Personally, I felt that most of the reading was pretty boring. It had too many technical terms for me to stay intrigued. But I did find a few things quite interesting. For instance, I had no idea that there was an entire system for classifying vowels (chapter 10). I have always just thought of them as a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, like we have learned since elementary school. Of course, I knew that depending on the word, there can be long or short vowels, but it was interesting to read about the more complex classifications, even if I didn't completely understand it. I felt that chapter 12 was the most useful because it discussed more how we speak and our tones of voice. For instance, we change our tone depending on what emotions we are trying to express, what kind of sentence we are using (a question v a statement), the meaning of the sentence, etc. I also thought some of the information on how children learn language was interesting, but I don't know how to apply that to self directed learning. I really thought the part on page 87 with the study with the fish was really interesting. Although the child knew that the word was fish, he kept pronouncing it fis.
I think my vocab is coming along well. I can recognize about 50 - 75 words while reading something, and have about half of that memorized into my vocab. My biggest problem is that in drill with Professor Kapanga and our language tutors it is all spoken, and I am more of a visual learner. I have to write something down to remember it. But it is coming along quite well in my opinion.
