Blogs

• the presence of the verbal prefixes, ber- and meN- to indicate formality and the lack of prefixes to indicate informality;
• word choices (e.g., the formal verb mengatakan vs the informal verb bilang);
• the use of address terms such as Pak, Bu (+name) to add respect or formality; and
• the use of longer and more complete sentence structure to create formality and ellipsis to create informality.

Some examples that demonstrate the difference between formal and informal registers:

• Good morning, Mr...    

           Formal: Selamat pagi, Pak

           Infromal: Heh, (name)

• Want

           Formal: Ingin

           Informal: Mau

Basa-basi ("Small Talk")

When two interlocutors from different social statues engage in a conversation for the first time, it is likely they will engage in small talk at the beginning of the conversation. The primary function of small talk is to show respect and politeness to one's conversation partner. Therefore, the content is not too important. Small talk usually follows a script in which formulaic expressions/answers are given. It is not considered polite for the conversational partners to go straight to the main point of conversation.

• the relationship between the speakers (the social status relationship between conversational partners);
• the setting (e.g., at home, on the street, in an office, or at a mosque);
• the topic discussed (e.g., academic discussion or casual chat); and
• the medium (oral, written, or electronic).

The outlined bullets above will be my guideline for how to explore this topic further. For example, I will explore the register type used in each bullet point, across different settings: in offices, schools, or in informal settings, which can include among friends.

Indonesia prescribes a strict protocol for a host of topics, language is one important manifestation/product. I would like to explore the reasoning behind this strict protocol and perhaps what happens when the boundaries are crossed. In other words, are there social or professional implications for individuals who do not adhere to the norms and customs guiding register type.

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.

Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language. To what family does your language belong? What sounds, words, or structures exemplify periods of contact with other cultures?

By knowing Korea's history, it helps me learn the language because it allows me to understand why certain phrases or words are used. Some expressions and words are shaped by Korea's history. It also helps me because when I am reading a book or a newspaper, some of them refer back to past history. If I have knowledge of their history, it helps me understand the meaning of the newspaper based on context. Additionally, Korea also uses an older form of language called 'hanja' which has its influence from china. Therefore, knowing some of Korea's history may be helpful in learning hanja. 

Korea belongs in the Koreanic language family. Korea has some vocabulary overlap and grammatical similarities with Japan. This led to a hypothesis that Japanese and Koreans are related. Korea also borrows a lot of their words from China and again uses an older language called hanja which is heavily influenced by the Chinese. This exemplify periods of contacts since there is evidence that Ancient China administered Korea around 100 BC. 

My target language is Korean. I was born in South Korea so I am technically a native speaker. However, I have moved to the United States at a very early age. While I have not completely lost fluency in the language, a lot of my vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension still needs work.

I have some parts of the basics down already in Korean. I can speak fairly fluently with friends and family. However, things like formal language and grammar still need a lot of work. Learning these skills in Korean is particularly difficult because of the culture. The Korean culture is a very collectivistic culture that pays special respect toward elders and tradition. There is a separate posture, gesture, and even vocabulary that changes depending on who the individual is talking to. For example, it is common courtesy in Korea to gently grasp your own wrist or forearm when pointing or shaking hands with someone that is older or in a higher position. In addition various words are different completely when directed to those that are older.

In order to better learn my target language, I have to be culturally aware of these changes when talking in a formal setting. I have to be aware of my current communicative competence and how to improve them further. I am already proficient at talking with classmates and friends in Korean. However, with the change in diction and gesture, I struggle a lot when talking to those that are adults or people that I have just met. Despite being seemily close in age, when meeting someone new, it is courteous to use a different mode of speech than the one used in an informal setting. I will need to spend as much time as possible with native speakers to really help my target culture become more intuitive. This will not be easy since I only see my language partner once a week. Because of this, my language partner introduced me to several resources such as Korean movies to become more culturally attuned with the Korean culture. In addition to movies, my language partner also recommended several reality TV shows to help with learning the dynamic of casual conversations.

In addition to cultural awareness, I really need work on other competences as well. Grammatical competence is an important one for me because I was not in Korea long enough to learn the grammar of the language. Korean is structured very differently than English. Many of its sentence structures differ and the proper use of punctuation is completely unclear to me. I would like to consult a basic Korean textbook to take time learning the structure of Hangul and have some level of proficiency in that as well. With grammatical competence, I would also like to eventually strive toward discourse competence. This is the language competence that deals with big picture meanings instead of small details. I would eventually like to learn how to read and understand lengthy documents. Things like a whole movie, a novel, and even a long conversation are some of the things I really would like to get better understanding.  

This week I watched a YouTube video explaining how to tell the date; the link to the video can be found in my lesson plan under task number 5.  This method of learning was fun and simple because it changed up the ways of a typical textbook lesson and everything is explained to you as you see the content.  It is very helpful for me in that way considering I'm an auditory learner. 

The content of the video contained Sino-Korean numbers, those derived from the Chinese number system, the names of the months, and structures of a date.  It was interesting to notice patterns in how the numbers are put together.  For example, the words for 20, 30, 40 etc. are like saying 2 10, 3 10, etc.  For the names of the months, they use the number of the month and put it in front of their word for month such as 1st month and 2nd month.  That makes it very simple for someone learning the language.  The video explained any and all changes to spelling, which I don't believe would be to common in every day life; however, it is very useful to have that tool under my belt for a situation that requires that knowledge.  For practice, I wrote down how to say my birthday.  In Korean they put the year, month, then day which is quite different from our month, day, year.  

 A new strategy that I have just started is changing the language of my iPhone to Korean.  This way, I will constantly be exposed to new words and terms which will make it faster in memorizing them.  It's an interesting change, but I'm up for the challenge.  This connects to what I've learned in this lesson through seeing the date change every day and using the calendar app to set up all my reminders.  As always, I'm excited to learn more about the language and the culture and I think this tiny step will make a big difference. 

Language learning is definitely an uphill battle. I felt very confident in my progress as soon as I had mastered the alphabet, only to feel discouraged when I realized that was only the preliminary step to even begin learning to read, write and speak. However, it is going well. It can be hard at times to find the motivation to study hard and dedicate all the time I need to in order to make significant progress in learning Korean. I really enjoy using Mango to help my language learning; it nicely builds off itself and makes sure you don't forget certain phrases just because you already "mastered" that chapter. It also makes you learn more complex sentences, which has helped me learn the sentence structures of Korean and notice patterns within the language. I think this is more helpful than just memorizing sets upon sets of vocabulary. That being said, I have been trying to do more flashcards and general vocabulary building, to give me more breadth when speaking the language. I really want to be able to get a point across if I try to speak Korean, and so I think knowing more words will help me more than having perfect grammar. I believe communicative competence, like H.D. Brown talks about in his article, is more important than linguistic competence, especially when learning a language without the purpose of using it in a strictly academic sense. If I were planning on writing academic or professional essays in Korean, I would probably focus more on proper grammar and whatnot. Learning grammar is very important when learning a language, but for me, I want to put more emphasis on the discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence that Brown talks about. Grammatical competence is important for creating discourse, but mastery of grammar is not necessary. I don't even use perfect grammar when speaking in English, but I can obviously converse interpersonally because I know the sociological rules of the U.S. and how to get around my imperfect knowledge of the language in order to get my point across. I think learning a breadth of vocabulary across different topics will help me advance toward communicative competence.

            Also there is definitely a relationship between culture and language, so learning more about my target culture can only help me improve my cultural competence. This is especially important for the sociolinguistic competence that Brown talks about because it is important to know how to talk properly given the setting and to whom you're talking. For example, knowing that Korea is a hierarchal society with a lot of emphasis placed on respect for elders, I know that learning the formal tense is a crucial part of learning the Korean language if I want communicative competence. It's also important to learn about the target culture so that you learn the most valuable words and phrases in the language. It wouldn't do me as much good to learn the word for "pizza" in Korean as it would to learn the word for "rice." Languages are created and developed from within a culture, so there is a strong relationship between the two.

The topic of my cultural project is going to be daily life of a young adult (college student or 20-something year old) in Korea. I want to focus on a lot of different aspects of Korean culture, and this way I can do that and through a lens through which I can compare Korean culture to my personal experience with American culture. My learning goals for this project are to learn the different areas of vocabulary and culture that a Korean person in university of recently in the workforce would know and use. This would include talking about school, jobs, transportation, work ethic, pop culture in younger generations, formality and colloquialism, relationships, and more. Since my overall goal with learning some Korean would be to help me get around if I were to go visit, hopefully this project and my goals around it would assist me in conversing with others my age. Since my topic is so broad, I won't be able to go too in depth with any of the specific areas of vocabulary or culture, but that's okay because I would rather build a breadth of knowledge to start out with this semester.

Languages go extinct when not enough people find value in continuing to teach it. In the case of Siletz and other American Indian languages, a big part of the languages' demises was that Indian children were sent to government boarding schools where they were not taught the language. This also happens because certain languages are more popular and useful to learn such as English or Spanish. When a language dies, it takes a lot of effort on the part of native speakers in order to preserve it. In the case of Siletz, one speaker took it upon himself to create an online dictionary for the language with thousands of recordings of himself saying the words. By crossing into the digital world, it makes it easier for a language to persevere; it won't necessarily die with the native speakers, it can be accessed online even after native speakers are nearly gone. K. David Harrison talks about his job as a linguist to document languages, as a large portion of the 7,000 languages that exist will go extinct with their last native speakers. So, he can make recordings of these last speakers to try to preserve parts of the language. It is very difficult to bring a language back to life because it takes a lot of effort and commitment; many people simply don't care enough about small languages to put in the effort to revive them. Siletz is an example of a tribe who went from non-existent to federally recognized, and with this the language had a better chance of surviving. With the digital age, it is increasingly possible to preserve a dying language by documenting it online, but it is very unlikely that a dying language would be revived to the point that it is widely spoken.

Since most languages are at least somewhat interconnected, it can be very beneficial to know a language's history. Languages in the same family often share many roots and cognates, which can give you a big advantage when learning another language within that family. Languages will oftentimes adopt words and sounds from other cultures that it has historically interacted with, whether it be through geographical proximity, colonization, etc. This can give you, as a language learner, an insight into why certain words are borrowed or why the roots of words are similar across languages. Korean has its own Koreanic language family. However, like most languages, it does draw from others. For example, Korean has two forms of counting, the Korean one and the Chinese one. The Chinese one is much simpler to learn, in terms of pronunciation, but Koreans use both number sets just for different purposes. Also, I've learned that a lot of words were adopted in Korean after already being translated into Japanese. This adds an extra element of difficulty in understanding these words because they've been slightly altered along the way. Some words, for example juice, apartment, Spain, France, dragons, and more are pronounced in English, but with a Korean accent. This means that "juice" is spelled in Hangul, and ends up being pronounced "joo-sah."

A topic that interests me the most, which also combines many elements of Korean culture, is the daily life of a college student or 20-something year old in Korea. I want to know how they perceive school, relationships, popular foods, movies, and music, transportation, social life, etc. This will require special vocabulary knowledge because it will involve learning about specific Korean businesses (such as popular clothing stores, restaurants, etc. for young people). Also, this topic covers a wide range of topics meaning I'll need to learn specific words to talk about transportation, university, pop culture, and more. If I were to go a step further, I could try to learn the very colloquial phrases that young people use, as I assume that exists as it does in the U.S. I've also heard that texting among young adults in Korea is nearly a new language, which is also similar to how some young adults in the U.S. text. I have included these objectives in my learning plan as I give myself a different topic of vocabulary to focus on each week. As there are infinite words to learn about "transportation" or "food," I can focus on ones used in big cities and university campuses, that a 20-something year old would actually want to know when visiting Korea.  

In my learning sessions we have focused on the campus life portion of our textbook.  It explains how to ask and describe details about certain objects such as food or classes.  The lesson provides a vocabulary list including several adjectives, particles to attach to descriptions, food related terms, and filler words such as 'really' or 'and'.  Through this, my goal was to be able to talk about my experiences.  This lesson covers very basic terminology that can be applied to several every day conversations.  

Lena is very helpful in explaining the concepts in the textbook in a more understandable way and providing examples to further our learning.  We are continuing to use the textbook she found for us along with additional online resources to supplement the lesson.  At the end of each session, we have practice activities from a workbook that correlates with the material we cover in the textbook.  I think these methods are very helpful and will continue to be.  

In this lesson, I have learned the basic sentence structure to describe things and ask how things are.  In expanding on my knowledge of vocabulary, I will be able to build off of this basis.  

I am excited because I am able to write a short paragraph describing our campus which is major progress.  I think the strategies we are using thus far are effective.  

I have learned the names of the books in the Bible. I worked on the names of the twelve disciples of Jesus. Their names were pretty similar to that of English and Korean as they were in the books of the Bible. Names of the disciples of Jesus are attached under the second artifact (including the books of the Bible in Turkish). I think it was really interesting to see some cultural aspects from learning the names of the disciples. I learned that there were lots of Turkish names among the names of the disciples. Some were common/modern and the others were relatively old names. I like how this semester's classes with my language partner is more focused on my learning goals. I think it really helps to have my tutor to guide me how to work on my learning goals like the religious names. Although he is not religious, he reached out to his friend who is a Christian, and asked if he or she knows the best way to learn the religious names. 

Disciples of Jesus

Old Testament

New Testament 

• Bi-weekly Journal #2: I learned how to write and read the New and Old Testaments of the Bible in Turkish. My language partner, Gokhan helped me to read and write them. We used two different applications on our phones, which were called Bible, and the Bible (in Turkish). For the first application, I changed the setting in Turkish on it. For the second one, it was already in Turkish so that I did not have to change it, which I found more helpful. We compared and contrasted the names of the books in the Bible in English, Turkish, and Korean, which is my mother tongue. I found the Turkish version of the name is really similar to that of Korean. I think that it is because Korean language has a larger range of words pronunciation. That similarity allowed me to remember the words better. While I was reading the words out loud, I worked on the accent of the words (which vowel I need to put a stress on). I figured out that counting is really unique in the Turkish writing. For example, "The first" Corinthians is "1. Korintliler" in Turkish, which the period differentiate "the first" from "number 1". I found this learning activity really fun because it was tied into my interest. 
• In your learning journal, post an evaluation of your First Artifact conversation.  Evaluate your artifact for accent, cultural appropriateness, and linguistic accuracy.
  • What did you do well? I did well making the conversation sound like a dialogue. I did a good job on reading a long conversation of the phone call. 
  • What do you need to improve? I need to improve with the accents and need to cut the time short. I took more than 3 minutes to read the whole passage. I think it wasn't too bad, but I could have improved if I tried to practice few more times before I recorded. 
  • How do you plan to make the necessary improvements? I will check the words that I circled on the transcript (I circled them after listening to my recording) with my language partner so that he can give me some feedbacks. I will keep reading the passage aloud. I will keep working on reading aloud with other texts. 

A learning task I have completed is I have successfully translated a Portuguese interview. I watched a interview with a Portuguese soccer player. I then translated it to English. At first I had a hard time understanding what the player was saying as he spoke white quickly, so I slowed the video down, and listened to each word one by one. After my translation I then compared what I felt was the translation to the subtitles provided by the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISKdzjFSVVA

We've covered a lot of new vocabulary and grammatical structures recently and I was really proud to be able to translate a chapter dialogue from the textbook from Youngmin's spoken english to written Korean without any help.

The dialogue was between two friends discussing weekend plans, travelling to school, and playing sports together. It also incorporated new grammatical structures like the different types of negations, doing things together, and positional descriptions. 

In my fourth artifact I read a dialogue written in Korean out loud while attempting to use proper inflection and situational timing. While I know all the vocabulary and understand the material this can still be tricky for me because my reading can be a little slow and its hard to keep the timing fluid and natural. I would say that I can definitely work on my pronunciation and in the future I would like to be able to read at a faster pace. 

Artifact 4

AO_Artifact_4.mp3

Reading a textbook dialogue written in Korean without preparation. 

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.

1) How have you organized your learning plan, and what have you learned so far? 

It is a lot easier for me to “process input” in Catalan than to “produce output.” So, I made a learning plan to “equalize” the gap between my language skills – listening/reading vs. speaking/writing. I have been learning most about pronunciation and how to differentiate Catalan from Castellano. I know how to read out loud in Catalan now (with some help from my LP :) 

2) What challenges or difficulties have you encountered?

I think the biggest challenge is the novelty of it all: learning a new language at an “older age” (compared to when I started learning English); not feeling sure about the pace of the progress; and the flexibility and autonomy in this course.

And I mentioned several throughout the semester how messy my mind would get with all these languages: I would answer my LP unsure if I was speaking in Catalan or in Castellano – or worse, if I was just adding an accent to my Portuguese. Today, talking to someone from Brazil, I thought “Porque” and typed “Because!”