We have done a little bit of writing recently and while learning the alphabet. For Korean, I definitely prefer to write free hand, because to type the language, I would have to learn a complete new keyboard that I am not used to yet. What I like about the Korean language is the direct translation between hangul and sound. Similar to English, where spelling and sound are very connected. However, it is frustrating sometimes to write words because there are very subtle nuances that make two completely different words, and sometimes it is impossible to catch those differences. With more complex sentences, there are more grammar rules at play, where the subject, particle, object go differs depend on a lot of factors, such as who you are speaking to. Knowledge of pronunciation has helped the most in the writing process, because of the knowledge of the multiple nuances. Some writing exercises could be writing down sounds and ask for the Korean transcription from it, such as “da, dea” and writing in Korean as “다, 대”
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How have you started to write in the target language? Do you prefer to type or write free hand? Have you started to see patterns emerge in the structures between words, clauses, and sentences? What is the relationship between simple and complex sentences? How does your knowledge of parts of speech, government, and agreement affect your ability to communicate in written contexts? Provide a sample of several short meaningful writing exercises from your target language.
Since I am not currently in the actual Korean class, I haven’t been actually studying the language, but for writing, whenever I text my parents, I attempt to write the messages in Korean. Writing in Korean is my weakest area. Writing texts in Korean is hard because I haven’t truly learned the grammar. So, I tend to write short, casual sentences. I also rely heavily on autocorrect, because spelling in Korean is so confusing and hard.
Here are some examples of a few of my recent text messages with my mom.
하이 엄마 —> Hi mom
아이패드로 문자를 보냈다 ㅋㅋㅋ —> I sent that message with the iPad lol
(Context: I recently got a new iPad.)
Since I only practice Korean writing when I text, I have only been typing instead of also writing on paper. Writing free hand would help me remember what I learned better, but I don’t have a big reason to do so for now. Because I‘m taking Japanese, I noticed that its basic overall grammar structure is very similar to Korean’s. I realized that Korean also relies on patterns with particles that indicate the topic/subject, direct object, and even prepositions. When I speak in Korean, I tend to drop most of the particles, so practicing writing is a good way to force myself to use correct grammar. Knowing more about the parts of speech and agreement helps me to be more conscious of the grammar structure when speaking the language. I think Korean becomes very complex because there are many different phrases to express the same or similar thing or idea.
Since the Korean written language and pronunciation are similar, I learned to write when I learn to speak the words. Since now online chatting app has become a major way for us to contact friends, I prefer to type. Therefore, it is essential for me not only to learn to write but also learn to type with Korean character keyboard.
I could see patterns emerge in Korean language structures, and a lot of sentence structure is similar with Chinese, which enables me to learn faster. In the Korean language, it adds connection words in simple sentences in order to make complex sentences. The way of adding it depends on the circumstances, but the basic rule is quite easy to understand. The following picture is the example of our class material which includes writing exercises of daily conversations.
In the reading and my point of view, most languages go extinct because their speakers are absorbed by a dominant language or cultural group. Colonial power may change the dominant language in the area thus make the original language go extinct. There are political as well as financial reasons behind language extinction. Just like the introduction of a new language, trade and exploration bring culture and ways of living to various places, and political power, including war, changes the local culture substantially. In my research online, I found out that Hebrew was the only language ever to be revived from extinction. There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world, and half are seen as at high risk of dying out in the coming century. Therefore, there is a very small possibility that a language could revive from dead.
Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases not mutually intelligible, language varieties, forming the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The similarities in pronunciation resemble the Korean language, and the written language shows contacts with the Japanese language. Since the pronunciation is similar between Korean and Chinese, it makes it easier for me to memorize Korean vocabulary since I could partially guess the meaning of the words. The Korean language develops their own written form in the 15th century, King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system known today as Hangul. The written language highly related to the pronunciation which makes the language unique.
Last week my language tutor (Atul) and I went to an Indian grocery store together. I recognized some of the foods from my visits to India, but many more were new! He took me first to the snacks aisle, and showed me his favorite kinds of “biscuits”. Indian biscuits are like British biscuits: small, crispy, slightly-sweet cookies that are meant to be enjoyed with hot tea. He then showed me the savory snacks that his city is famous for. They had so many different kinds!! Most of them were some variant of crispy little pieces of grain- or potato-dough, at varying levels of spiciness, and are generally called “chaat” चाट meaning “snacks”. I also noted with amusement that they had a “diet” version which was more like puffed rice than a delicious fried snack.
Next we looked at the spices – oh, India and its beloved spices! I picked up some powdered turmeric (a recent health fad in America) and fennel seeds. Fennel seeds are used in India with large pieces of white sugar as an after-meal mouth freshener. It can also contain brightly-colored pieces of confection or confection-covered fennel. I think it is called Mukhwas in Hindi. I first experienced fennel seed mouth freshener at a small café overlooking a lake in the foothills of the Himalayas, and when I tasted a little bit of the fennel after I got home from the store this week, I was instantly transported back to that beautiful place.
Next we looked at the cooking supplies and I bought some of that food known all around the world – 3-minute noodles! My favorite brand of Indian noodles is called Maggi, and I bought those and also a new kind that had noodles made of oats. Atul and I also looked at the refrigerated section, and I bought a huge 5-pound bucket of Desi-style plain whole-milk yogurt! Because it is such an everyday item in Indian kitchens, it is much cheaper at the Indian store than at an American grocery store, and it is also so much more delicious and natural without the gelatin/pectin that American brands add to thicken it up.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my time. It was good to see Indian foods from the perspective of someone outside the Dehli/UP area, since Atul is from Rajistan. Attached is a picture of most of the food I bought! As you can see, my kitty was also interested - she is a great student of Indian culture. ;-)
I started learning to write in Hindi my first week of learning. Actually, the first few weeks were dedicated almost completely to the writing. I much prefer to write Hindi freehand rather than typing because, although I have never tried it, I have heard that the Hindi keyboard is difficult to use, and furthermore that it is difficult to use an English keyboard as a make-do Hindi keyboard. I think it must be because all Hindi consonants have an inherent assumed schwa vowel after them, so if you need to express two consonants together, you have to write a “half consonant” joined to the subsequent “full consonant”. In this way, Hindi combines letters together to form conjunct characters. I am assuming that to inform a computer that you want, for example, a combined H+Ra rather than a separated Ha+Ra, it must take extra steps. For this reason, most internet casual communication in Hindi is written in the English script. However, for my purposes, I am still learning the script since most Hindi textbooks are written in Hindi script with no transliteration.
I have started to see some syntactical and morphological patterns in Hindi. I know that all verbs have suffixes that determine number, gender, and formality. For example
Kharna - to eat
Kharti - I [fem.] eat
Kharta - I [masc.] eat
Kharte - You [formal, nongendered] eat
etc.
Fun side note: Kharna is also the noun for food so “Main kharna kharti hun” Means “I eat food” and “Kharna kharna” means “to eat food”.
Hindi also has some surprising syntax rules. The language really loves to express relationships between things, and there are some common little prepositions that signify those relationships. So I can’t just say, I am behind the table, I have to say something like “I (in relationship to the table) am behind. In Hindi that would be “Main table ke peeche hun.” Similarly, to express that I am American I say “Main America se hun.” which literally means “I America from am.”
Knowing about these grammar rules definitely does give me some clues when I try to read a script. From verb endings and pronouns alone I can figure out that in “vah mujhe kitaab deti hai", it is a single female doing the action [deti hai], and the I am the object of that action [mujhe]. The sentence means “she gives me the book”.
For my second cultural post, I would love to talk about my involvement with Bollywood Jhatkas, the Bollywood fusion dance group on campus!
Bollywood is a well-known phenomenon of Indian culture. Although I used to dislike Bollywood movies (and music and dance) because I thought it was excessively overdramatic and unrealistic, I am coming around to an appreciation for it. I still think it is unrealistic, but now I think it is fun also. For the past couple of months, I have been to weekly dance practices with Bollywood Jhatkas and we have performed three times already! The first performance was at Celebration of dance, the second was at an international night at a local elementary school, and the third was at the Richmond Fire, Flour, and Fork festival as part of their world food and culture event.
Here is a picture of of our ending pose from the Celebration of Dance performance! I am second "guy" from the left [we had an uneven number of guys and girls so I offered to dance the guy's part]. And if anyone is interested - please come to our Spring Showcase next semester!
This past week I had goals of learning a handful a new verbs and listening to Mango lessons 7-10. I did meet with Atul and he started explaining some more verbs to me. Hindi verbs do not always match one-to-one with English, so it is a little more complicated than simply memorizing new words for equivalent meanings. I also listening to Mango lessons 7-10 as planned. They are teaching me more useful language as the lessons get into more conversational skills. I am progressing past having my default conversation as "Namaste, mera naam Kelly. Aap kese hain? Aa mosem bahut achha hai. Namaste." ("Hello, my name is Kelly. How are you? The weather is very nice today. Goodbye.")
I also had a specific goal this week to start to formulate sentences describing the locations of items. With Atul's help, I was able to describe items in my room. I still need lots of practice to be able to use the language competently, but it is nice to be able to form some simple sentences. Hindi syntax is very different from English, so it takes some getting use to (and some deciphering). For example, instead of saying "My book is above the bed." I might say "mera kitaab mera bed se uper hai" which would translate to something like "My book, my bed, in relationship to, above, is."
In this coming week, I have the following goals:
- Complete Mango lessons 11-20
- Start using verbs to describe my daily life and/or what people are doing (present simple and present continuous tenses) For example, "Every day I wake up. I drive to school. I study psychology and languages. I eat --- for lunch. I go to work. I go to sleep." and/or "I am studying now. He is drinking water. Are you drinking water? What are you eating? What are you doing? Why are you doing that?"
- Make a memrise account with vocabulary words
- Evaluate my skills and goals on a competency framework
Last week we started focusing on more specific vocabulary. We talked about Korean food and different dishes. I think planning out specific topics that I want to learn about each week has really helped. Since we were only taking about food, I was able to successfully learn the difference between different dishes. If I learn about food items separately, it can get confusing because a lot of them don't have literal translations in English; for example, a lot of the dishes would just translate to noodles -- but because we went over all the different types and used pictures, now I can differentiate on my own. My language partner and I are also planning to go to a traditional Korean restaurant, with other native speakers, to observe and learn about the cultural significance of the different types of food. I'm also looking forward to seeing the different dining etiquettes in Korean societies -- which is something my language partner and I talked about last week.
The learning activity that I planned was to teach someone the different levels of education in Korean. This was fairly easy because of the connection between beginning, middle, and end that related to the different types of education. For example, beginning in Korean is “cho,” which relates to elementary school because it is the “beginning school.” Therefore, elementary school in Korean is “cho-dong hak-gyo.” The person that I taught was able to make this connection pretty easily and apply this concept to the other types of schools.
A challenge we ran into was when we were trying to understand the term “college” because it was “dae hak-gyo,” but the prefix is not one of the terms that means beginning, middle, and end. Therefore, this was a little harder to remember, but we were still able to do it! We may have run into some obstacles during this activity, but overall, it was pretty simple to understand because of the connections between the prefixes. This was interesting to learn because the prefixes also helped me to learn these terms, so I am glad that I was able to apply this concept to help someone else learn these words, too!
One of my goals in my Interpersonal Communication section is to learn about the cultural aspects of South Korea’s bird, tree, flower, animal, and etc. I wanted to learn about these items because I am aware of these types of symbols that are relevant to the U.S., which is why I was curious to see what these were for South Korea.
Here are some of the symbols of South Korea. The national tree is the pine tree, which in Korean is “so-namu,” and the second part is tree in Korean. The national flower is the “moo-goong-hwa,” which is a Hibiscus syriacus aka the Korean rose. The official bird is the magpie, while the national animal itself is a little complicated. There is a myth and a longer story that is associated with the national animal, which I can expand on through a future cultural post!
In comparison, the national tree, flower, and bird of the U.S. is the oak tree, rose, and bald eagle, respectively. The most similar symbol is the national flower because it seems to both be in the category of roses, which is really interesting to learn! The other two symbols are not that similar because there are two completely different types of trees and birds. Overall, it was really cool to look at these similarities and differences between the symbols!
My learning activity is to teach someone the different types of educational backgrounds because since I am in college right now, these terms relate to our current university career and how to identify them in Korean.
I will first introduce the topic of beginning, middle, and end because these words have similar prefixes to the different types of education. Then, I will discuss the levels of education, such as elementary, middle, and high school. Then, we will review the connections between the two before we try to apply these concepts by identifying which education level applies to us and close family/friends.
When a language dies, a number of things happen as a result.
First of all, the people the language belonged to lose their mother tongue. This, in turn, leads to the loss of contact with the culture that spoke the language. I am a firm believer that language gives great insight into culture and vice versa, which means that by letting a language die, we close an important window into that culture.
What is even worse, in time, we may even lose memory of the culture. Potentially not all languages and cultures in the world have been documented, which means if one of them were to go extinct right now, with no record of it, the culture would die with it.
This is a dangerous game because, if a language dies and there are not sufficient records of its structure and the culture surrounding it, it is extremely difficult, if possible at all to revive it.
That is why linguists should do what they can to immerse themselves in the cultures, learn and record as much as they can, and help teach the language to others to spread the knowledge.
Languages go extinct when a more dominant language entire a language group and start taking over little by little in a long process. When a language dies, no one in the entire planet grew up with the language as a first language. As popular languages such as Spanish and English grow more and more, we see the death or the process of death of a language. As people try to learn the dominant language to communicate with the rest of the world and for convenience, the original language is in the process of dying as people are speaking less and less. When a language dies, not only does the language die, but the culture within the language also dies. Things like proverbs, jokes, slangs, sayings, etc. They all disappear when a language dies. Languages can be preserved in many different ways. Couple ways is to make songs and dances to preserve the language and the culture. Other ways can be recordings or dictionaries made by the linguists to preserve the language. Dead languages can be brought back to life just like how Siletz clawed back to life. Through songs, dances, and other methods of preserving the language, languages can be brought back to life once it dies.
In the cases like the Siletz, with very few remaining people who actually understand their native language, the threat of a language going extinct is real in ways that I could never have imagined with my target language Korean. According to the New York Times article, the current status of the Siletz language was not a sudden extinction, but rather a long process of systemic discrimination that discouraged the use of it. The U.S. government forced the Siletz out of their land, "lumping" them together with various other Native American tribes that spoke a variety of different languages, which not only caused these other tribes' languages to go extinct, but negatively effected the Siletz language itself. The government gave overwhelming pressure to children of the Siletz tribe by forcing them to go to schools that, in the process of trying to "assimilate" them, essentially banned the use of the Siletz language. Over generations, this kind of pressure gradually resulted in fewer people who could speak the language and thus pass it down, until the current situation with the Siletz tribe became reality; of the five people who can speak the language, not one of them grew up with it as a first language. The NYT article showed how crucial of a role a linguist plays in preserving a language like Siletz through this example and various others. The online dictionary that is mentioned several times throughout the article was a vital part of preventing extinction for the Siletz language, and its creation was largely due to a linguist who helped the Siletz tribe. By introducing this technology, and helping to spread awareness about it to other regions of the world, people were able to take interest in the language and it created some social power to then implement other strategies for keeping the language alive (e.g. classes in the language at school). While the process of preventing extinction is possible, albeit difficult, the process of "reviving" a dead language is essentially impossible. The fact that a language died means that its use was no longer necessary for any group of people, and thus the complete resurrection of it in a part of society is impossible; there would simply be no incentive for people to want to go through such an arduous process.
Languages go extinct when the language is no longer passed down by native speakers. Sometimes this is because of globalization and cross-cultural interactions, and sometimes its simply because a small population speak the language and as a result they adapt to using dominant languages that help communicate with the larger population. Dr. Harrison talks about this when we mentions that about 80% of international business uses only three major languages. One of the ways we can prevent languages from going extinct is by recording audio dictionaries -- this helps to achieve the language and pass it down so that future generations have the opportunity to study the language. It is, however, very difficult to revive a dead language. The basic argument behind this being that the language went extinct in the first place because people stopped studying and using the language for a reason -- where it be convenience or displacement. Therefore, in order to revive a language, the certain portion of the population would have to start using a language that no one else understands and lack practical use.
Languages go extinct when people cease to speak it in daily life whether by the replacement or domination of another more universal language or in combination with the lack of rising generations learning and speaking the language. In the interview with David Harrison, we learned of one of the endangered Native American languages to actually be one of the more common languages. This particular language had previously driven out other Native American languages when several Native American tribes were forced to live in the same space by colonists and due to the advantage of their larger quantity of people that language became the main way of communication between the people. We see languages go extinct due to the convenience of being able to communicate with more people, becoming more obsolete in the fast paced modern world. More universal languages as well as the reluctance or indifference of the next generations to preserve the language and teach it to the next generations also contribute to dying languages. This indifference is aided by social constructs such as school for Native Americans that were intended to stamp out their Native American ways.
Although universal languages provide more convenience, the death of a language results in the death of a culture full of different perspectives of the world and different ways to describe it. We lose one more way to connect with people on a different level. To prevent this from happening, linguists can help preserve a language by documenting and recording the language. Although, the oral speakers of a language may one day die the written and verbal transcripts can be kept to teach later generations who may revive it. Linguists can also encourage oral speakers of a language to teach the younger generations as well as share the database of language over the internet to those across the world to learn as well.
In conclusion, although a 'dead' language may never regain the life it once had, there are certainly some parts of it that can be revived through the teaching and sharing of it to the younger generation everywhere.
Languages go extinct when there aren’t enough people speaking the language to pass it down to their descendents. Then, nobody speaks the language and that language essentially becomes dead, and the culture, such as songs and dances, dies with the language. It’s interesting to see that the elders’ children did not end up inheriting the siletz language, which was the prime example of how the siletz language was at risk of becoming extinct. Linguists can help preserve the language by creating the certain language’s dictionary and spreading the existence of the language throughout the world, such as advertising through the internet, for public exposure.
I believe dead languages can come back to life as long as there are resources about the language and a group that is determined to learn, spread, and pass down the language. Resources, such as songs, dances, stories, and dictionaries, can help the learner know about that language and its culture, which is an important aspect.
