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This is a picture of a text conversation I had with Lena about our language session.
Translation:
Lena - Hello, are you doing well? Our class today will be held in the library, see you then!
Me - Yes, I'm doing well. How about you, Lena? Where is the library?
Lena - I'm also doing well. The library is in front of the Thomas building.
Me - Ah, really? Thank you. Then I'll see you in the library!
- Reflect on your experiences as a language teacher and learning in this latest speed-dating workshop. What difficulties did you encounter? How did you successfully relay concepts that were foreign to your classmates as your students? If you were eventually granted the opportunity to teach a full semester-long course on the target language, what strategies would you adopt?
In preparation for this workshop, I tried to pick something to teach that was short and easy to understand for someone who has never been exposed to Korean before, yet also interesting enough that people who have started learning Korean would want to listen. It is difficult to teach something about a language that doesn't start with the basics to someone who is at the beginner level. In order to make my concepts more understandable, I wrote the words in both Hangul and in a romanized form so everyone could read it. I also opted to use a whiteboard to write out the concepts as I said them because I feel that helps people to better follow what I'm saying.
If I were teaching a foreign language class, there are several strategies I would use. First of all, I would have everyone take the learning test to see how each individual best learns a language and then split them into groups based off of that result. I think textbook learning is important but conversational is very helpful as well, so I would go around and have conversations with the groups, but without a lot of pressure to practice that branch of the language.
I also feel that games are a fun and effective method of teaching that includes having the students repeat what you're saying instead of just listening to an hour of instruction. In my language learning experience, I have also found that songs are very helpful in remembering vocabulary words and grammar usage. Not just practice but frequent practice is definitely key, so I would probably assign a lot of homework that includes more than just reading and writing to make sure the students are exposed to all aspects of the language.
For my 4th artifact, I documented a cultural exercise that I completed with my language partner. This was aimed to get to know more of the Turkish culture, as coffee is an essential aspect of it. We explored the Turkish coffee culture(we made Turkish coffee) and used the cup to "predict the future." We had a conversation over a cup of coffee about Turkey and Turkish politics as well as how the Turkish coffee culture works. We did use a special "coffee app" to help understand the pictures in the coffee cup.
Learning Journal # 13
One interesting thing I learned this week: Sanskrit doesn't have stress on a syllable/word like English or most European languages have. For example, in English, you will read this sentence with an emphasis on 'you' because it was italicized. But Sanskrit doesn't have that grammatical/linguistic structure. Instead if you want to emphasize something, you must use a separate word, "eva" after the word you want to add emphasis to.
In English, you could use the phrase "that is my horse and "that is my horse" and there would be a different connotation to these sentences. In Sanskrit you have to add additional bits of meaning.
Ex.
naaro viira eva = That man is a hero.
naara eva viira = That man is a hero.
Learning Journal # 12
This journal talks about the tatpurushah, a type of Sanskrit compound. Sanskrit is in love with compound words. We’re familiar with these in English, but Sanskrit takes it way farther, to the point where you basically can have limitlessly long words. There’s some poems that have words that take up dozens of lines because the compound rules were enacted to keep on adding adjective to noun to sound poetic. Anyways, the tatpurushah is basically a rule for creating compounds. An English example is “singer-songwriter”. In Sanskrit, it’s seen in the combination of “krsno hastah” (black hand) into “krshnahastah”. It involves a lot of samdhi changes (shifts in vowels to make a word easier to say). There’s pretty standardized rules though, so all it takes it practice to be able to recognize and form the tatpurushah words.
Ex. “sundaraa ashvaah” (beautiful horse) → sundaraashvaah
“Niilaani phalaani” → nilaaphalani
Learning Journal # 11
I’ve been learning about the 8 limbs of yoga from a philosophical/spiritual approach that incorporates the Sanskrit terminology. Ashtanga refers to the 8 total limbs of yoga. Yoga is defined as a practical way of living happily in the world while gradually moving one’s consciousness inward. Yoga is NOT just a workout class; this is only a small segment of the larger practice of yoga that is ultimately a spiritual pursuit. These are the limbs of yoga:
- Yama- social ethics, “restraints”
- Niyama- personal ethics, “internal restraints”
- aasans - posture, sitting (what most westerners think of Yoga)
- Praanaayaama- breath regulation
- Pratuaahaara- internalization of the senses, “drawing back”
- dhaaranaa - focus, concentration
- Dhyaana- complete absorption
I will go more in depth into these practices and Sanskrit/English meanings behind these in later journals.
Learning Journal # 10
I’ve switched into my focus on Sanskrit and yoga terms. A lot of this is vocabulary, cultural, and context based rather than just a focus on pure grammar. A quote from my textbook says “key Sanskrit terminology/pronunciation can deepen knowledge of the yogic path and give deeper understanding of yoga aasanas”. Although Western yoga is often focused on the physical postures (aasanas), there are actually 7 other limbs of yoga. I want to understand the Sanskrit names for yoga terms and poses (aasanas) because it keeps a deeper, core understanding of the yoga practice and because English translations often differ. My book gives what I think is a great description of this perspective: “The Indian process of learning is largely based on viewing an object from a variety of angles, thus seeing it in its complete form”. This perspective is driving my desire to learn Sanskrit.
For my 3rd artifact, I documented conjugations of different verbs, with emphasis on the past and future tenses. Below is the blackboard with the verb conjugations as well as an online resource I used to check other conjugations that I completed.
Learning Journal 7
It’s been so weird finding out how similar the vocab of Nepali and Sanskrit is. I have a small/moderate vocab understanding of Nepali, but it’s definitely been helping me with understanding the roots of so many words. It’s crazy that language could change that little, since Nepali was derived from Sanskrit thousands of years beforehand! I’ll give a few examples from words that are very similar or the same between the two languages. Pardon my spelling, since I’m going off the Nepali from memory and I learned a lot of it orally.
Sanskrit Nepali
deva/devi (god)
chandra/chandramaa (moon)
hasta/haat (hand)
sarpa/sarpa (snake)
chaura/chera (thief)
phala/pharphul (fruit)
duhkha/dukha (pain)
agni/aago (fire)
There’s also so many religious words that are directly the same still, but I won’t list those. It’s just amazing to me that these seemingly random, basic words have changed so little. In these ways I find learning Sanskrit to be almost easier than learning other languages because it’s so easy to derive the root and find the derivative words as well. I’d like to know more about how quickly other languages change. I know that Old English is entirely a different language to modern English and that change happened in only a couple hundred years. Is it geography or a lack of migration that has kept Sanskrit/Nepali so similar?
Learning Journal # 8
Sandhi, Sandhi, Sandhi. This will be the bane of my existence.
Sanskrit has so many rules!
Sandhi basically refers to the vowel and consonant shifts that occur when certain letters are next to each other. It’s kinda like how a/an works in English, or how le/l’ works in French. The vowels will be modified or dropped to become easier to say, or to flow better. Most of the time these changes make sense, but there’s just so many of them! There are both external rules (changes between words) and internal rules (changes within a word). A common rule would be that no two vowels should be next to each other.
There’s a lot of changes that I find make it harder to locate the case or gender/number of a word. For example, a rule is that in front of any vowel except ‘a’, the ending ‘h’ is dropped. Ex. narah icchati → nara icchati. Then you just keep adding rules for each vowel and type of consonant. It’s definitely going to take a lot of memorization!
Learning Journal # 9
Pronouns!
These aren’t really used that often from what I can tell. But when they are, it’s confusing. My journal page above lists the different forms of mad (me)/tvad (you)/tad(it/that/this). We have these in English too, but it’s been tricky learning them all over especially when the forms are so different. For example, “mad” in the singular object form is “mam” in the dual is “aavam”, in the plural is “asaman”. Tvad also takes some pretty big changes. In the singular, it is “tvaam”, dual “yuvaam”, and plural “yuusman”
Also I recently discovered this declension table maker and it’s so helpful! http://sanskrit.inria.fr/cgi-bin/sktdeclin?q=tvad;g=Any
Learning Journal 5
In all the Sanskrit resources I’ve used, it’s been a really different experience than in my learning any other language. Since Sanskrit is an ancient language and often used in religious, poetry-like epics, its structure comes off as more nature oriented than my other language experiences. For example, in each text I’ve learned the word for “elephant” (gajah), “horse” (ashva) and “deer” (mrgha) in the first few lessons. I think this must be representative of the frequency of these words in Sanskrit nexts. I don’t remember learning those animal words at first when I was taught French, which more focused on food or school. This seems to be an interesting cultural reference. I don’t know how much of that is because Sanskrit is ancient and often used for religious purposes or how much is related to the culture that used the language.
Image: "Sanskrit" as it's traditionally written. Directly translated into English, it would be "Sam(nasalized 'a')skrtam
To linguists, Sanskrit is often an origin of controversy. South Asian and Western scholars have different ideas on the geographic origin and significance of the origin. When Sanskrit was first largely opened to the Western world by William Jones, ‘father of linguistics’ in the mid 1700’s, he admired it at the greatest language he has ever seen:
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family (William Jones).”
At the start of Western Sanskrit study, the language was admired as the pinnacle of language, culture, and religious expression. But some Indian linguists claim that over time, the West has lost its admiration and respect for Sanskrit and India. This is shown in the term “Indo-European”, claims Indian linguist Varun Singh, which places the “Indo” in a marginalized position to the “European” (Singh 2017):
“Sense of European superiority, which guides and drives the present status, has undivided support of Western scholarship spanning several disciplines, particularly those devoted to the Indo-European cause, study of ancient languages including Sanskrit, the practitioners of Indo-European or historical linguistics and more recently the rapidly evolving field of genetics. Sadly, India has so far lacked specialists in these fields who could take on and redress the kind of imbalance generated by the specious Western scholarship (Singh 2017).”
Colonialism and politics brought the concepts of the nordic looking “aryan” to the forefront of 20th century European ideals, although the term aryan is heavily distorted in this sense. The origins of Sanskrit/Hinduism are still debated as either coming from Syria, the Mongolian/Russian steppes, or India itself. These conflicts in scholarly opinion are likely to continue with the resurgence in popularity of Sanskrit across India.
Sources:
Singh, Varun. Origin of Hindu religion and Sanskrit in Central Asia: A recent claim and its rebuttal. 2017. Indian Historical Review, 44.1, pp. 1-20.
This is a page from my Vocabulary nouns list. I've found it helpful to make lists of vocab to memorize and remember what I've already learned. I then used these lists to make flashcards which make me memorize it more. When I'm reading a text I've also found it useful to be able to go back and double check on confirmation on the exact meaning of a word. This is just the first page of my vocab list but it's really the most common words and I tend to go back to it pretty often.
Sometimes I find reading Sanskrit to be very difficult because of the frequency of conjunct consonants. These are letters that come together and their total forms are broken down into just parts of their shapes for quicker writing and to show the vowel deletion between the consonants. Some of them are pretty easy to figure out like "tya" which keeps the overall shape of the 'y' and the loop of the 't', but others like "nda' or 'ddha' 'njna' can look really confusing if you're not used to them. For the most part the complex ones aren't that common, but it's useful to have this chart to know what you're looking at and how to read it when you come across it. Sometimes the letters combine in unexpected ways.
Learning Journal 4
At first I thought I might be able to study Sanskrit by just using the English transliteration, but I’ve quickly realized that it is necessary to learn Devanagari fluently to keep up with the language. Although Sanskrit can be written in any alphabet, the Devanagari system more adequately expresses the sounds of Sanskrit than the English language does, and I find the many diacritics in transliterations distracting. For example, Sanskrit has 4 forms of ‘S’, ‘t’ and ‘d’, and it is important to be able to recognize these letters when they appear. I’ve had familiarity with the alphabet in the past, but a number of letters have been particularly challenging since they look similar to other ones or we just don’t have them in English so I have nothing to compare them to.
For my first artifact, I recorded myself speaking about myself as well as asking questions to a second person. English translations of some of the things I said or asked are below. I enjoyed speaking in Turkish. I do not seem to have issues with my accent as I am familiar with the sounds of the language due to my previous linguistic experiences. I think for this semester, I will aim to be able to sustain longer dialogues with native speakers and be able to ask more questions, especially if I am ordering in restaurants or doing shopping elsewhere. I enjoyed this experience, as I combined what I knew from last semester and used tenses and what I've learnt these past 3 weeks.
Some examples:
Good afternoon. My name is Manya. what is your name? Nice to meet you.
I'm nineteen, how old are you?
Where are you from? Where do you live? .....
I also work as an assistant in post office. It is an interesting job. What do you do in your free time? How many languages do you speak? ...
-oh that is great. I did not know you speak Italian....Have you been to Italy?
-Wonderful. It was nice meeting you. I hope to see you soon in Istanbul...
