindus or orthodox Muslims living in a society that rigidly follows traditions and social orders. What binds the communities together is a common passion for business and making money as well as overall reputation. The Gujaratis are renowned for their business acumen. This has developed from centuries of maritime trade and commerce. The native Gujarati has spread to many parts of the world - notably East and South Africa, the UK and USA in search of new business opportunities. It is this spirit of entrepreneurship that has made Gujarat one of the most industrialised states in India. Currently, Ahmedabad which is the capital of Gujarat, is also the industrial capital of India. I found this extremely interesting, but it helped me put two and two together. Gujaratis and Punjabis are two of the largest Indian immigrant communities in the world. Understandably, the entrepreneurial and business motivation has made this group of people and their culture global! 

Since this semester I will be trying to learn how to write, I figured that it is certainly appropriate to learn more about the Gujarati language and script even though I know the basics in that it originated and evolved from Sanskrit.

The Gujarati script was adapted from the Devanagari script to write the Gujarati language. The earliest known document in the Gujarati script is a manuscript dating from 1592, and the script first appeared in print in a 1797 advertisement. Until the 19th century it was used mainly for writing letters and keeping accounts, while the Devanagari script was used for literature and academic writings.

The Gujarati script is also known as the

saraphi (banker's script ) 

vaniasai (merchant's script) or

mahajani (trader's script ) script.

Gujarati is a syllabic alphabet in that consonants all have an inherent vowel. (ie. Ka, keh, kih). Gujarati vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to. These are known as matras.

Questions