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Korean Thanksgiving, or Chuseok, was Friday, September 13. I celebrated Chuseok on September 14, the first day of my hagwon class at the Lord Jesus Korean Church. I learned how to make tteok, which is a Korean rice cake. The type of tteok that we made was one that I have been eating ever since I was a child. It is called songpyeon, and it is finely ground rice made into dough and filled with sesame seeds, chestnuts, red beans, et cetera. It was fascinating to be able to make a childhood food from scratch. (Seriously, people made the dough beforehand completely from scratch!) First, we took the balls of dough and rolled them in our hands to soften them. We used the flour to coat the dough and make it less sticky. Next, we formed them into circles and put some of the filling inside. I believe the filling that we used was sesame seeds and brown sugar. Then, we folded the dough with the filling inside and shaped it into a ball. Finally, we pinched the top of the ball to form a decorative line. As we were making the tteok, we had several failures and successes; there was definitely a learning curve to making good-looking tteok. Apparently, if someone can make a particularly well-shaped tteok, they will have a beautiful daughter. Not only did I learn how to make tteok, but I found out about a fun idea related to it!

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay for all of the festivities, but making the tteok was fun. If we had stayed longer, we would have actually been able to eat our tteok (it needed to be steamed), seen dancing, and, of course, eaten delicious food. The girls in the picture are wearing hanboks, which are traditional Korean attire. They are worn for formal occasions such as festivals, celebrations, and ceremonies.

I did some research on Chuseok and found some interesting things about it. Chuseok is one day, but it is celebrated for three days, including the day before and after. It is a time to be with family. Some people worship and pay respects to the spirits of their ancestors, and most families make songpyeon together. The purpose of Chuseok is to celebrate the harvest season. Another thing that I learned is that other countries also celebrate the harvest season with festivals. China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, Argentina’s Vendima (the National Grape Harvest Festival), and American Thanksgiving are examples of other countries’ holidays that celebrate the harvest season. They vary in regards to tradition, food, and festivities, but are all a time to come together and enjoy.

Something else that I remembered while reading about Chuseok is that the date is determined by the lunar calendar, which means that it on slightly different dates each year. Koreans consider autumn to be the best season of the year due to weather conditions that are ideal for the harvesting season. They celebrate the bountiful harvest and hope that next year’s season will be better than the last.

In the future, I hope to celebrate Chuseok with my family and in Korea!

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Israeli tv is known for it's production quality, realism, and violence, all of which tend to appeal to the younger generation of Americans who grew up with violent and realistic movies and video games. The most popular Israeli show worldwide is Fauda, which in Arabic means "chaos" but more commonly refers to a violent riot. The show is split perspective between an Israeli secret service/FBI adjacent counterterrorism unit and a couple "shahid" (martyrs or terrorists depending on who you are) who fight for a military wing of Hamas, the quasi-official government of Gaza. One of the main themes of the show is how far should government agencies be willing to go to quash extremism and terrorism? As Hamas kills more and more Israeli civilians, should shabach (the FBI guys) be allowed to kidnap and kill wives and fathers of the Hamas operatives? Because the show frames the conflict with both sides practicing violent and evil tactics, it is popular with both Israeli viewers who appreciate the honest and non-propagandist story, and Palestinian/other Arab viewers who feel they are portrayed as people rather than faceless monsters. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is complex, and needs a complex show to adequately deal with the subject matter. 

Because the show is produced by Netflix, it comes with high quality subtitles in pretty much any language you could choose which makes it easy to understand and translate words or phrases that you are interested in. Also, because it is such a ubiquitous show among Israelis (and a point of national pride), they are quite willing to discuss the show and help to understand what the characters are talking about in any certain scene. It hits especially close to home for many Israelis because they personally have been affected by both sides of the conflict in very concrete ways, unlike in America where although we have been at war for almost decades now serving in the army is rare and it can sometimes feel extremely far away. Some interesting things I have learned about the show: the main character (pictured below), who is something like a plainclothes FBI agent who conducts assassinations and kidnappings for Israel actually had this job in his youth. That was likely during the time of the second Intifada in the early 2000's, when there was a surge in Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets. So the actor who plays this character likely carried out very similar missions and fights to what is portrayed in the show. The show is directed by him as well. The show is mainly filmed in Israeli-Arab areas where there is peace rather than the west bank or Gaza where fighting continues today.

One of the things I found interesting concerning language used much words relating to war or violence have been adopted into Hebrew slang. Here are four slangy ways to say  "good:"

Esh - fire

Satzah - bomb

Til - rocket, as in the rockets that are regularly fired at Israeli cities

Pagaz - shell, as in artillery shell

Since almost all youths serve in the army, it makes sense that so many army-centric words would make their way into common parlance.

The two big sounds in hebrew that don't exist in american english are ch and r. This ch is probably the most recognizable sound in hebrew, if you ever hear someone speaking and they say this sound often they are likely speaking hebrew, or arabic to a lesser extent. Even if you don't know anything about Hebrew you probably know words that are meant to be said with this sound. Hannukah, an important jewish holiday that every american has likely at least heard of can also be written Channukah since the first sound is the hebrew ch. The sound itself is like an H that is choked in the back of the throat. It isn't very pretty, but it is important and sounds scary if you need to yell at someone. My language partner reminded me that  a big mistake that foreigners make when pronouncing this letter is focusing too hard in it. Since americans usually have little difficulty with the rest of the word, we often overpronounce the ch since we are thinking of getting that one part right. The more native pronunciation is relaxed and not so exaggerated. Here are some words I know that use ch:

nachon - right as in yes you are right

achi - bro

ochev - eat

ma shlom cha - whats up

The other difficult sound is an r. Because the american r is very unique, we often have a difficult time learning other languages version of the letter. Hebrew's is deep in the throat, untrilled (unlike arabic) and similar to the french r as far as I can tell. Not every r is pronounced this way however  - so far it seems like r at the beginning of a word is more similar to ours, as in "raba." One funny story I heard about this letter from an Israeli soldier : she spent about three years in America growing up and therefore had a pretty American r while speaking English. She told me that she could never fall in love with anybody who pronounced r the Hebrew way because she found it so extremely ugly. A word with this r sound:

perot - fruit

That's actually all i know so far because this sound is much less common than ch. Also I don't like pronouncing it so maybe I skip some of the words with it in it.

I am an avid watcher of Korean TV, especially dramas. In fact, the only things I watch in general are YouTube, Korean dramas, and Korean variety shows. Here at school, I usually watch them while I eat to save time, but back at home, I watch with my family. Recently, the drama I have been watching since March of this year just finished. The drama in English is called “Mother of Mine,” while the literal translation from Korean is actually “My Prettiest Daughter in the World”. I think “prettiest” in this case is actually more like “precious” and not the physical aspect of it. I find the English title to be very interesting. “Mother of Mine” is from the perspective of the mother’s three daughters, while the Korean title is from the perspective of the mother. I do not know the intent behind flipping the title. Maybe the original title was too long, or maybe it is the difference in culture?

Anyway, this drama captures the importance of family in the Korean culture. The drama features Park Sunja, the mother who runs a seolleongtang, or ox bone soup restaurant alone and her three daughters. The oldest daughter, Kang Misun, is married with a daughter of her own and finds herself in many frustrating and difficult situations with her husband, daughter, and in-laws. She struggles with balancing a career with expectations and responsibilities of being a mom. The second daughter, Kang Miri, is a hardworking career woman who seems unapproachable and intimidating at work, but with her family, she’s completely different. Out of the three daughters, she truly expresses how much she loves her mom, who isn’t actually her real mom. As she engages in a relationship with her coworker, the son of the family who owns the company they work at, she ends up in a complicated situation where she finds her birth mother, who is actually the aunt (by marriage) of the man she loves. Lastly, the youngest daughter, while immature and lazy, was once a promising author, but had been in a writer’s block for years until she meets the son of her past editor/publisher. After somehow sealing a contract with him, she eventually writes a book about her mom and her sisters.

By watching this drama, you can learn about family in Korean culture. Koreans are generally very family-oriented. Parents’ primary goal is to see their children grow up to become more successful and educated than them, so most are devoted to their children’s success and well being. In the drama, the mother says how hard it was to send all three daughters to college all on her own with her restaurant. She takes care of her granddaughter, so her first daughter can go to work without upsetting her mother-in-law. She goes over to both her first two daughters’ apartments without them knowing in order to clean for them since they’re so busy. She also takes care of her youngest daughter who lives with her without a job.

This might be a huge spoiler, but when the mother is later diagnosed with end stage lung cancer, the daughters are shocked as the thought of her mother dying never crossed their minds. They realize how badly they treated their mom as they were so busy with their own lives. They feel an immense amount of guilt as they try to convince their mom to receive treatment, which only hurts her more. As I watched this drama, not only did I cry buckets of tears, but it made me realize how far my mom goes for me and she’s only becoming older and more tired. But overall, this drama was great and I highly recommend it.

Also this is a picture of seolleongtang. It tastes really good.

And here is a picture from the drama.

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The rules of pronunciation are extremely interesting and each country has its own unique rules. While the international phonetic alphabet is used in many languages around the world, Korean is the Roman sound, as is Japanese. Chinese is even more unique, using Pinyin for phonetic notation. As for the formation of Korean, Korean consonants and vowels are created according to the oral structure of human beings, the ancient Chinese thought of heaven, earth and human beings, and the theory of Yin and Yang. Such as ㄱ which like the shape of your tongue throat closed. ㄴ, like the shape of tongue attached palate. ㅁ, like the shape of mouth. ㅅ, like tooth profile. Guttural ㅇ, like pipes. At present, the Korean alphabet consists of 21 vowels and 19 consonants, which can be made into many syllables. It is simple and systematic, and can comprehensively record Korean speech. Korean text is made up of syllables, it's good for reading, but also creates a lot of homophones word, same spelling, such as "story", "temple", "ancient words", "leave" and "dead" are writing "고사". Therefore, the context must be used to determine the context.

I think the most important thing in learning Korean is the memory of word combination and the understanding of sentence. Because the difference mainly among Korean, Chinese, and English is that, for Chinese and English, each word has its own meaning. Many times, if you don't know one or two words in a sentence, you can still infer the meaning of the whole sentence from the words before and after the test. In Korean, however, mostly a word has different meanings in different sentences, so for the overall grasp and requires a high degree of semantic understanding.

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Last week I took my first ever Korean class with Professor Kim. We had a quite small class size, which I like because then everyone gets more chances to ask questions and practice more conversation wise.  In the class, we started with a introduction video to Korean on YouTube. That video helped me to understand some basic information about Korean as a language. Professor Kim introduced us to IPA------International Phonetic Alphabet. IPA was quite a helpful tool for me when I started learning English because I could easily read out the words with IPA’s spelling by the side even though I don’t know the words beforehand. In the same way, IPA can also aid me with pronouncing Korean syllables.

            Professor Kim gave us two handouts in addition. The first handout is “Quick Guide to Hangeul”. It provides the consonants and vowels. The second handout is some more specific information to the consonants and vowels. The first handout additionally describes how syllable blocks (Korean words) are formed with certain rules. Each syllable block at least has a consonant and one vowel, and sometimes with a third optional final consonant. This is the “minimum two letter rule.” Every syllable is either structured vertically or horizontally, and it must start with a consonant and then vowel. The vowel will be in the middle if the optional consonant is present. There are some other rules about silencing the vowels’ sound given specific circumstances.

            I learned some other significant things about Korean. Korean is more towards unsounded voices. So that’s why it would sound softer than some other language which are more prone to sounded voices. And when Professor Kim gave us our Korean names with the closest pronunciation, I discovered that Korean doesn’t have the “l” sound so my Korean name will be pronounced like “Ranqin” rather than “Lanqin”. These details about the phonology and other structures in Korean will definitely save me a lot of time when learning Korean.

            This week, I will focus on mastering Hangeul, especially the sounds of the vowels and consonants. Right now I want to focus more on the speaking and listening than reading and writing. Professor Kim said that for starters in Korean like me, I should not try to memorize how the syllables are written, but on how to speak some basic things like self-introduction and short phrases. The resources I will use for these are the handouts given to me, YouTube videos that teaches the Hangeul. Additionally, I found the Chinese version of the book that Professor Kim recommended--- Yonsei Korean 1-1. The book uses some Chinese characters as approximates of the vowels and consonants in Korean. That can actually help me better than IPA in some ways. I think the best thing to do is to reinforce those sounds multiple times. Repetition of sounds for me is one of the most useful ways for me to remember them, especially if they are short sounds like the vowels and consonants. I want to use visual materials combined with auditory ones since I believe a combination of them will be more effective than just a single kind. So far, this method is working, and I am continuing this method with the Hangeul.

In Atchison’s linguistics, he provides a diagram to show the range that linguistics covers. It has phonetics in the center, surrounded by phonology, then syntax, then semantics, then pragmatics, and then various fields of study centred in linguistics. Similarly in the structure of language, David Crystal divides language into disciplines—pronunciation, grammar, and meaning—which have their own sub-disciplines and some variations of approach like sociolinguistic, historical, and psycholinguistic. After reading these texts I’ve come to understand that, for me, I would not want to learn a language by perfecting the inner circle before moving onto the outer one in Atchison’s linguistics, or by perfecting one discipline before moving onto the next in David Crystal’s structure of language. Instead, I’d want to work on each of the circles/ disciplines simultaneously as I keep learning. What I mean to say is that I do not want to just perfect my pronunciation before learning about grammar, I want to learn common phrases and words and dive into each one of them by examining their structure in the order of moving from inside out in Atchison’s analysis and from right-to-left in David Crystal’s analysis. I prefer learning ‘안녕하세요’ along side learning Hangul, pronunciations, and the correct way to use it, over just working on Hangul till I perfect it. 

Similarly, I think that it would be best to analyses what I learn in a historical, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approach to get a holistic understanding of the language.I personally prefer diving deeper into the sociolinguistic approach because I find this approach to be the most exciting in the way that it relates how different social situations influence language which essentially speaks to the culture of the native speakers of the language, and that is something I’m really interested in learning about.

I’ve used what I learned from these readings in what I learned this week. Korean is a really cool language because most of its alphabet shape essentially imitates the shape of the vocal organs when you pronounce it, and so it is written literally exactly the way that it’s pronounced. This makes learning Korean much easier. This week I learned to read and write Hangul and I’ve been practicing it all week. I also learned some commonly used phrases in Korean from the omniglot website. Also after listening to multiple pronunciations in various videos I can now greet someone I meet in a very basic way by saying my name and saying that I’m pleased to meet them. I practiced this several times and recorded a video of this basic greeting. For the next week I want to learn more commonly used phrases and add more details to my basic meeting/ introduction, and I also want to learn the Korean numbers from 1-10. If possible, I could also look into some of the important root words that are used in Korean.

The article mentions four-level models of languages, which includes phonetics, phonology, grammar and semantics. To be honest, I’m still confused about the difference between phonetics and phonology, since they are both the study of the sound. But still, I want to compare the structures of languages I studied before. In terms of sounds (not sure it is phonetics or phonology), I feel like English, French and Turkish have similar sound system, though English has the simplest one, while Chinese is totally different from them. It is interesting to see that every language has its “fixed pattern” of sounds, and if you are going to learn a new language which contains the sounds beyond that pattern, you will have trouble pronouncing that sound. For example, when I was studying French, some of American students will find it really hard to pronounce “r” in French, because English does not have that sound. But for Chinese it’s quite easy because we have similar sound in our language. And I found I could not pronounce “r” in Turkish, even after practicing a lot, I still can’t, since I’ve never got any touch with that kind of sound before and it is like I can’t control my throat. In terms of grammar and semantics, it is interesting to see that French has feminine and masculine difference while Chinese, Turkish and English don’t have it, so I found it really hard to sort it out when I was studying French at the beginning. But English sometimes has something similar to this. For example, actor stands for masculine and actress stands for feminine. But most of time there’s no such difference. Also, Turkish put the negative form into the verb itself, so it doesn’t have auxiliary verbs (words like am, is, do, doesn’t in English or suis or n’est pas in French).

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So far I had two Turkish classes, and I felt that the class schedule is much more intense than I thought. Learning a new language is always difficult at first after all.
In the first class, we learned the pronunciation of every alphabet in Turkish. Turkish has 28 alphabets which are different from English. Almost all the alphabets are written the same way as English. However, the pronunciation is kind of similar to the English letter. Such similarity actually is not a convenience for me, since it is easy to confuse the pronunciation of the Turkish alphabet with the English letters. However, after the continuous practice for two weeks, I think I can accurately pronounce most alphabets. Also, different from the pronunciation rule in English, every Turkish alphabet has only one pronunciation in words. For example, "a" is pronounced differently in the words "valley" and "apple". In Turkish, "a" only has one pronunciation. Therefore, once I learned the pronunciation of every Turkish alphabet, I could pronounce almost every Turkish words.
We also learned several basic greetings, such as "Hello, my name is Yahui Wu. what is your name". "How are you?". "I am doing good, thank you!" Although I do not quiet understand the grammar of those sentence at first, learning those greetings gave me confidence that I can speak Turkish and motivated me to learn more.
At the second class, we reviewed the alphabets and learned some basic grammar. Turkish grammar is different from English grammar. In English, the structure is "pronounce + verb + object", like "I read books". However, in Turkish, the structure is " pronounce + object + verb", like "I books read". The Turkish grammar structure is pretty similar to the Japanese Grammer structure. In Japanese, the verb is also at the end of the sentence. Also, in Turkish, there is no difference between she, he and it, we use the same word "O (singular form")" or "Onlar (plural form)" to refer to the third party.
One thing I noticed really interesting about Turkish grammar is that the verb plays a crucial role in constructing the grammar. In other words, we change the form of the verb to show the time, the singularity or plurality of the pronounce and the negative form. For example, In English, we add the word " don't" to the sentence to show negative meaning, like " I don't read books." Otherwise, in Turkish, we will change the form of the verb to show negative meaning. Specifically, we would change "Ben (I) kitap (book) okurum (read)" to "Ben (I) kitap (book) okumam (don't read)". Thus, all Turkish learner needs to master all forms of the verb.
Besides, we watched a TED talk at the end of the second class. The speaker is a well-known female Turkish novel writer, who write novels both in Turkish and English. During the speech, she talked about her different experiences writing in English and Turkish. She said that when writing in Turkish, she is more emotional and imaginative since Turkish is her mother language. However, when writing in English, she is more rational and straightforward, since she needs to think about the grammars and spells.
Overall, I think my learning process for the first two weeks is satisfactory. We plan to learn more grammar and new words about color and food in the next several weeks, which is exciting for me. I also want to watch a Turkish movie next week to improve my knowledge about Turkish culture.

D. Crystal mentioned a really interesting notion about the collocation in the reading "How we mean and how we analyze meaning". Collocation refers to the predictable way that the vocabularies work together. For example, the word "sparkling" is always followed by "water" or "wine", or "blood" is always followed by "hair". For me, collocation has pros and cons. It may create a barricade for people who are trying to learn a foreign language since it varies among different languages. People may feel awkward at first since they need to learn the new collocations in a foreign language, which are different from their mother tongue. For example, in English, people say "play basketball". However, in Chinese, we say 打篮球, which means " hit basketball". However, on the other hand, once ones get used to the collocation, it would be convenient for them to speak like a native speaker since ones just need to remember the most authentic collocation.

In D. Crystal's another reading "how the brain handles the language", the most important parts for speech production and comprehension are Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area, and auditory cortex. However, there are other regions which are also important for communications. It is arbitrary to attribute the functions of communication and information process to a single area. Some complicated activities always involve collaborative work of different brain areas.

From my perspective, language learning is not a purely biological process. Besides constructing sentences and pronouncing the words, it is also important to embody the sentences with meaning. It requires people to know the culture behind the new language and even the lifestyle of local people who speak the new foreign language. If ones could not make other people understand what they are saying, the language is just a bootless tool. After the language is the carrier of different thoughts and ideas and it is of equal importance for the sender to express and for the receiver to understand.

September 22 Bi-Weekly Journal

This week, I met with Jenna on Thursday. This was the first real student-teacher experience. In this class, Jenna taught me the basic Korean alphabet. We went over exactly how to say each character in Korean. We practiced how to write each character and I also learned the different double character words in Korean. These characters are basically the prefixes or the base character of Korean words. Next, we learned the suffix  characters in Korean words. In Korean, one prefix and one suffix is added together to create on full word. For this class, we only went over how to pronounce each character for both the suffix and prefix characters.

I was pretty satisfied on what we accomplished that class. I was hoping to learn the alphabet and review the pronunciations the first week of tutoring. Furthermore, we watched a compilation of scenes from a popular Korean TV show. As we watched, I learned new words and asked Jenna what exactly was happening in parts that I was confused by. For homework, Jenna assigned me to practice writing the suffix and prefix characters until I memorized each one in order. In class, we also practiced reading a Korean news article on the weather. We went word for word, and she would correct me if I pronounced a word wrong. I think this study session was really helpful in learning the basic characters of Korean. 

Personally, I have been watching Korean TV shows on YouTube with captions to understand how different words are spelled and how they are pronounced. We haven’t learned any complicated words yet in Korean, even though I know some of them, so I omitted from learning them yet. For the upcoming weeks, I will become incorporating listening to music and radio broadcasts in Korean to become accustomed to the language. Furthermore, I will begin reading lyrics to songs and watching shows with subtitles. I will slow down the videos so I can have more time to read it properly. From a cultural standpoint, I think I will try going to Korean church on Sundays. One of my fraternity brothers go to a Korean church and they provide lunch after service. I think this is a great opportunity, not only to learn the speaking of religion in Korean, but also to try true Korean food at the church. 

So far, I think my effectiveness of learning Korean is going pretty well. Jenna helped me understand the Korean alphabet again and refreshed my memory on pronunciations. In the future, I will keep reviewing the suffix/prefix characters and soon learn more complicated characters in the future. Also, I will soon begin reading Korean articles about sports and news. 

I have had a fun time learning the basics of the Korean alphabet. Since I already know how to speak it fluently, it was really interesting to see how the words I say all the time is spelled and written. So far this week, I have spent some time rewriting the different characters in Korean as neatly as possible, until it is second-hand. I think just rewriting the characters over and over is very helpful in learning the language. 

In Korean I see all the different structures present—semantics, grammar, and linguistic transmission. My goal in the SDLC class is to learn to read and write. I think the structure that I can mostly see in my learning in Korean is the medium of linguistic transmission, where I learn phonetics and phonology under reading and writing. 

From the diagram on page 9, I can see how the different disciplinary perspectives could apply to Korean as a language to a whole. There are different types of linguistics that are differentiated in the figure that are under different subjects such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. These different linguistic perspectives can help create a more complete dictionary for a language learner. Knowing vocabulary from each of the main linguistic subjects will allow me to become more efficient in that language. Learning one aspect of linguistics won’t necessarily help you excel in a certain language. One must learn the semantics, phonetics, syntax, and all other aspects of the perspectives in order to truly learn a new language. This can relate to the video we watched in the beginning (ted talk), where immersing yourself in a culture to learn about the “other” aspects of a language culture is equally, if not more effective, in learning to speak a language. 

For me personally, I think that all the disciplinary perspectives are important in learning Korean. Learning the different language structures definitely will help me in the SDLC class in Korean. Being able to widen my perspectives in different subjects of Korean can help me have a more diverse learning plan. 

I’ve already had two Turkish courses with my language partner and it has been really excited! At the first class, I was so worried about learning Turkish, because they look so complicated and it is different from any language I’ve studied before. Turkish even has 29 letters, while English and French only have 26. Also, most of letters looked exactly the same as English letters, but all of them sound differently from English. So, at the beginning, I can’t even read those 29 letters fluently because I always get confused between the pronunciations of English and Turkish. It’s really hard to look at the letter “A” but pronounce differently. Also, they have new letters, which are Ç, Ğ, Ö, Ş, Ü and İ. These letters look very beautiful but they are really hard to pronounce. However, after practicing several times, I began to read them fluently, although I still can’t pronounce them exactly correct. Maybe after more and more listening and practices, I can do it much better.

We also studied the basic grammar and subjects. It is interesting to see that they put verb in the ending of sentence. For example, if you want to say “I read a book”, the Turkish grammar sequence is like “I book read” or “book read”. Turkish has 6 subjects, which are pretty different from English but similar to French. They do not use he or she separately, because they use third person subject as “O” and don’t have different subjects for different genders. Also, the word “Siz” not only stands for plural form of third person subject, but also meaning “you” in a more respectful way. For example, they use “Siz” when talking to professor or someone unfamiliar, while using “Sen” (means “you”) when talking to friends. This is really similar to French. Because they use “Vous” as a respectful form of “Tu”. Also, in Chinese, we use “您” as being respectful, but when talking to friends, we mainly use “你“. But in this situation “您” does not stand for the plural form of the second person subject, which is different from French and Turkish. And they also have longer word than English words or French words, because Turkish is more like put all of the grammar into the verb. The verb has six basic forms when they follow different subjects. Besides that, they also put negative form and tenses into verb, so they do not have “do not” or “did not” this kind of things.

Also, the greetings are also different when they talking to different person. For example, with friends they use “Merhaba” as “Hello” but with respectful people, such as professors, they will use “İyi günler” to greet, which means “good day”. It is really interesting because in the States, it’s like we say Hello to everyone. But in China, we also use different greetings when we meet different people. We use “你好“ when we first meet a person who is in similar age, we use “嗨” (which sounds like “hi” and I believe it was from English) when we meet our friends, and we use “您好“ when we greet to respectful people, such as elder people or professors.

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My most recent Malay lessons have focused on the topics of activities and food, along with my continued study of numbers. A goal I had set for myself - to gain a stronger foundation in the number system and less hesitation saying them - is still being worked towards , however I am nonetheless quite happy with the speed with which I am progressing with regard to numbers and, loosely, pronunciation (though I still struggle with certain words, such as "dengan"). As I have expanded my vocabulary related to activities I like to do and food I like (or do not like) to eat, I have recognized that sentence structure is quite similar to English and even Mandarin, Loan words from both languages also exist, e.g. "epal" for apple and "mihun" for noodle (面, miàn, in Mandarin). A new goal of mine related to this is to learn to what extent loanwords from English and Mandarin exist in the language, something that was mentioned in the article by Tim Ferriss to more easily expand vocabulary in the target language. In addition, I have benefitted from learning some basic adverbs, such as "telah" to indicate that something has already happened (since, similar to Mandarin, no verb modifications for tenses exist in Malay) and "sangat" to indicate an extreme degree. 

My conversations with Melissa have yielded some interesting and unexpected cultural insights. When I travelled to Malaysia last Fall, I realized that, anytime I ordered coffee, it automatically came with cream and sugar. According to Melissa, simply ordering "kopi" or "teh" implies that it will come with milk and sugar added unless you explicitly say one of the following: saying "O" after to forgo milk but keep the sugar, or "O kosong (zero)" to forgo both milk and sugar. Another interesting concept was related to the word for 'love' in Malay. The language has two separate words for this ("saya" for love of family and "cinta" for a lover and your nation). Additionally, you cannot say that you 'love' a certain food with either of these words, but instead have to opt for 'really liking' that food. I would be interested in exploring more deeply how this connects to nationalism and what nationalism means in Malay and to Malaysians. Melissa has been very good about offering insights such as these throughout our lessons and, even more so, indicating when something I have learned is too formal or seldom used. This is one of the most salient advantages of having a dedicated language partner assist me in my language learning endeavors and something for which I am quite grateful already.

Last Wednesday, I got to take a quiz that Melissa put together that tested my knowledge of existing material and assessed my ability to fuse together disparate parts and form new sentences or meanings. This went well and, following my completion, I got to review the content with Melissa and see how I fared. The last part of the quiz comprised of a simple dialogue that I had to complete. After reviewing my responses, Melissa and I recorded this dialogue out loud and I got to fill in both roles to practice my pronunciation, speed, etc. I would like to continue to use these types of recording methods and see how I can improve my speaking by listening to myself and noticing my slip-ups or general areas of difficulties. 

Now that I have met with my language partner a couple of times I can speak with much more confidence about the things I am doing right and the things that I am doing (very) wrong. Overall I am happy with the progress I have made, but I do feel like there are limitations in language self-study. Without being in a classroom and meeting almost every day, it is difficult to remember to study Hebrew and to retain new vocabulary. Luckily, Hebrew is not a particularly difficult language and my sessions with my partner are fruitful enough for me to have made significant progress, especially in the realm of pronunciation. My "ch" sounds much more natural and words like aruchat which I previously struggled a lot with have become much easier. My partner didn't unfortunately have any wise advice about how to pronounce the r, which I still struggle with. Thankfully it is not an incredibly common letter and mispronouncing it, according to my partner, makes me sounds foreign rather than flat out wrong. I have also learned more slang and useful phrases like slicha (excuse me), ma ko re (whats good), and yafa (cutie). The last one actually came from my dad, but my partner got quite a kick out of being called that. I also learned the word metzekoah, which literally translates to half-power, but is slang for so-so. It was interesting calling my dad and saying these new words so he could see how much the language has changed since he lived in Israel over 30 years ago. So far the most impressive activity I have been able to do is pretend I am at a restaurant and order food for me and my partner, who also happens to be the waiter. Through this activity I have learned some cultural particularities that I might not have gotten from reading a textbook. I knew the word for hurry up (maher) previously, but I would never have said that when ordering, because in America and especially in the south that would be seen astonishingly rude. But apparently that is said in Israel quite often, occasionally paired with benzonah (son of a *****) although I believe that is reserved more for traffic situations. Either way, this method of learning primarily from native speaker who has never taught a language before means that adapting to cultural differences and linguistic differences goes hand in hand, and I think so far it has been working out well. In the coming weeks I hope to continue work on pronunciation as well as begin to learn more about the grammatical structure of Hebrew as well as male/female conjugations, since part of the activity involved using verbs such as I want and I eat. Looking ahead, over fall break when I have more time to study I want to begin on the alphabet so I can stop using the crutch of a latin alphabet. The timing for that is on purpose as my Arabic class has mostly finished the alphabet and diacritic lessons and I didn't want to learn them at the same time. One of the things I look at daily that makes me proud and motivated is how many different keyboards I have downloaded on my phone... 6! with that get used often. I would definitely recommend downloading the keyboard of your target language even if you don't really use it. It is at least cool to look at!

I will meet with my language partner for the first time this coming Tuesday. Unfortunately the times didn't work out so this is the earliest meeting available, but I have taken this weekend to do my own preparations to make the meeting easier and more effective for me and my partner. For the first couple weeks what I hope to focus on is basic phrases and pronunciation, because I feel like I will be more motivated to continue with the language if I feel like I already have some ability to just speak. Also, I want to impress my dad over the phone with what I can say, and I hope to understand whatever inane cursing he yells back. To that end I have been splitting my preparation time between the app Drops and various sources online that list common and useful Hebrew phrases, such as "how are you?" and "im good, thanks." One of the questions I plan on asking my language partner is if these phrases that I have reviewed actually see much use in Israel. I know from seeing some ESL textbooks that the English they teach kids first learning the language can come off stilted and awkward if said in an informal context. I guess the reasoning is that its better to be accidentally formal in an unfamiliar situation rather than accidentally informal with people you shouldn't be casual with, but since I will most only be talking with my father and my friends for the time being I would rather learn to speak like a native 21 year old - for instance, saying whats up as a greeting and not expecting an answer I think is a good example of a native American habit that might seem odd to foreigners even if they speak excellent English. I hope my language partner will be able to help with those kind of questions.

On Drops the first chapter is all about food. I think that is a pretty good category overall because it contains words that you will always need to use regardless of who you are. So far I have learned words like lechem (bread), maraq (soup), mazleg and kaf (fork and spoon), and the very difficult to pronounce aruchat boqer (breakfast) and perot (fruits). What makes these quite difficult is the ch and r sound in Hebrew that are pretty distinct to how how we say things in English. The ch is a gargling sound from the back of the throat, and though I can make the sound I have trouble doing it consistently. It helps if I have recently taken a drink of water or a smoothie or something though. What makes aruchat particularly difficult is that you must slide into the ch from a vowel sound, u. It is a tricky word to make sound natural but I think I am making progress. The r is more like the french r I believe, and I have no hope of doing this correctly as of now. Hopefully by my next journal I will be doing better!