My goals for this week were to begin conceptualizing my cultural project, continue watching Ezel (the Turkish soap-opera), and try to incorporate my imaginary travelling task more into my learning curriculum. The project conceptualization is going well and I have decided to focus on how Greek and Turkish languages have influenced namesakes of towns and the people living within them. Meanwhile, the show Ezel has me cringing at times by its over-dramatic and corny nature but nevertheless I am starting to pick-up words said by the actors as well as the proper pronunciation of certain words. Finally, I decided to incorporate my imaginary traveller task of writing down conversations while visiting different cities into more of a research for my project. As I stated in the previous Journal Entry the task is mundane since I do not have a diverse enough vocabulary yet, but it does help me with researching different places I could present for my project and so I will continue performing the learning task for the goal of completing my project.
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My learning plan has been going well those some issues should be addressed. One problem has been the use of DuoLingo. Because the class curriculum does not match well with the online language learning application, I struggle to find reason to keep using it. I mainly utilize it for practice at night or to work on pronunciation. Also the imaginary traveler task that would have me write conversations of a character travelling through Turkey was somewhat ambitious given that I do not have a diverse enough vocabulary in Turkish yet. All the conversations sound similar except for the location, which makes them somewhat pointless. Nevertheless, this learning activity has helped me learn more about Turkish geography and history and I have found myself googleing different towns and sites and Turkey for extended periods of time. The activity has convinced me that my cultural project topic of towns and cities of Turkey is a great choice and a project that I will thoroughly enjoy.
<br><a href="http://vocaroo.com" style="font-size:xx-small;" title="Vocaroo Voice Recorder">Voice Recorder >></a>
The recording is an imaginary conversation between Romario from Spain and Alex from Greece. The idea of the conversation is to showcase that I can ask and answer questions about identity of a person. Questions about name, feelings, and orgin are answered in this conversation by both Romario and Alex.
My learning goals for this week were to make sure I understand the new words we learned on the topic of origin. In class we learned how to ask where someone is from and how to answer such a question. The question would be "Nerelisin?" and the answer in my case would be "Yunanistanluyum". In Turkish "Yunanistan" means Greece and "luyum" is a suffix that indicates that you are from that place. The suffix changes depending on the vowels present in the word, which will be difficult to remember but through practice memorization becomes easy. I have been notcing some of these suffixes in the show Ezel, and so I have been already exposed to the proper pronunciation of suffixes like "luyum."
My cultural project is going to be on Turkish towns and cities and their names compared to their Greek names. I have always wanted to travel through Turkey. I believe that we share very similar cultures and that we have more similarities than differences despite a tumultuous history. I have noticed that some Turkish cities' and towns' names resemble the Greek names for those towns and so I would like to present all the different towns and cities in Anatolia with similar namesakes and their history. I want to focus on towns and cities that are not well known to most, so I will avoid presenting on cities like Istanbul and Izmir. I think this will show how closely my mother language and culture is linked with Turkish language and culture.
This cultural post was meant to discuss the targeted language's writing system. Coincidentally, I already covere that in the previous cultural post soI decided to go more in depth on the topic. Turkish is a a member of the Turkic language group, which is a language group spoken across Central Asia. The most common language of the Turkic family is Turkish. The Turkish language's writing system used to be the so-called Ottoman writing system until the 1920's when the Turkish Republic was formed from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Its leader Kemal Ataturk wanted to create a Western, secular state out of Turkey and as a result emphasized Western ideals. One step taken to achieve this was to replace the Ottoman wrting system and alphabet with the Latin alphabet. This drastic change took time to fully implement but due to the mandate given to Kemal he was able to achieve the gargatuant task of changing the essense of an entire language. And so today Turkish uses Latin letters, which allows to export better since it uses the same alphabet as the most popular language in the world, English.
My first artifact was good overall. I was smooth with my delivery of the questions and answers I believe. The only problem is that I need to work on my pronunciation. I express words with a Greek accent and do not sound anywhere close to the way Ezel sounds in the Turkish show I have begun watching. Overall I think I met my goals for Week 4 and 5 which was master these basic introductory words to a conversation. I think working with in class helped me the most to achieve this as well as working at home and doing mock conversations. I'm looking forward to the next step which should be more in depth conversation questions and answers in order to form the body of a conversation.
This is an imaginary conversation between Costas and Angela. The two characters say hello, and Angela asks Costas' name. Costas responds and ask the same. The Costas asks how Angela is. Angela responds and does the same. The conversation ends with farewells fro both characters.
My goals for week 4 and 5 are to master the greetings and introductions. Introducing yourself and greeting someone are the first basic steps to any linguistic interaction and so by mastering these I can attain the necessasry initial knowledge to having a conversation in Turkish. Merhaba, Adim Costas, Adin ne?, and Gorusuruz are the basic key words with variants like Gule gule and hoscakal available for use if I wont to change the farewell part of the conversation. Obviously saying "Hello, My name is Costas,asking for the other person's name, and then saying goodbye" is not a natural conversation but it is an important beggining that I can build off of.
I find it interesting that the Turkish alphabet utilizes the Latin alphabet. Normally, languages that utilize the Latin alphabet are Indo-European. But Turkish is a Turkic language that used to utilize a writing system that resembled more Persian or Arabic script. I know the change to the Latin alphabet occured under Kemal Ataturk in the early 20th century. I find it fascinating that letters in the Turkish alphabet sometimes are not sounded out anywhere near their European equivalent. For example the letter "C" makes the sound "J" in Turkish which from what I know is not found in any other languages that utilize the Latin alphabet. Of course I'm not a linguist so I could be wrong.
My learning goals for this week were to make sure I understood how to say and properly pronounce the words "Hello" and other basic words like "student" that we learned in class. The key will be memorizing these words. The pronunciation is sometimes difficult because of the differences between letter pronunciation in English and Turkish despite the fact that the two languages both utilize the Latin alphabet. Unfortunately DuoLingo has a certain group of words it exposes to begginers and most of the words I learned in class are not included in the DuoLingo group of words. Nevertheless, some practice and repetition should help me memorize the words or at least ost of them.
Presentation Summary
My cultural project was about tourism in Turkey. It was based on the background of the tourism in Turkey that how it became one of the top 10 tourism attraction in the world in 2014. Historical and cultural sites are famous to tourists and there are also health therapies that they can enjoy. I introduced two of the tourist attractions, which were Pamukkale and Oludeniz. Pamukkale means "cotton castle" and it is famous for its white terraces. People have bathed in its hot spring for thousands of years. Oludeniz is located in Mediterranean and is one of the top 5 beaches in the world. I also highlighted some concerns of tourism in Turkey since it is declining because of terrorism.
Sources
Feridun, Mete. "Impact of Terrorism on Tourism in Turkey: Empirical Evidence from Turkey." Applied Economics 43.24 (2011): 3349-354. Web.
Morris, Hugh. "Is Turkey Safe for Tourists and Can I Cancel My Holiday?" The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 18 Feb. 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.
"Turkey Travel Warning". travel.state.gov. Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State. 3 September 2015.
U.S. Department of State. U.S. Department of State, 28 Mar. 2017. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.
Powerpoint Slides: Tourism_in_Turkey.pptx
I have bookmarked two great resources to help me reach my language goals in Turkish. First, I have saved the website DuoLingo which helps me work on basic words and sentences. The application allows me to not only read and type Turkish to answer questions, but it even has a speaking function where I can answer questions by speaaking the answer. The application then responds by stating whether the answer is correct and then says the answer with proper pronunciation which allows me to here how the words are meant to be sounded out.
The other online resource I bookmarked is a Youtube channel that has episodes of the Turkish show Ezel. The show has subtitles so I can understand what is happening, while picking up on pronunciation and proper speaking speed. Also I will be able to figure out more and more words as I learn the language through the class and various self-directed learning activities.
It has been a great semester in terms of my self-directed Korean learning experience. During the process, I developed better skills of self-learning, time management, study planning. This class is different from any other classes I’ve taken at UR because it requires me to make a study plan myself and design my learning goals. In that way, I have to take charge of making progress instead of others pushing me for progress. In this paper, I will first talk about the weekly daily routine and how it helped with my learning of Korean. Next, I will reflect on the problems I encountered and how I deal with them. Finally, I will talk about my learning result and what I can improve in the future.
Every week, I met with my language partner twice, and each session last fifty minutes. In addition to the learning sessions, we complete homework outside of class. I really enjoyed these classes. There are four beginners in our learning session. I felt more involved when learning with peers. Our language partner combined visual tools and traditional learning techniques. In addition, we practiced conversion with each other in every meeting. At the same of learning speaking and dialogues, we also learn the Korean alphabets. Combining the two elements laid a solid foundation for us beginners. Through the meetings, I was practicing my spoken Korean in a real room setting, which helped with my listening and pronunciation. The most fundamental material is, however, Korean alphabets. By mastering all the alphabets, we are able to pronounce all words in Korean. To help with the learning of Korean alphabets, we had competition almost every class to pronounce Korean words by combining the syllables. We also watched various videos. Some were k-pops that contained the words we learned that class, and some were learning videos to help with our understanding of grammar. Overall, all the techniques helped me with my listening, writing, speaking. Outside of class, I have been watch Youtube Videos that teach Korean through some popular culture. The YouTuber I often watch is called “Alice Wonderland”. She can fluently speak Korean, English, and Cantonese. She often teaches grammar, sets of words, or phrases under k-pop context. In that way, one can learn words and phrases from song lyrics. I found it to be really fun and helpful to watch. Overall, I think practicing dialogues with my peers to be a very effective method of learning.
There are also some difficulties I encountered during my study of Korean. The first is the pronunciation. While alphabets themselves are easy to pronounce, once they combine to become a word, it is hard for me to imagine the combined sound of the word. In the future, I will spend more time in practicing speaking words by imaging how to combine the alphabets more. It will require lots of practices to master it. Also, grammar is particularly hard to learn because the sentence structures of Korean are very different from English. One word has many forms depending on the place it is in a sentence. Even if I know the word, it changes form in a sentence and I no longer recognizes it. I will need to learn more grammar to know how to use single words into sentences.
I also learned a lot from the cultural presentations. I learned from my cultural presentation that there is still huge gender gap in Korea. Women get more than 30% less pay than men in average and have fewer opportunities at work. However, the situation is changing as more women get higher education. For the presentation on Turkey's gender equality issue, even though women's status is still low, it has progressed a lot and the percentage of women holding leadership positions are even higher than many developed nations. I learned from Yuchi's cultural presentation about the trainee system in Korea. The entertainment industry is one of the largest industries in Korea and its popular culture spreads around the world. It has a very systemic way of training future k-pop stars. I learned that trainees start at a very young age, and their daily lives are controlled by their companies and they are usually not allow to rest during their promotion period even if they are sick. It is a cruel system but still very competitive.
In conclusion, I am pleased with my learning result, as I met most of my learning goals and the learning sessions with language partner were very effective and fun. Once knowing the alphabets, it is easier to learn new words and write them. The classes laid a solid foundation for me to continue my self-study in Korean after graduation.
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When I first decided to enroll in the self-directed language course, I had very little knowledge of not only the Turkish language, but also Turkish culture. I honestly could not locate the country on a map or simply greet someone with a friendly hello in the language. Therefore, I was a bit nervous to start completely from scratch in an area so new to me. However, with my experience of previously learning to speak Spanish I figured that I had already developed many of the skills that would be necessary in trying to learn another new language. At the start of the semester, I knew nothing. But, as we approach the last week of classes I have completed close to all of the tasks that I originally set forth for myself. Currently, I am able to greet others, introduce myself (name, where I am from, age), count, briefly talk about family, ask questions such as “who/what is this/that?”, describe the weather, and indicate the names of the week/month/season all in Turkish. In addition, I have gained an understanding of the Turkish culture in regards to the Turks most important values and ways of life.
Although I am proud of the progress I have made thus far, the road to getting where I am today has not been an easy one. Teaching myself a language has challenged me in ways that I could not have imagined. Self-directed language learning requires a lot of self-discipline and motivation. Therefore, I found it much easier to attend class and review new vocabulary and grammar rules with my language partner than I did watching Youtube videos and trying to teach myself on my own. However, the more I practiced independently, the easier it became. I think that the most difficult challenge for me was pronunciation. While memorizing words and rules about sentence structure required a lot of mental effort, pronouncing words correctly required more of a physical effort. It was very frustrating at times because I would know what a word is supposed to sound like but I struggled with shaping my mouth and moving my tongue in just the right way to produce the proper sound. With lots of practice and continuously watching Youtube videos, I learned to improve my pronunciation and Turkish accent.
One thing that I really enjoyed this semester was having the SDLC 105 course in addition to the SDLC 110. The SDLC 105 course really allowed me to not only demonstrate the progress I was making in speaking the Turkish language, but also gave me the opportunity to delve more into the culture of Turkey. Additionally, the course exposed me to other cultures that my classmates were studying like Korea, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Spain. The juxtaposition of each of these cultures really emphasized their uniqueness and changed my perspective on the way in which we should view others who may be different from us. Taking both of these courses has opened my eyes to the importance of learning about other cultures. It brings us together and provides us with an understanding of where others come from. By continually spreading awareness of different backgrounds we can truly make the world a better place.
- Learning Journal 14: Summarize your work this semester, the progress you made and the difficulties you encountered.
- I think I learned a lot of different topics in Turkish. Sezgi's class helped me to keep up the learning schedule and allowed me to review the stuffs in my own time. I think I should have tried to go to Turkish restaurants but I had no chance to do so. I think there is a lack of opportunities that I can experience Turkish culture in Richmond.
- I learned a lot from my research on holidays and tourism in Turkey. Sharing thoughts and teaching people about Turkish culture were a great experience to nurture my understanding of the culture.
- I accomplished most of the original learning plans, but there were some changes on my learning plans. I added more materials that were covered in Sezgi's class and omitted some goals because it was hard for me to find structured learning guidelines for the topics.
- Learning Journal 13: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
- My goals were reviewing stuffs that I learned during the past week and prepare for the final examination.
- I reviewed vocabularies about body parts, families, different suffixes, and putting "at" at the end of the sentence.
- I listened to a popular Turkish song, Dudak by Edis and reviewed vocabularies by filling the blanks in the lyrics. I think learning Turkish with songs is fun and effective.
Fourth Artifact: Edis_Dudak
