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Fifth Cultural Post:  Identify a topic for your culture project and your learning goals for your topic.

For this culture project, I’ll talk about the Korean Holiday called Chuseok. Chuseok literally means “Autumn’s eve” and is a harvest festival. This holiday is celebrated in both North and South Korea for three days on the 15h day of the lunar calendar’s 8^th month. This date falls in alignment with a full moon. During this time, Koreans go back to their hometowns and hold celebratory feasts with their family.

Interestingly, the origins of this holiday are debated. Some believe that the holiday’s original purpose was to present offerings from the new harvest to ancesetors or local gods. Another theory is that Chuseok commemorates the day that the Kingdom of Silla won an important battle. Some speculate that Chuseok was the celebration for a winning team at the end of Gabea, a month-long weaving competition. Regardless of its unknown origins, Chuseok is a major holiday comparable to American Thanksgiving in terms of its scale.

One of my learning goals is to become more knowledgeable about Korean culture, including major holidays. Through this culture project, I intend to go more in depth about the traditional customs and foods associated with Chuseok, and I will learn some of the specialized vocabulary that goes hand in hand with this holiday.

The Turkish Writing System

Fun fact: Turquoise is the favorite color of Turks.

Turkey is one of the nations in the world with designated "official script" -Atatürk's writing system.

The Turkish republic was found in 1923, and 5 years later, Turkish people experienced an overnight shift of their writing system. As one of the means of modernization of Turkey, Ataturk-the founding father of the country, ordered to switch the Arabic script into a Latin script. Turkish alphabet now consists of 29 letters, 7 of which (Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals to meet the phonetic requirements of the Turkish language.

a, be, ce, çe, de, e, fe, ge, yumuşak ge, he, ı, i, je, ke, le, me, ne, o, ö, pe, re, se, şe, te, u, ü, ve, ye, ze. These are names of the letters in the Turkish alphabet.

The letters Q (qu), X (iks) and W (we) aren't present in the official Turkish alphabet, but are occasionally used in loanwords. ğ is not pronounced, but lengthens the vowel before it. There are no diphthongs except in a few foreign loan words. Ç is pronounced as ch sound as in cherry. Ş is pronounced like sh in word shrimp. Ö is pronounced the same was i is pronounced in word shirt. Ü is pronounced as ew is pronounced in the word brew. 

Overall, Turkish writing and reading system is very simple and pretty much resembles English. It is important to learn the few differences though. I believe, I am pretty confident in my pronouncing and reading skills of Turkish, and I am glad Ataturk made the shift of the writing system in 1928, since it made it easier, at least for me, to learn the Turkish alphabet.

• Learning Journal 5:  Post (a) an evaluation of your First Artifact conversation, and (b) an assessment of how well you met your learning goals for weeks 4 and 5.

My first artifact conversation went well. I started with introduction expressions, stated my age, where I'm from, where I grew up and mentioned some of my hobbies and what languages I speak. I thought I could do some more revising for it to be perfect, but for the first time, it wasn't that bad. I hope to practice more as time goes on.

I would say I achieved my goals stated in my last post. I managed to learn days of the week, months, seasons, some describing words, times of the day and I'm able to read notices in the airports and public places. I also tried to learn fruits and food, although I definitely need revision of this. I feel confident about most of the vocabulary, however, saying the times of the day in Turkish is quite a challenge, since they have several ways of saying them. They either just use numbers, and that is relatively easier, or past/to, quarter/half past expressions, and I find this part challenging. I will definitely practice this during the upcoming weeks and do new exercises and try to ask and understand time in Turkish when I talk to my language partner, Turkish friends or classmates. I also revised colors, pronunciation and the ways to make the nouns plural. I think these weeks were a bit hard but very productive and I'm hoping to revise and improve more next weeks.

• Learning Journal 4:  Document (a) your goals and tasks for weeks 4 and 5, (b) the resources and activities you will use to achieve your goals, and (c) how you will evaluate your success.

Weeks 4 and 5 are heavy vocabulary weeks for me. I am learning the seasons, months, days of the week, words to describe weather. I'm also revising all the introductions and questions that I have learnt so far, along with adding some new vocabulary regarding to the topics I'm looking at. I'm revising the numbers and learning how to ask and say the times of the day. I also am going to learn some fruit and food vocabulary. I am mostly using my language partner's help and practice with my classmates as my main tool for learning. I'm paying attention on common words used in airports and other public places. I'm using several resources, such as duolingo, google dictionary, and short youtube videos. I am also using sticky notecards in my room to help visualize and memorize the words I'm learning. As a way to evaluate my success, I'm trying to look at the English words and say or write them in Turkish, and do some short self-made quizes. Overall, I think my goals are a bit challenging but achievable, and I'm going to do my best. 

Recording presentations and talking about about our target cultures was, indeed, a great and meaningful experience in my Linguistics class. I thought, it gave everyone an incentive to do more research on the language and culture of their choice. I particularly spoke about Turkey and main aspects of Turkish culture. In my recording group another person spoke about Turkish cuisine by stating the common dishes and drinks and the ways how they are made. I found that really interesting, since cuisine may reflect a lot about a certain culture. Another person studying Hindi talked about the famous Hindi festival Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. He mentioned the countries, that it is celebrated in, the decorations that people use, the history of celebration and other creative aspects of the celebration and much more. Majority of my classmates are learning Korean and their presentations talked about several aspects of Korean culture, such as history of Korean language in relation to Russian, Korea in general in relation to World Wars,  beauty and  fashion trends in the country, traditional royal cuisine, food, economy,  Korean hip-hop, and even the history and role of the Samsung industries in Korea. Other language learners shared about Israeli defense forces, mentioning the mandatory 2-year army service for males and females, the history and exceptions behind it, as well as Japanese colonialism and its history.

I thought all of these presentations were important in understanding the cultures and the languages that we are learning. Some of us mentioned the importance of understanding the culture while learning a particular language. We also engaged in discussions after the presentations, and asked questions to each other to get a deeper understanding about certain cultures. My language partner heard my presentation and gave his feedback as well. I was glad I was given a chance to explore and talk about my target culture, and I'm sure most of my classmates valued this experience as well. 

The culture shock video was fairly long and I watched just a part of it, but I though it gave a pretty good glimpse of what cultural shock is. I am able to confirm some of the ideas mentioned in the video. 

I came to the US only 2 years ago and visited several cities in the North and South and experienced culture shock every time i moved around. It is astonishing how big the United States is, and how many different cultures within the country you can find. I also have had a chance to be in Georgia, Turkey, and Russia as well as study in international school with people from about 90 countries. This being said, I know what culture shock is, and I have experienced it more times than one can imagine ,and I even do get culturally shock when I go home after being in the US for a long time. It is a feeling of awkwardness and disorientation at the same time, but luckily, I get used to things quickly. Studying with people from that many cultures has taught me to be very understanding, empathetic and inclusive toward other cultures in the world. The important thing when one experiences a culture shock is to realize that every culture is unique and worth embracing, even if you do not understand certain parts of it. I still ask my American friends about small aspects of American culture to make sure I'm culturally educated. Looking back at my other posts, I want to mention again about the importance of reading about the culture of a country and watching videos before visiting or learning a culture and I am glad, that I have been to Turkey and have done significant research about the Turkish culture. I believe, 21st century is a century of diversity and inclusion and it is essentially important to be open to cultures, ideas and traditions. 

Turkish doesn't quite work like English. It has some major structural differences. For instance, In Turkish, the verb goes goes at the end of the sentence and the most common word order follows the "subject-object-verb" formula. For example "He is eating a banana" would translate as 'o bir muz yiyor" , where "yiyor" is the verb. The order of the words can sometimes be alternated to emphasize certain words in a sentence and the emphasized word is the closest to the verb. The adjectives in Turkish work like English or Russian. The adjective usually goes before the noun. For instance, "yellow banana"would translate as "sarı muz", where muz is banana, and sari is yellow. Turkish also allows to build up  words through suffixes: -lı/ -li/ -lu/ -lü, for instance are used to turn nouns into adjectives. Examples would be tuz-tuzlu, meaning salt-salty. Suffixes  -sız/ -siz/ -suz/ -süz are added to the noun to express absence of the noun. an example would be ev-home and evsiz-homeless. Suffixes -cı, -ci, -cu, -cü (-çı, -çi, -çu, -çü). are used to express professions from the words( Diş - dişçi mean tooth and dentist. -lık, -lik, -luk, -lük are used to express specific nouns from adjectives, such as çocuk-çocukluk meaning child-childhood. Ler/Lar are used to form the plural of the nouns in Turkish, such as ev-evler. are used  Also, in colloquial speech, the verb's place in the sentence can vary, although the written language has a specific structure that I mentioned above. 

I think the mentioned points are the most basic structural features of the Turkish language. I believe knowing these structures and especially learning all the suffixes that form words will help me learn the basics of the language more easily. I think practicing exercises will help me remember these structures better. I think reference grammar can be really helpful to maintain good skills of the language, however I believe, simple practice of written and spoken exercises help me better in my language learning process. The combination of both, on the other hand, will help me acquire skills faster and better.

I can now make sentences on my own. I can know successfully create sentences without having out reference pre-made sentences on my own. Before I began I could only recite pre-made sentences such as my name is, or i live in, but now that I understand verb conjugation better, and have more vocabulary about time and and context I can now make sentences about more broad topics. For example, I feel as though now I am much better equipped to talk about soccer. This is because not only because I can make sentences, but also I know some minor soccer slang terms. I have also been watching some soccer interviews in Portuguese which has helped, me understand soccer in Portuguese much better. 

• I was working on how to talk about my hobby and major, and my daily routine in Turkish. I also learned present continuous tense while I was learning these topics.
• I wanted to be able to say "I like playing the piano", "I like learning new language", "I get up at 10am", "I wash my face", "I brush my teeth", "I eat breakfast/lunch/dinner", "I go to sleep" and etc.
• I had a class with my language partner and he taught me how to say those sentences. I listened to some recordings of my language partner's friends introducing themselves, and filled in the blanks on the scripts about their hobbies, what kinds of languages they can speak, where they are from, and what they do. I learned different verbs related to daily routine, and worked on tenses. 
• I think I improved my listening ability a lot, because I was able to fill in most of the blanks after listening to the recordings few times. Also, I feel confident introducing myself. I improved in grammar as well because I have no trouble making sentences based on the conjugation that I have learned. I can apply the grammar rule to various verbs and subjects. 
• I will review the topics that I learned and I will write my own introduction talking about my major, my hobbies, what kinds of language I can speak, and my hometown. I will keep studying conjugations and apply them to different verbs and subjects. 
• I will keep practicing listening and speaking by listening to recordings and a CD in the Global Studio.

Complete Reflection Paper #2 (500 words) and Post to Your Blog in the Ning

• Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language.  What do you need to improve your communicative competence?

• I am beginning to understand the importance of  learning the target language and the target culture and how they go hand and hand. In the beginning I thought that understanding the culture of the target language is trivial because learning a language can just be learning a language. Culture is language itself! Learning a language is automatically learning a culture. A big example where learning a language is impossible without learning the culture is expressions of phrases.Phrases, words, syntactic forms and concepts are impossible to translate directly because they sometimes don’t exist in some languages. Differences in language between cultures are evident when you compare how some countries have different definitions for certain phrases. A prime example is that generally a “good day” for a Western speaker means a sunny day, however a “good day” for an African speaker will mean a rainy day. It is all context. If I were to learn an African language and did not know this cultural references then I would not understand a lot of the context and fail at accurately understanding the language.

• Culture can also have a huge influence on how we communicate. For example in Thai, the words we tend to chose are like a pyramid where formal talk is reserved only when talking to or about the royal family. Then the formality goes down based on age no matter their position. For example; at work, if A is lower in position but older than person B (person B has higher position but is younger), person B will still have to address person A as if A was B’s superior. However in America and many English speaking communities, this is not necessary and in fact frowned upon. If I were not to know these differences then learning the language would be difficult since I would not know what is appropriate and what is not. Hebrew also has the same references as one would address a boy versus a man versus an old man. The degrees of seniority or importances determines what word choices you should use.

• I think to improve my communicative competence, definitely learning the cultural by reading the newspaper, talking to natives, watching movies, music...etc will definitely learn the culture and the language at the same time, so you’re killing two birds with one stone. However also sitting down and learning the language is also important in achieve communicative competence. Learning the language is a formal setting will help me track my progress and learn Hebrew “correctly”. I think that some people after spending time with many speakers of that language are able to pick up phrases but if you wanted them to build their foundation and to continue the language they are unable  to do so because their foundation was not strong enough to continue and build. I still feel incompetent in learning the basic root words in semitic languages. I don’t understand what it means to find root words because I can’t find the similarities. I also have problems but they are similar to this where I just a need a few clarification and from then on, if I see the problem I am able to relate it and build upon my skills.  Fortunately, I am still young and have ample of time to build my solid foundation into rock solid knowledge. I am not too worried about my communicative incompetence because I know I can improve with more effort and time.

• Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language.  What do you need to improve your communicative competence?
• I think I understand the target culture and the target because of my interest in hebrew prior to this class. I think that learning the structure of a language and what makes of languages helps significantly alot in understanding a language. I am still not entirely sure how a culture might influence the learning of a language since for hebrew, religion culture is deeply immersed in the language as a religious factor, so I don't know how to compare that to a language without a non religious factor. 
• I need to improve my communicative competence by writing and using the language more through music, news, and talking with native. My plan is not to get rid of my accent because I speak three other languages and I know how difficult it is to get rid of accents while learning the language. My main goal is to communicative basic terms that will allow me to get around in Hebrew speaking communities such as Israel (and only Israel). 

Over these two weeks, I feel as though my sentence forming has improved dramatically. Although I may not be able to respond to questions right away, I feel that I am now able to confidently make sentences on my own. My language partner and I have been working on verb conjugations, and the differences between using ser vs estar, and the preterite, vs imperfect tense. To build on these things we have been working, I have trying to practice using instances of both, during my conversations with my language partner. I feel the strategies my language partner and I have used have been effective. So far I have been quite satisfied with my progression in Portuguese.

A current issue Brazil is faced with is the gap in social class. Brazil's wealthiest 10% has access to over 40% of Brazil's income. On the other hand the poorest 10% have access to only 1% of Brazil's income. This can is quite apparent when one visits Brazil, as poor, and wealthy often live alongside each other, showing the large difference in social class. As a result Brazil has quite a high crime rate. Crimes such as kidnapping, and mugging are not uncommon. Another issue related to this, is that law enforcement is often corrupted. This discourages people, from reporting crimes, as the people feel the police are of no use. Brazil has taken some initiative to fix this, such as free education, but as a whole, Brazil still has more work to do. Also Brazil has secured its qualification for the World Cup. This has gotten Brazil as a nation very excited, as they will be attending the World Cup in Russia this summer.

The presentation that we did in class regarding some unique aspects of the cultures that we studied were extremely interesting. I learned some interesting aspects of Korean culture that I did not know of before. For example, one of the presentations highlighted Samsung's impact on Korean culture. It was extremely interesting to see how a company could have so much influence on a country's total economy and thus its identity. Samsung accounts for 15% of the country's GDP, an enormous amount for a company to own in a country as developed as South Korea. In addition, whenever Samsung has some embarrassment scandal, it is usually reverberated to the South Korean people, as they identify Samsung as Korean symbol.

The other presentation included the influence of Japanese colonialism on Korea, and how Koreans were restricted from using Korean during the years where they were colonized. This led to a lot of crossover words that were formed from Japanese culture. 

Even though the Culture Shock video was more focused towards international students acclimating to the environment in America, I experienced similar culture shocks when I first came to Richmond after living in southern California for the majority of my life. I grew up in a community that was made up of mostly immigrants and other ethnic minorities, so when I came to the University of Richmond, I distinctly felt like a minority. However, I was lucky enough to not have to go through the language barriers or even some of the cultural barriers that were described in the video. 

When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, for some reason, I did not experience a heavy culture shock. This might also be in part because I prepared myself for what was to come when I studied abroad, and I grew up in East Asian culture similar to the culture that was present in Hong Kong. The only time I experienced somewhat of a culture shock was how restaurants in Hong Kong treated their customers. Customer service does not exist in Hong Kong, as I've had many experiences where waiters yelled at me. 

Even though the Culture Shock video was more focused towards international students acclimating to the environment in America, I experienced similar culture shocks when I first came to Richmond after living in southern California for the majority of my life. I grew up in a community that was made up of mostly immigrants and other ethnic minorities, so when I came to the University of Richmond, I distinctly felt like a minority. However, I was lucky enough to not have to go through the language barriers or even some of the cultural barriers that were described in the video. 

When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, for some reason, I did not experience a heavy culture shock. This might also be in part because I prepared myself for what was to come when I studied abroad, and I grew up in East Asian culture similar to the culture that was present in Hong Kong. The only time I experienced somewhat of a culture shock was how restaurants in Hong Kong treated their customers. Customer service does not exist in Hong Kong, as I've had many experiences where waiters yelled at me. 

Even though the Culture Shock video was more focused towards international students acclimating to the environment in America, I experienced similar culture shocks when I first came to Richmond after living in southern California for the majority of my life. I grew up in a community that was made up of mostly immigrants and other ethnic minorities, so when I came to the University of Richmond, I distinctly felt like a minority. However, I was lucky enough to not have to go through the language barriers or even some of the cultural barriers that were described in the video. 

When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, for some reason, I did not experience a heavy culture shock. This might also be in part because I prepared myself for what was to come when I studied abroad, and I grew up in East Asian culture similar to the culture that was present in Hong Kong. The only time I experienced somewhat of a culture shock was how restaurants in Hong Kong treated their customers. Customer service does not exist in Hong Kong, as I've had many experiences where waiters yelled at me. 

Even though the Culture Shock video was more focused towards international students acclimating to the environment in America, I experienced similar culture shocks when I first came to Richmond after living in southern California for the majority of my life. I grew up in a community that was made up of mostly immigrants and other ethnic minorities, so when I came to the University of Richmond, I distinctly felt like a minority. However, I was lucky enough to not have to go through the language barriers or even some of the cultural barriers that were described in the video. 

When I studied abroad in Hong Kong, for some reason, I did not experience a heavy culture shock. This might also be in part because I prepared myself for what was to come when I studied abroad, and I grew up in East Asian culture similar to the culture that was present in Hong Kong. The only time I experienced somewhat of a culture shock was how restaurants in Hong Kong treated their customers. Customer service does not exist in Hong Kong, as I've had many experiences where waiters yelled at me. 

Vocaroo_s0KHYllHOQY2.mp3

I feel as though in this conversation I did  good job of understanding the questions, and responding in the appropriate manner. I think I could still work on my accent, and the pronunciation of certain words, such as tenho, and moram. To make these necessary improvements, I intend to continue practicing these words with my language partner, and asking where I can make changes to my accent.