Blogs

"...document (a) your goals and tasks for weeks 4 and 5..."

Goals for Week 4/5

• Learned vocabulary for utensils and things you might see at a Korean buffet

• Learn how to describe self (Identity)

Tasks:

Week 4

• Practiced the vocabulary on actual objects

  • We had plates, utensils, and food set up at a long table and we practiced saying and recalling the vocabulary with Sun (tutor)

• Took notes on activity and what we learned

• 1) Tutor named off a list of items on the table, 2) worked through each word and origin of the words, 3) Worked with Christy to find ways to better remember each of the words

Week 5

• Learned how to describe self (Identity)

• Name, age, location

• Talked about culture with Sun (tutor)

• 1) Internet, looked up words that applied to us, 2) Worked with language partner to chain together the words into sentences, 3) Took turns to introduce ourselves during a tutoring session

Key: 1) Resource, 2) How you worked with language partner, 3) Activities you found most effective

Evaluation of progress:

I believe that I was successful in learning how to describe self. I am able to introduce myself formally, and give my age and hometown. In terms of learning all of the vocabulary, I found it fairly manageable because all of the words applied to myself. However, it was more difficult to work on my goals for week 4, which was to learn the vocabulary of utensils and objects in a Korean buffet. Those words did not necessarily apply to me as an identity, so that is why they were harder. I think that through more practice, it will be easier to recall these words. For now, I have met the learning goal of being able to describe identity, but I only have partial success with describing food and objects at the table.

Christy Buranaamorn

Goals for Week 2:

•             Practice greetings

•             Learn terms for main, family members

•             Learn how to address certain people based on their age and sex

•             Learn common phrases such as “I’m sorry! ,” “Good job!” and “I’m hungry.”

Tasks for Week 2:

• Use the Korean Bravolol IPhone App to search greetings/terms for family and how they are pronounced
• Read and practice reciting words from my notes
• Practice with Sun and my other Korean novice learners
• Attempt to incorporate common phrases more into my daily conversation (Ex. Addressing Azmain and Gargi as dongseng (someone who is younger than yourself))

Evaluation of progress:

I believe that I successfully memorized family names through practice and recitation. My greeting s definitely flow more easily when I run into Korean friends simply by putting more effort into my studying and utilizing the Korean Bravolol IPhone App. Sun taught us very well and did not speed through topics too quickly. She was very patient in her teaching; therefore I was able to process the information very well and my learning was more effective in this way.  

RefPaper2.docx

Karaoke Time!

Allan and I happened to meet at a Karaoke gathering hosted by Asian Student Union (ASU). And so we both thought, "Why not do an artifact?" We chose the song "Byul" which is featured in the film "200 Pounds of Beauty." Speaking in Korean and singing in Korean proved to be two completely different things in my opinion. Since singing was involved, I tended to worry more about the meanings behind the words and the emotions involved. Diction is important yet making sure one's feelings come across well is just as important too. Therefore I became more aware of this aspect through this singing experience.

I also particularly enjoyed this song because we spoke about this specific film in our cultural project in relation to  the phenomenon of Korean cosmetic surgery. This song expresses how one's inner beauty is so important and how surgery can make the world a superficial life. 

First two parts are copied and pasted from my first artifact blog post. Third part is evaluation.

Reflection:

• The current task I am working on is trying to memorize the proper names for each of my family members. There are informal ways to mention people, though.
• My strategy was to create a family tree style diagram to help me better visualize all the words I had to memorize for my direct family. What is important to note is that there are different words for members on the father's and mother's side.
• I believe that the strategy was effective because I am a visual learner, and this helped me learn the words quicker than if I just tried to memorize everything straight from a list.
• Because this was successful, I will build upon this and try to learn more through diagrams in the future.
• I tried this strategy because previous surveys concluded that I was a visual learner.

Other aspects:

• I think I had some emotions of enthusiasm because the structure of family names were similar to that of Korean. So it was understandable when there were words for "grandfather on father's side."
• This was a successful experience because the words were manageable and I was able to learn the words without too much difficulty.
• In the short term, I want to learn how to address everyone formally. In the long-term, I could learn some words on how to address family members informally.

Evaluation:

I decided to create a family tree because, after I took the early surveys at the beginning of the semester, I found that I was a visual learner. From past experience, I found that it was easier for me to organize everything visually and to learn different aspects of a topic in a compartmentalized form. With the family tree, it allows me to learn each tier of the family and their formal names in an organized fashion.

Learning things in a diagram format is easier than trying to learn everything directly from a list.

In this dialogue, the girl is asking out a guy. She has a shy personality, and the boy is impatient and a bit of a rascal.

Girl: Excuse me

I have known for a long time that languages are like species- new ones are created as old ones die out. But while reading this article the issue became more real in my eyes. It is scary to realize how ages of culture and history die out with the language. Every language is unique and its development runs parallel to its native population's traditional growth in terms of music, art, historical artifacts, and what not. Death of a language would mean losing all of that and the breaking of ties with all the previous generations that spoke the language. The article helped me understand the great importance of language preservation and why it is essential to maintain a speaker population. Since native populations reduce due to globalization and multiracial relationships, the best way to preserve a language is to use the language speaking population's culture as an attracting aspect. My attraction to Korean culture was what made me motivated to learn the Korean language. In a world where languages like English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, etcetera are taking precedence over other languages due to job benefit provisions, less-spoken languages have to use culture and tradition as motivations for people to learn them. At this point, learning Korean will help me become better acquainted with the culture, and even though I might not end up settling down in Korea, I am glad to be learning the language. Who knows, with the changing political and economic dynamics in Asia, South Korea may develop a rising importance on the international platform and Korean might become the next 'big thing'. But until then, I will groove to my Korean pop and binge eat my Kimchi. And even if Korean does not become the next 'big thing', at least I will be glad to be the part of a multi-racial Korean speaking generation, and do my part in ensuring the preservation of the beautiful language.

Korean Karaoke

This is a Karaoke that Christy and I sang recently at an event on campus. We are singing "Byul" from the 200 Pounds Beauty soundtrack.

• During this task, we are working on pronunciation and learning how to read the alphabet. I still have difficulties with reading at a decent speed because characters can be combined to create new sounds. In other words, Korean has a general list of vowels and consonants, but those vowels and consonants create new sounds when combined, almost like a secondary alphabet of double vowels and double consonants.
• I believe that this learning strategy is effective because it will help me be more familiar with the Korean alphabet and how the words roll off the tongue.
• I feel slightly frustrated because it is difficult to sound like a native Korean. My words sound forced and awkward, whereas a native Korean sounds fluent and relaxed.
• However, I believe that this experience was helpful. In the short-term, I want to pronounce words better, but in the long-term I want to become faster at reading.

My learning plan for the Korean language is as follows:

1. Hangul script- reading and writing

2. Introducing oneself

3. Greetings (includes honorifics)

4. Family tree

5. Numbers

6. Basic sentence structure formation

7. Basic vocabulary

I can:

1. Write Hangul

2. Read at a slow pace (due to limited vocabulary)

3. Introduce myself

4. Greet someone

5. Use honorifics

6. I know the family tree and usage of terms for different family members

7. Numbers

8. Basic vocabulary

9. Order food at restaurant

10. Bonus: I know how to ask a guy out (did not plan this haha)

Overall, I think I did a good job accomplishing all of my goals I included in my learning plan. However, I don’t think I have retained ALL the information I learned. I have to continue to practice and go over everything I have learned this semester to be able to continue my development with the language. However, I am able to have small talk, greet people, talk about myself and my family, pronounce words correctly for the most part, and talk about my interests. I think I need more work on telling time/days of the week, as well as asking others questions.

One stumbling block I encountered this semester was not always being as self-motivated as I should be. SDL is the first class I took here, where it was up to me to really force myself each day to sit down and practice what I learned each week. It was easy to prioritize my other classes over Hindi. This was something I struggled with during the beginning of the semester. However, I later realized that I was only going to learn as much as I put in. It was up to me to make the most of it. I always wanted to learn Hindi so I decided I needed to be better at taking time out of my day to sit down and study Hindi. Another stumbling block I encountered towards the end of the semester was not being able to coordinate times with my language partner. A few times toward the end, she said she was too busy or would show up late/leave early. However, because I saw my language partner at our dance practices and SASA meetings, sometimes we were able to practice a bit of Hindi to make up for the lost time.

In the future, I definitely want to continue my study of Hindi. I will continue to use the app on my phone to learn new Hindi words as well as review everything I learned here at UR. I hope to one day visit India and be fully immersed in the culture and converse with people I meet. I am so happy I decided to take SDL course. It allowed me to better augment my language learning skills as well as learn about other cultures through the posts and discussions!

Ordering food from a restaurant

Christy and I did a combined dialogue to practice together.

Allan: Restaurant

Christy: Customer

Dialogue:

Customer (A): Hello?

Restaurant (B): This is a Chinese restaurant. What is your name?

A: My name is Christy.

B: What do you want to order?

A: Please give me cooked beef and marinated beef for delivery.

B: What is your phone number?

A: *says phone number*

B: Okay, understood.

• During this task, we were working on learning how to order food from a restaurant.
• We hope to accomplish the ability to pronounce words more fluently and know how the Korean culture works. Dialogue is all formal because the conversation is between two strangers.
• I believe that this is an effective strategy because it applies vocabulary and phrases into a real-life application.
• During the process of this task, I was excited to use the words. There is no point in learning vocabulary that one will never use.
• I believe that this is effective as a learning strategy because the words are in a dialogue.
• In the short-term, I want to be able to memorize this structure of sentences, but in the long-term I believe that it is important to know how to choose how you want the food to be prepared (e.g. extra salt, less sauce, etc.)

Theses are pictures of my lesson with my language partner when I learned words relating to dance, singing and acting. These became useful to me when conducting my cultural research presentation on dance in India. Since I have a passion for dance, I wanted to learn these words!!

Learning activity:

I taught my friend how to say her name and how old she is in Hindi. I first said my name and how old I was and told her to repeat after me. She had some trouble with the pronunciation, so I sounded out each syllable for her. She said this strategy was helpful, and she was able to pronounce the words more efficiently. I then taught her to count from 1 to 10. We took turns going back and forth counting up to 10. I think this activity as a whole, was pretty effective. My friend was able to learn a few Hindi phrases as well as count to 10. I tried to make the activity fun and interactive so it was enjoyable while informative at the same time.

Artifact Evaluation:

In one of my artifacts I say basic phrases about myself. For example, my name, where I am from, my interests, my family etc. These are phrases I can incorporate when making small talk with someone in Hindi.  It took me a few tries to properly pronounce all the words.

During this lesson with my language partner and I learned basic phrases that are useful when going out to eat and ordering food. My partner pretended she was the waiter and I was the customer, so I was able to practice the phrases I learned.

Knowing a language's history can help you learn the language. In fact, knowing the Korean language history, I feel, is almost required. Korea's language is divided into three parts: 1) Romanized Western words, 2) Hanja (the Chinese-influenced Sino-Korean), and 3) Hangeul (native Korean words). Knowing the Korean language history will tell of how the language evolved from Hanja and progressed to Hangeul.

In addition, some words use different parts of the Korean language. Telling time, for example, uses Hangeul for the hour and Hanja for the minute. I found this website helpful: http://www.omniglot.com/language/numbers/korean.htm

Even though I do not remember how to write Chinese as well as I used to, knowing that Korean language has Chinese influence has helped me learn the language. Many words in Korean sound similar to Chinese, but have been modified for independence purposes. However, because of this, I am able to learn words easier.

I also learned that the Korean language has some Confucianism roots. Confucianism emphasizes hierarchy, which explains the reasoning for why honor, pride, and respect are emphasized so much in the Korean language. There are multiple ways to say different phrases. You can say "komawo," or "komawoyo," "kahmsahamnida," and many other words, just to say "thank you." The difference is that each variation has a higher or lower level of respect. With this knowledge in mind, it is not unusual to tell your age when first meeting someone in Korea. Koreans "like" to know your age so that they know how to address you. Learning why you say different things in Korean will help you "reason" and know when to use certain phrases.

Summary%20of%20weely%20reflections.docx

Reading the article, I didn't realize that learning another language helps to improve brain activity. I'm surprised but then again I'm kind of happy that it does. This means that my brain is smarter than others. HA

In my opinion, knowing two languages does make it difficult for me to converse with people especially relatives of my native language. When I was younger, I was really fluent in Cantonese. But as I grew up and went to school, English grew to become more fluent and override the other. And so now, it's really difficult for me to converse with my grandmother for example since I forgot most words and don't talk as much in Canto as I do in English. I'm more exposed to English than the other way. I do deeply regret this. I wish I had tried harder to maintain this part of my heritage since it does really help in talking with my grandma who I don't really know too well or her history because of a language barrier.

Some cultural people that I know are also having the same issue as myself. They either didn't get the opportunity to be exposed to this part of their heritage because of their parents or they have forgotten completely. In general for me, if I got the opportunity to do this again, I would go back and actually try to talk more in the language.

It's true that bilinguals have to switch from one language to another and must adapt to what is being said and are efficient in doing so. But I think this applies only to people who are fluent in both languages and doesn't really work for people who are inadequate in one of the languages. For me personally, I definitely have difficult in adapting since I'm more fluent in English. I try to speak in Canto to my parents but it just ends up being half Canto and half English. Therefore, I don't think I can really enjoy the benefits unless I really make an effort to be fluent in both my languages.