Over these two weeks, my language partner and I took a break from the newscasts and instead did something a bit more fun. We watched the popular Ukrainian competition show "Holoc Deti," which is essentially "The Voice" in Ukrainian. I really enjoyed doing this because it was a change of pace from what we had been doing before, and I understood a lot more during the show than I thought I would. Hearing the language and how it is used conversationally (as opposed to on a news broadcast) was helpful for me because I feel like this is the type of language I will hear in daily life in Ukraine.
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For this artifact, I summarize a news article about a bomb being thrown into a Polish Embassy in Lutsk, a relatively calm and safe western town in Ukraine.
I think my learning activity is effective in soliciting answers about a newspaper article from a student. The questions guide the student and help them understand what needs to be talked about. These are the types of questions my language partner asks me after I read an article or watch a news segment. Although they are relatively elementary questions, I feel that they are helpful in guiding my thoughts and helping me put together a coherent answer in Ukrainian.
My language partner and I have been working on watching news reports and reading corresponding news articles to help me increase my listening and comprehension skills. It is challenging to understand the news reporters, as they talk very quickly, however, I have found that if I keep myself informed about what is going on in Ukraine (in English), the understanding the general topic that reporters are talking about becomes much more understandable. My learning activity is below:
1. вибрати статтю з газети читати.
2.Підсумувати статтю. Що сталося? Хто бере участь?
3. що ви думаєте про ці новини? це хороша новина чи погана новина?
This activity asks students to read a newspaper article, summarize it, and share an opinion about what happened. This is essentially what I have been doing with my language partner.
- Third Cultural Post
As I continued to look at the Korean Fashion. I ran into a designer that specializes in hanbok for the modern times. Hwang Yi-Seul is a designer focused on combining both the old and traditional together to create the more trendy relaxed version of the hanbok. It was interesting to see the combination of old and new together.
My learning goal for week 10 compliments what I learned in week 9 over spring break, when I focused on developing my listening skills. After expanding my knowledge about listening and comprehending simpler Korean audio clips, I will be able to extend this knowledge by attempting to understand some parts of the Korean news. I can accomplish this goal by listening and attempting to translate samples of news clips through SCOLA and GLOSS. My language partner can also help me accomplish this goal by looking at news clips together to identify common news-related vocabulary.
I dedicated at least one goal each that focused on reading and writing in Korean. These two aspects are definitely quite challenging and even more difficult than simply speaking in that language. I rated these two aspects as one of the lower categories, when determining my level of competence because I personally struggle with both of these. However, I would definitely say that writing in Korean is harder than reading in Korean. The Korean alphabet may be simple, but the placement of the vowel and consonants are quite tricky, especially with letters that sound the same. As a result, writing in Korean is the last learning goal that I want to achieve because it is the most tricky, but also the most satisfying to complete. I want to be able to apply my learning by writing a short, heartfelt letter to my aunt and to be more comfortable texting my family in Korean.
Reading in Korean is also a struggle because I am more comfortable with reading in English. It takes me a while to read Korean articles because not only do I want to make sure that I am reading the words correctly, but also I need to properly understand what I’m reading. When my learning partner and I were reading a news article, it was quite challenging because I had to read slowly to understand and I ran across many unfamiliar vocabulary words. However, reading and writing skills can develop through practice, so I will be sure to continue learning and reviewing what I learned to develop my reading and writing skills for Korean.
As a bilingual speaker myself, it was quite interesting to read these articles that discussed why bilinguals are smarter and/or if bilinguals were actually smarter. The first article details how bilinguals are smarter because the use of both language systems allows strengthening of a brain’s cognitive muscles. The article also describes how bilingual speakers have an increased ability to monitor the environment, which is due to switching between speaking the primary and secondary language. For instance, I usually talk to my family members in Korean, but sometimes we switch our language to English, without even realizing it. This skill has become natural to me and I didn’t realize that this natural flow can actually positively influence my strengths as a bilingual speaker.
The second article takes this topic on the opposite side and questions whether bilingual speakers are indeed smarter. An interesting point that they made was that bilingual individuals may know more words overall, e.g. when combining both languages, but may know less words in each language, separately. I can definitely agree to this reasoning because I basically have two different ways to say one item, such as dog. However, I do sometimes feel like I lack a full span of vocabulary for both languages, when they are separated into the Korean vocabulary and the English vocabulary. Both articles were quite interesting to read because they allowed me to evaluate my skills as a bilingual speaker and how I can assess its strengths and weaknesses.
About half of my learning goals were directed towards interpersonal communication, which meant that I needed to learn a lot of vocabulary words to have more flowing conversation with my family and friends. As a result, I have learned a lot of new words, maybe ~60 for just words to develop my communication skills. However, I also learned new words while reading and understanding articles, so I think I learned ~80-90, maybe even 100 new words in total. I learned these words by initially using vocabulary games/flashcards, but I also learned these words by practicing with my learning partner. My learning partner was very knowledgeable about the topics of interest and really helped me learn these new words. Even when we read the articles together, my language partner would help me make a vocabulary list for the unknown words because this would help me understand the articles better.
I am aware that I have learned a lot of new words, which will take a lot of practice and reviewing to continue remembering these words. As a result,I think I can better achieve this goal when I actually use them and apply them to real-world situations. For example, I am creating my final cultural presentation about education in Korea because I learned how to say a variety of different majors in Korean. It was beneficial that I could apply my knowledge when making this presentation because it helped me use these types of words and really evaluate my learning.
This reading detailed the existence of the Siletz language, which seems to be slowly deteriorating. One of the individuals who speak the language, Mr. Lane, mentions that their goal with the Siletz language is to simply allow it to become stable. It is eye-opening to hear someone mention that stabilization is all that they’re looking for in their language because the language would disappear without that stability. It is very important for the Siletz people to not lose their language because their culture will die along with it. They will lose the symbols and traditions that are unique to their culture, once they lose their language because language can shape how different parts of the culture are formed. As a result, it is quite amazing to see the Siletz people continue to revive their language by attempting to teaching their language in sixth grade and potentially in high school as well.
They truly inspire me to value my secondary language of Korean because of the variety aspects of culture that make up the language. Like the Siletz, I would also strive to preserve Korean language because I would not want to lose its connections to clothing, food, and other parts of culture that make Korean the beautiful language it is.
My goal for this week is to learn how to order food. The reason why I chose this topic is very simple, it's because that it happens every day! I started this task from learning some Korean dishes I like in Korean. The memorizing part was not very difficult for me because I already knew most of the names of the dishes I will love to try if I travel there. Then, I found some dialogues in my Korea University textbook and practiced them by speaking these dialogues by myself. From this process, I have learned the ways Korean people will say when they go to a restaurant, also knew about some of the Korean cultures. The culture part is very interesting! Like the elders will pay the meals for the younger people, also those who come late have to pay as well. And the way I accomplished this task is by designing the conversation I will have if I go to a Korean restaurant, then I showed them to my Korean friend to see if anything needs to be revised or not.
At this point, I would estimate that I have learned around 150 or 200 words in Turkish. Most of the word we learned within the context of a lesson. For example, we learned a group of nouns so that we could construct yes/no questions. This helps me remember what words go together in context and allows us to build our vocabulary by adding new words to phrases and sentences we already know. In the last few weeks of the semester, I would like to work on more travel vocabulary and I am confident in my basic understanding of phrase construction to be able to work on this on my own.
This week we learned what happens when languages die. Although this tribe described in the article was able to revive a language on the verge of extinction, we lose hundreds of languages every year. The problem with losing languages is that not only is the language itself lost but also the history and culture of a people who spoke and/or wrote that language. In addition, in trying to revive a language that is almost extinct causes issues with diversity within the language. When there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who spoke the language in danger it can be assumed that there was more complexity to the language. While trying to preserve a language that may only have one or a few individual speakers left, the language then become limited to the vocabulary of that individual. It was also interesting for me to think about while many hundreds of languages are being lost, that also means that the world is becoming less diverse linguistically and therefore more people are learning the same languages and can understand people more universally.
Below is my second reflection paper for the 105 section of SDLC: SDLC%20105%20Reflection%20Paper%20%232.docx
Learning Journal 10: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
My learning goals this week are to be able to describe the Korean dishes I grew up eating through talking about the flavor, spice level, color, ingredients, and more. I did this by attempting to teach my friends during our outing to a Korean restaurant as well as learning how to properly say many of the descriptive terms with my mom. During calls with my mom, I made sure to note many of the foods I wanted to eat when I went back home and the reasons why. For example, I talked about a Korean dish called “dduk-bok-ee,” a spicy rice cake dish often made with cheese, boiled eggs, and green onions. I learned how to say these ingredients as well as basic terms to describe them such as “spicy”, “red”, and “yummy.” Later during the week, during an outing to a Korean restaurant with my friends, I learned new dishes and the ingredients in the dishes. I attempted to describe the dishes using the vocabulary I had to my friends.
Post Learning Journal #8 on Your Blog in the Ning
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?
I learned many new words in my target language. I learned many formal versions of words I only knew the informal version of such as residence, birthday, age, name, and more. Furthermore, I learned how to say my majors and minor in Korean. I learned them through lessons with my language partner. In addition to lessons with my language partner, I also learned Korean vocabulary through listening to music. When I encountered a word I didn’t know, I would either look it up on Google translate or I would ask my mom. I came to learn how to pronounce many of the words I was saying incorrectly. I think that it’s difficult learning vocabulary because many of the words I know in Korean are often slang or words only my family understands. Therefore, it is a bit difficult to change the words I’ve used for years and replacing them with new words. I hope to continue my quest to acquire new vocabulary through watching television shows and listening to music.
Post Learning Journal #7 on Your Blog in the Ning
Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die. (You might want to watch the interview with David Harrison posted to the front page of the Ning.)
It was very interesting to read about the Siletz language, and the many people attempting to keep it alive. As a Korean who grew up in Los Angeles, I never thought about what would happen if my language suddenly disappeared. I was constantly surrounded by it, so I didn’t realize how painful losing it would be. Everyone spoke the language, and we had an entire country across the ocean that also spoke the language. If the Siletz language died, many aspects of the language would die with it as well. The language would lose its traditions due to no one practicing them anymore. Furthermore, it would lose its ability to be spoken. No one would know how the grammar of the language worked, and, thus, would not accurately string words together. The most important thing that would be lost when languages die would be the culture associated with it. We would lose the cultural values the group had. We would lose the traditional clothing and food. We would lose the life lessons and perspectives associate with the language. In a world of seven billion people, it is important to embrace diversity. We thrive through challenging ourselves and maturing, and we do this through learning about others and their differences. We learn from other languages' cultures, and we incorporate that into ours and vice versa. By losing the Siltez language, we, as a world, further deplete ourselves of the ability to grow in understanding.
Learning Journal 9: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
My learning goals for this week were to practice saying numbers and months in Korean. When speaking to my mom, I tried my best to say my months and time projections in Korean. In Korean, there are two ways to say numbers. One is based off of the China System and the other is based off of the Native Korean System. It is quite similar to how in English, we say “first” and “one.” Both mean that it was the primary number, but both indicate it in different ways. The China System is used for dates, ranks, time projections, and more. The Korea System is used to count objects. Therefore, I tried to be more conscious and accurately use these systems when speaking to my mom. We would practice time projections by talking about what the date was, what date I was coming home, what the time span that was, and more. As sometimes I get mixed up between the two number systems, it is nice to have my mom there, a native Korean speaker, to correct me and tell me the reasoning for why it is that way.
Sixth Cultural Post: Attitudes about Time in the Target Culture
In Korean culture, time seems to be very important, and there is an overall need to be busy and working. For example, high school students in Korea attend school Monday-Saturday (with the exception of two Saturdays off per month) for sixteen hours. After school ends, students then go to “hagwon” or after school in order to learn more. In Korean culture, every hour is prioritized, and it is expected that everyone should be doing something productive. Furthermore, in Korean work culture, it is normal to work overtime, giving more insight to the concept of Koreans prioritizing the concept of doing over the concept of resting. In my personal experience, growing up in a town that had a large population of Korean immigrants, overworking oneself seemed to be normal. Children would be sent to after schools and enrolled in multiple activities in order to boost their resumes and chances to get into good colleges. Parents would work longer than eight hours a day. Overall, Korean culture attempts to combine productivity and time.
For this week, I focused on learning how to introduce my family and hometown. Minkyung prepared a worksheet for us that has the basic sentence structure for present tense. We practiced the dialogue together and made notes on the pronunciation. Next, we wrote the conversation with our own family situations. We learned a set of words about family members. It's interesting that women and men address brothers and sisters differently. 형 = older brother (if you're male), 오빠 = older brother (if you're female),누나 = older sister (if you're male), 언니 = older sister (if you're female)
The conversation includes how many family members in my family and where they live. In this case, we also learned to talk in past and present tenses. I recorded all the conversations in my notebook with detailed translation and pronunciation notes. This topic is truly useful. I also watched videos about introducing family to reinforce my memory.
