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During the first two weeks of learning Bahasa Indonesian, I have been working on a variety of tasks. So far, I have practiced answering yes or no questions, introducing myself and my friends, and discussing my daily routines. I have also learned vocabulary and cultural insights about public transportation, public places, and food places in Indonesia. During these next two weeks, I hope to be able to introduce myself and have an introductory conversation without looking at my notes and be able to count to twenty.
My language learning has mostly been based on the daily, one-hour zoom meetings with our Indonesian teaching assistant, Farida. As a professional language instructor, she has created a syllabus for me and a fellow student learning Indonesian and has guided us through the basics of Indonesian language and culture. We have grammar-focused classes on Monday and Tuesday, and culture-focused classes on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, we have a less formal language table as well as the opportunity for one-on-one tutoring. As discussed in SDLC 105 this week, speaking practice is key to language development. By meeting with Farida 5-6 times a week, I have the opportunity to use the language with a native speaker. We spend a significant portion of each class working through speaking activities, and I feel like I have made progress, though I need to be actively taking notes so that I can retain the new vocabulary.
This format has held me accountable for making language learning a daily practice, provided ample opportunities for speaking practice and insights on Indonesian culture. During class, I take notes. At the end of the week, I then reorganize these words into a folder reserved exclusively for my Indonesian vocabulary. Another strategy I have to remember vocabulary is to write new words on color-coded sticky notes, which I then hang in my bedroom to practice informally. This week, Farida has also prompted us to start a daily practice of memorizing 5-10 new vocabulary words each day. This daily practice of memorizing new vocabulary words is a manageable habit that will culminate in significant progress and help me achieve long-term goals. By the end of the month, I will have between 150 and 300 new words! Since I am a visual learner, writing these words in sentences and making little doodles beside them has helped me to retain vocabulary. When learning new words, I usually try to limit myself to one part of speech. For example, today I memorized 10 new verbs. I will build on the grammatical structures and vocabulary by also learning about Indonesia’s culture. Today, we studied food places and applied the grammatical skills to actual conversations we would have if ordering food in Indonesia. Learning about the culture is helps to reveal nuances about the language and read between the lines. During these next two weeks, I will evaluate the effectiveness of my notetaking and organization strategies and reframe if necessary. If I find that I am having trouble remembering my new vocabulary words, for example, I may try a new approach, such as saying them aloud 10 times or coming up with a mnemonic device. I will consider how to make the most of my time in class with Farida. For example, I might spend five minutes before class reviewing notes from last week, or maybe it would make more sense to transfer new vocabulary to my nice folder every day instead of once a week.

Jesse Amankwaah
Dr. Marsh-Soloway
30 August 2020

Reflection Paper

As a language learner, I am really enjoying the opportunity to chart my own course in
this journey. Language learning has always been really interesting to me but I always felt so
discouraged because I could not keep up with the pace, but it was not the language learning that
turned me off. Even just learning about the families that language belongs to is amazing to me
because it makes me feel connected to other people that I would think I have no history with.
Our ancestors were closer than I could ever imagine and just thinking about those language
families gives me hope for the future. I now have a basis for exploring the empires and
civilizations that existed before the modern world as we know it. What I dislike about language
learning will always be that there is a learning curve, and a time where you are not sure whether
you are learning or your short term memory is just working well. Trying to adjust to another
language also comes with different phases where you try to translate everything directly from the
language that you already speak. During this process the exchanges are slow and you feel very
silly. You try to memorize key phrases like how to use the bathroom and how to say hello and
see how far you can get with it. Then you need to ask a question, so you learn the grammar
structure of a question, then past and future tenses and vocabulary to help you express yourself.
It has taken me my entire life to understand in what order that I need to learn a language for it to
make sense to me and so even though that process doesn’t seem complex, it has helped me quite

a bit. With this course, I am excited to learn an even better process that is backed up with
pedagogy and practice.

The language learning activities that best suit me are the ones where I watch a video with
subtitles and try to answer questions based on context and the knowledge I have acquired from
that language. I think activities that allow me to get thrown into the fire really help me because I
know that naturally I will want to keep myself safe and in my comfort zone to avoid losing
confidence. Studying abroad helped show me that being thrown in the fire is really the only way
to develop in proficiency once you have passed the elementary level. I also really enjoy activities
that allow me to engage with people that are at my proficiency level so I can get an
understanding of what I should be able to understand after having practiced and asking my peers
what strategies have worked for them. I still have to develop learning strategies that will help me
with a language I have no working knowledge of because there are no cognates to help me out
this time in the context of Malay. I am really looking for this 105 course to break down for me
the building blocks of language and compare it with the way I have studied languages in the past
to theorize what would work best for me.

When I was around 9 years old, I would try to learn languages through Rosetta Stone. My first inspiration for trying to learn a new language was because a close family friend of mine was Italian, and I wanted to learn how to speak with them in Italian. Another language that I tried to self-teach through Rosetta Stone was Spanish. It was amazing, to me, seeing how similar certain words were between the two languages. Though I enjoyed going through the modules on Rosetta Stone and learning new vocabulary, I regrettably didn’t practice speaking the language outside of the program and didn’t take the initiative to watch shows or read books in the languages that I was attempting to learn.

In high school, I took three years of Spanish classes to complete my language requirement. Throughout those three years, I was able to really learn what methods of teaching a language that I benefited from best. When I first began Spanish, I took it in a CP course. I enjoyed the model that my teacher utilized in that we learned Spanish through making up stories. The teacher would often include the names of students and make references to popular culture of the time. Periodically, we would view parodies of current trending songs that were made in Spanish.  We were encouraged to practice speaking to one another in simple sentences using the terminology that we were exposed to. This professor practiced mostly immersion and spoke in Spanish throughout the majority of the class. The following year, I enrolled in Honors Spanish with a different teacher, and the style was different than I had encountered in the previous year. This class focused more on grammar and sentence structure, which I soon found that I struggled with. However, one difference in this teaching style that I particularly enjoyed was how we were exposed to Latin American culture through the literature we reviewed in class.

After taking my Spanish courses, during my senior year, I decided to enroll in a German class online. I was inspired to learn German due to how my school had a foreign exchange student program, and many of my closest peers were from Germany. This was my first experience trying to take an online language course that was mostly self-paced. Each week, we had a session in which we would gain live instruction from the teacher over materials we had learned in the past week. This live session also granted participants the chance to practice speaking the language. I’ve found that I really benefit from repetition and hearing others speak in the language that I am attempting to learn.

If I had the chance to go back to when I first started exploring other languages, I wish that I had taken more of an effort to learn more about the cultures of the languages that I was learning. As someone who is very much a visual and an auditory learner, I would have greatly benefitted from reading books or watching television series that communicated in the language that I was seeking to learn. This realization of how I best learn languages is what makes me excited as I study American Sign Language more this semester. I plan to be intentional with communicating with members of the Deaf community, as well as spend time watching deaf or HOH YouTubers to continue learning more about their culture. I think that engaging with members of the community is especially important, as I’ve learned while self-teaching how some resources online are truly teaching SEE or PSE, rather than ASL.

For the first class of this semester, my fellow student Valentina, our language partner Jannette and I met for the first time. We decided to hold three meetings including one group meeting and two individual meetings based on our different levels. 

Sino-Korean System:

• 1 – 일 (il)
• 2 – 이 (ee)
• 3 – 삼 (sam)
• 4 – 사 (sa)
• 5 – 오 (oh)
• 6 – 육 (yook)
• 7 – 칠 (chil)
• 8 – 팔 (pal)
• 9 – 구 (gu)
• 10 – 십 (ship)

Native Korean System:

• 1 – 하나 (hana)
• 2 – 둘 (dul)
• 3 – 셋 (set)
• 4 – 넷 (net)
• 5 – 다섯 (daseot)
• 6 – 여섯 (yeoseot)
• 7 – 일곱 (ilgob)
• 8 – 여덟 (yeodeol)
• 9 – 아홉 (ahop)
• 10 – 열 (yeol)

For the individual meeting, I was able to regain the knowledge I learned from last semester-- numbers. There are two sets of numbers in Korean: the native Korean system and the Sino-Korean system. The native numbers are used for numbers of items (1-99) and age, while the Sino-Korean system is based on Chinese numbers and are used for dates, money, addresses, phone numbers, and numbers above 100. For this class, I consolidated my knowledge about recognizing and pronouncing numbers in both systems from 1 to 10. Moreover, I learned how to pronounce 11-100. To form double-digit numbers using Sino-Korean numbers, you just have to combine the number words from 1 to 10. For example:

• 20 – 이십
• 21 – 이십일

To make twenty, we use the words that refer to 2 (이) and 10 (십), and to make 21, we add the word that refers to 1 (일) to 20. The same logic applies to other double-digit numbers in the Sino-Korean number system. 

On the other hand, this logic doesn't apply to the formation of double-digit numbers in the Native Korean system. Similar to English numbers, the Native-Korean number system has specific words for double-digit numbers that end in zero, and these are numbers like 20, 30, 40, and so on.

• 20 – 스물 (seumul)
• 30 – 서른 (seoreun)
• 40 – 마흔 (maheun)
• 50 – 쉰 (swin)
• 60 – 예순 (yesun)
• 70 – 일흔 (ilheun)
• 80 – 여든 (yeodeun)
• 90 – 아흔 (aheun)

Both number systems have specific uses in Korean, and it’s important that the number systems are used appropriately.

Sino Korean numbers are used for the following purposes (the ones that were covered in our class):

• To say the date:
  • 일월 일일 (January 1^st)
• To count the days:
  • 일일, 이일
• To count the years:
  • 일 년, 이 년
• To count the months:
  • 일 개월, 이 개월

Native Korean numbers, on the other hand, are primarily used to count things. In Korean, when you count things, you have to use a specific word to count different nouns. These counting words are called counters.

The most common counter word is

Native Korean numbers, on the other hand, are primarily used to count things. In Korean, when you count things, you have to use a specific word to count different nouns. These counting words are called counters.

The most common counter word is 개 (ge), which we use to count most inanimate objects. However, there are many different counters in Korean. The one that was covered in our class was Age – 살 (sal). 

However, there are also some exceptions where both systems are used at the same time. 

One exception to the rule we covered is telling the time. When we tell the time in Korean, we actually use both Sino-Korean numbers and native-Korean numbers. 시 means ‘hour’, and to indicate what the hour is, we use native-Korean numbers in front of 시. 분 means ‘minute’, and to indicate how many minutes past the hour, we use Sino-Korean numbers in front of 분. For example:

• 1:10 – 한시 십분
• 5:20 – 다섯시 이십분
• 6:40 – 여섯시 사십분
• 10:05 – 열시 오분