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SDLC 105 - Learning Journal #10

Learning to read and write in Korean has definitely been challenging. I attribute the challenge to the grammar itself. Often in Korean, you have to read, write, and think backwards (from English). Since sentence structure is SOV, I can go through an entire chain of modifying verbs and adjectives before ever reaching the object of the sentence. One of the activities I've been focusing on with my language partner has been reading texts about 1-2 levels above my current ability to challenge myself. While reading, I look up unfamiliar words and grammar patterns and then discuss my "translation" or my comprehension with my language partner. From this, I've learning new reading techniques where I group words by grammatical function in order to streamline the comprehension process.

Writing and speaking are the two biggest components of my twice weekly Korean group lessons. However, the same issues with reading arise. Often I will write down a few words that I want to use and then rearrange them so they can fit in the grammatical structure correctly. In some cases I can write the sentence down correctly the first time but the rearrangement method is useful when using new grammar points where a reference is not available. Overall, it has been difficult to learn to read and write in Korean because it requires me to do some mental acrobatics. However, I do feel a great improvement compared to my ability at the beginning of the semester. 

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SDLC 110 - Learning Journal #12

For this week, I learned basic Korean food vocabularies, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My language partner and I practiced the words by asking “did you eat breakfast/lunch/dinner”. Also, I learned how to say several common foods and drinks such as water, milk, and bread. At the same time, I also studied several traditional Korean foods such as Kimchi and Bibimbap, which are familiar to me because I often eat Korean food. In order to memorize these many words, my language partner and I repeat them by asking “do you like…” Next time I go to a Korean restaurant, I might be able to read the menu in Korean characters. In addition, I learned to say “delicious” and “awful” so that I can make comments on the foods I learned. 

 

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Fifth bi-weekly report -- 111

My goals for these past two weeks were to:

  • A) Begin Chapter 9: Characteristics of Humans, Animals, and Objects, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture;
  • B) Continue reading Indonesian comic books, sourced from the internet; and
  • C) Continue reading about Indonesia's geopolitical stance in the Pacific -- BBC, Jakarta Post, etc. 
  • D) Meet with my partner for four hours

Strategies to accomplish these goals:

  • A) I am halfway done with Chapter 9: Characteristics of Humans, Animals, and Objects. 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 Human, Animal, and object characteristics; and to give information about colors, shapes, and the location of objects
  • 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.
  • 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.
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SDLC 110 Learning Journal # 9

Week 9

Last week, I learned about how to tell time which I found to be challenging but also incredibly helpful for this weeks lesson on numbers and dates. We learned about the calendar in Turkey and how to say the different months: ocak, subat, mart, nisan, mayis, haziran, temmuz, agustos, eylul, ekim, kasim, and aralik. We also learned how to say the days of the week: paar, pazartesi, sali, carsamba, persembe, cuma, cumartesi. Then we learned about the different seasons where winter is: kis, spring is: bahar, summer is yaz, and fall is sonbahar. After learning the vocabulary, we applied this new knowledge to telling the weather where we looked at the forecast of the week at Turkey and we had to say the month, day of the week, season, and whether it was sunny, rainy, or cloudy. I found this exercise to be very useful for understanding numbers and dates and I am excited to see how we continue to build on this new knowledge. 

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SDLC 110 Learning Journal # 8

This week we learned about telling time which is such an important part of learning a new language. At first, I found it difficult to grasp because the words are very different from English, but once I caught on to the pattern it was a lot easier to understand. As I memorized the vocabulary and continued to practice with my peers, telling time became fun. In order to ask "What time is it?" we have to say, "Saat kaç?"And in order to respond saying, "It is 11" you say "Saat on bir". I also found it easier to learn this concept since I knew the number system in Turkish. It was also very helpful to play an interactive game to fully grasp telling time and apply what we learned in a fun and exciting way. I look forward to building on this knowledge by learning about the days of the week next class. 

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SDLC 110 Learning Journal # 7

 

I think that the Turkish course is going well so far and I am on track for my learning plan. I am able to have basic conversations with the rest of the class and I am also able to understand simple dialogues. Apart from learning basic greetings and a foundation in the alphabet, numbers, and basic words we are also learning how to ask for directions which is one of my learning goals. And while we have learned about the culture of Turkey, we still have not touched on how the government as much especially how to say government terms in Turkish which I hope to learn by the end of the semester. I look forward to learning about the different seasons and how to tell the weather in Turkish. Also, I am curious about family structures and values in Turkey. I will continue to work on what I've learned by practicing pronunciations, reviewing vocabulary and having conversations outside the classroom in Turkish. 

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SDLC 110 Learning Journal #11

For this week, I reviewed Korean alphabets agains in class through pronouncing a set of Korean dishes.  Most of the time I am able to fully say the words and felt more confident at saying them. When I watch some Korean TV shows, I sometimes can identify single words that they spoke, which I feel happy about.  I focused on a set of words for my cultural presentation on South Korean's gender equality issue. They are: society -사회, men - 남자, women -여자들, economy -경제, equality - 평등, inequality-불평등. I also learned about K-pop's trainee system and Turkey's women's rights from the cultural presentations. I realized how competitive South Korea's entertainment industry is and the progress Turkey made on women's rights over the decades.  

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SDLC 110 Learning Journal #11

Learning Journal #11

One of my personal goals was to be able to talk about the future in Korean, building on my ability to speak in different tenses. I have been practicing this through my bi weekly calls with my mom. Recently, I have been learning how to say my major and my career path in Korean. It is difficult because I grew up skipping many syllables when speaking Korean with my family members who grew to understand what I meant. Therefore, it is difficult trying to learn a new way of saying many phrases I am used to naturally shortening. I also tend to forget many of the vocabulary words for my major and the correct way to put words together. 저는 심리학와 생물학 공부핼거에요. 조롭할대 저는 대학원갈거에요. Though rife with spelling mistakes and errors, I am trying to memorize and be better at saying what I want to do with my majors when I grow up, The sentence states that “I am going to study psychology and biology. When I graduate I want to go to graduate school.” I hope to build on my vocabulary and be able to say more advanced statements such as the subjects I am considering going to graduate school for and the occupations I am considering.

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Turkish 112_ Week 10

Cultural Post

Superstitions and ceremonies are a big part of Turkish culture. In my last few posts about Turkish culture, I talked about a few of the superstitions and rituals in daily cultural life. I will explore these in my cultural project, with attention and focus on traditions and superstitions around death. What are the beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife? Do those come from religion, or are they from pre-existing beliefs common throughout the Mediterranean? Like weddings, funerals are big events. There are two weeks of mourning are various communal events that occur when someone dies. In America, we have a few traditions around funerals, but beliefs about death and the afterlife differ from person to person. A death in Turkey is a bigger event and the rituals surrounding death are longstanding traditions. There is a specific agenda of activities and food eaten when someone dies in Turkey. I look forward to exploring this topic more, specifically the origins of the tradition. I will also begin to research using resources in Turkish, as my goal is to deliver my presentation mainly in Turkish.

Learning Activity Reflection

I had a couple of people try my activity. One of my roommates studies Arabic with me. She got all of them correct. One of my other roommates, who does not study another language, also got them all right. I know they were all easy sentences and words, but they thought it was fun. The emphasis on this activity was not whether or not the sentences were complex, but it was an activity on using context clues to decipher the meaning of an unknown word.

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Turkish 112_ Week 9

I am now focusing on reading comprehension and working on my accent when I read. Surprisingly, I understand 90% of what I read, which is cool. I have gotten a lot better at figuring out words I don’t know. I think I know what to look for within the context of the sentence. I am able to answer comprehension questions, such as fill in the blanks, and True (Doğru) or False (Yanlış). I am getting faster at reading. I don’t sound out each letter in the word, because there are more words I recognize immediately.  I really enjoy reading in Turkish, but for the next weeks I want to improve my conversational skills and look for context clues in conversation.

 Activity: I will give someone sentences in English, with one word in Turkish. Given the words you know and context clues, what does this Turkish word mean? 

1) Memet went to the grocery Mağaza to buy vegetables.

A: store

2) Yesterday was doğum günüm. I turned 21.  

A: my birthday

3) Ahmet: Nasılsın Nur? Nur: I am good! Nasılsın Ahmet?

A: How are you?

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SDLC 110 Cultural Post #7

110 Cultural Post #7

In my experience, attitudes about family are very strong in Korean culture. Growing up, it was normal, if not expected, to be close to one’s nuclear family as well as one’s extended family. Korean people around me generally were close to their family members. Essentially, one’s family was the basis of one’s social life. In Korean culture, there is an emphasis on depending on one’s family members. For example, Korean children are expected to take care of their parents when they grow older. In Western culture, parents generally do not expect their children to take care of them. However, in Korean culture, it is normal to have an elderly parent live with the eldest son or daughter. It is expected that the children will take care of the parent through providing room and board when the parent is no longer able to take care of themselves. Just as the parent provided for the child during his or her youth, it is only normal to return the favor when the parent is unable to live alone.

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Turkish 112_ Week 8

This semester, with the help of Sezgi, I have focused more on solidifying the grammar and verb tenses rather than focus on learning vocabulary by topic. I am really creating a strong base off which to keep building and applying new vocab. I want to learn the majority of grammatical suffixes and how this affects sentence structure. I originally wanted to learn vocabulary pertaining to travel, etc. But I think focusing on the grammar is more important. The vocab will come with time and I will learn from experience and out of necessity. I can learn vocab from context clues in text and in conversation, but grammar is much harder to just pick up on.

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Turkish 112_Week 7

I am now learning the future tense and how to express wishes and wants. Like English, expressing wants requires two verbs.  I also learned how to say I must/should. This is expressed with an affix -meli/mali-. Once again, I feel that I can now say so much more, now that I know another verb tense.

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Turkish 112_ Week 6

In the following recording I am talking about what I did last weekend using the past perfect tense. 

Turkish: Hava güzel oldu geçen hafta sonu. Cumartesi günü çalıştım ama pazar günü çalışmadım ve tüm gün güneşlendim,  Çünkü hava oldu sıcaktı ve güneşli geçen hafta sonu. Kahvaltı pişirdim ve kendim odamı ve mutfağı temizledim. Sonra akşamları ev arkadaşlarımla bir restorana gittim. Geçen hafta sonu çok güzel bir haftasonu. Bu hafta sonu ne yaptın?

English: The weather was beautiful last weekend. I worked on Saturday but Sunday I didn't work. I sunbathed the whole day because the weather was warm and sunny. I cooked breakfast and cleaned my room and the kitchen by myself. Then, I went to a restaurant with the housemates. Last weekend was a very beautiful weekend. What did you do last weekend? 

Week%206%20artifact.mp3

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Turkish 112_ Week 5

These past 2  weeks I learned the past perfect tense and used a lot in conversation. I can now say what I did in the past and ask questions in the past tense. I am also learning more vocabulary to incorporate into my conversations, such as places I have been and things I have done. I learned more word about temporality, such as “last week” and “yesterday.” I find past tense to be quite easy and it is nice to be able to communicate things that happened in the past. Learning a new tense is kind of liberating. I feel I do not have as many limits on my conversational skills. Next, I will learn the future tense, and express wants and desires. 

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111 Cultural Post 4

The more I explore Ukrainian music, the more aware I become of the complexities of political relations in Ukraine. The 2016 Eurovision winning song was called 1944, and  performed by Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar Jamala. The song talks about the mass deportations under Stalin of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, which was a brutal time. The choice to send a song about mass human rights violations and deportations in Crimea was no accident, and it was clearly a political message referring to Putin's illegal annexation of Crimea. The song is sung partially in English and partially Crimean Tatar, which is certainly a minority language in the world, but it is listed as the second language of Russia, and the fourth in Ukraine. The political nature of the song, combined with its strong emotional appeal likely lead to the song being named the winner of the competition. 

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