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Respond to the readings

I agree with the idea that the bilinguals are smarter. Although I am not a bilingual since birth, however I can understand and agree with what the scientists talk about in the readings. Although, some people say that learn a second language since a baby would have bad impacts on their learning, yet, I think the same way as the scientists told" it would make them smarter and react quicker than other children." From my experience, I speak mandarin and Taiwanese as my mother languages. Later, I have learned English, Korean, a little bit of Spanish and Japanese as well. From these learning experiences, I feel that I would think one thing in different ways. Like when I see an object, I might express my feeling in Chinese or English or even Korean, and three of them sometimes would give me different emotions as well. So, by learning more than two languages, the ways of thinking would be different as well.

Another thing is the logic of learning. From learning more than two languages, the bilinguals have to understand the logic of learning those languages. Such as the logic of the structure or the grammar, or they will find them very confused if they don't know how to organize them and use them in the correct ways. Thus, I think the bilinguals might be good at the logic of learning a new thing. In conclusion, I totally agree with the idea of bilinguals are smarter than those who are not according to the above two reasons.

How many new words have you learned in your target language?  How did you learn them?  Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?

First of all, I really have no idea of how many new words I have learned in this semester, but I could tell how I have learned those words. The basic way to learn them is from the class. In the class, the teacher would teach as some conversations or listen to a song and learn the lyrics, from these materials I have learned a lot of new vocabularies which are very practical as well. Another way is from the dramas and the TV show on the internet. From these two resources, I have learned a lot of new words and know more about making conversations. My realistic goal for my acquisition of vocabulary is that I can learn as many daily words that Koreans would use in everyday life as possible. Yet, if I want to engage some business there in the future, I would like to learn financial related vocabularies as well.

Respond to the reading, reflecting on what is lost when languages die.

I think the most essential things behind a language is its culture. Thus, when a language dies, the history and the cultures behind it would lost and disappear. From a language, we can know how the people who use the language react to their daily lives, that is in another words, their cultures. Such as the language in the reading, teacher has showed us that this culture has many ways of naming "basket". From this, it is apparent that this culture puts a lot of emphasizes on the baskets, maybe because different kinds of baskets have different usages. Thus, a specific name for a specific basket is important for them. Another example is the languages between the northern countries and the south. In the north, people have many ways of calling different types of snow, some are wet snow, and some are dry, and they have many different adjectives to describe them. However, in the south, people don't even have snow, so they would only call snow as "snow", no other special adjectives to describe because they don't need them at all. Thus, from this, we can see that knowing the  language of the specific area is very important because it can tell us the history and the culture of that area. In conclusion, when a language dies, its cultures and history would be lost as well. Thus, it is very important for us to preserve those dying languages so that we can record the history and the cultures behind it.

Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language.

Knowing the target language's history can help me a little bit on learning it. As I have learned a little background of Korean language, I could tell that Korean has been affected a lot by Chinese language and cultures. Since the begging of Korean language, it is said that Korean people could only communicate by speaking at first. Later, some scholars learned Chinese characters from China and spread it to the high social status people, and it was until then could the Korean people communicate by writing as well. Although, the Chinese characters were replaced by the Korean characters we see nowadays later, we could still see a lot of words that have similarities with Chinese vocabularies. By knowing this, sometimes it would be much easier for me to memorize some vocabularies than other students because I can speak mandarin as well. Thus, knowing the history of the language is very interesting and sometimes can help the learners know how to use or memorize some words much easier as well.

Reflect on the Culture Shock video and your own experiences and expectations of culture shock

This culture shock video basically talks about how the international students at U of R feel or react to the cultural shock they have faced in the campus. For me, as an exchange student as well, I have experienced almost the same as they had. Such as the different teaching styles between here and my home university. Here, the professors in the class would expect all the students should participate a lot in the class, however, at my home school, all we do in the class is listen to the professors and take notes. Thus, when I first came to the class here, I felt nervous and depressed because I was not used to it before. Another interesting culture shock they have mentioned in the video is the greetings and the "small talk". Here, when people meet friends on the streets or the cashiers in the stores, when they see you they will always say " how are you?' as an opening, and it basically just another way to say "hello". However, when I first heard that, I was surprised because those were the people I just met and they cared about how was my feelings? So, I happily replied back and expected more information from them and they just left in a second without even replying me. I felt weird at first, but later a friend explained all the meanings of this, I found myself really funny. Thus, I think culture shocks are basically from all the small things in daily lives. For me, I can always expect the "big shock" before I experience them because they are supposed to be very different. However, those "small shocks" would really make me feel shocked at first, but after I understand them, I will find them interesting and kind of enjoying the differences.

I created a learning activity to teach my friends about how to tell time in Korea, and I created a powerpoint to help me with the illustration.  

I will first explain the difference between English and Korean ways of telling time. Korean uses the native numbers for hours and Chinese style numbers for minutes. I attached the powerpoint below. I taught them how to say native and Chinese based numbers. I gave them examples of telling time during the day. 

I think the powerpoint is an effective way to show them how to tell time because it listed 1-12 o'clock with pronunciation and corresponding arabic numbers.   

Time%20Korean.pptx

One personal goal for me was to be able to speak with my girlfriend's Korean family and be able to have a basic conversation with them. Last weekend was Isla's grandmother's birthday and we facetimed her and sang her happy birthday in Korean and then I talked to her briefly about school and classes in Korean. While I get to talk to Isla in Korean it was really cool to get to use the language in a non-practice setting and to be able to communicate with someone who I wasn't able to understand before.

This week I am doing a lot of review as recommended by my language partner in preparation for the language presentation. I have been going over old vocabulary and grammatical structures, focusing on greetings, introductions, and farewells. In terms of greetings and farewells I've been going over the formal and nonformal versions. For introductions I have been reviewing the descriptive vocabulary about things like jobs, hobbies, family, locations, and activities. I've been having practice conversations with my girlfriend a lot and she helps me speak more fluidly.

This week I want to learn how to order food at a restaurant. In order to achieve this goal I will need to learn what different foods are called and how to describe them, as well as vocabulary relating to ordering food. I have been studying the names of different types of traditional Korean foods, like 갈비 and 삼겹살, two of my favorite types of Korean barbeque. With my language partner I am practicing discussing and ordering food, and describing its flavor and taste. I also watched a few episodes of a Korean drama called Pasta which is about a restaurant and has a lot of vocabulary about food and ordering food.

My learning goal for this week is to learn about talking about my day. To that end I will have to become more familiar with relative time words and will also need to learn new vocabulary describing activities like waking up and going to classes. In order to achieve this goal I will study the vocabulary that I will need to learn and then work with my language partner to practice using the verbs correctly and talking about my day. I will work through a helpful worksheet that my language partner gave me last time and practice speaking with my girlfriend.

During this week I learned about the number system in Korea and how to talk about time. Korea actually has a very complex number system, or two be accurate, has two different number systems that are used for different purposes and occasionally together. Korea has its own traditional number system that only really works for small numbers, but Koreans also use a chinese-based number system for larger numbers. When doing things like talking about your age, counting things, or stating the hour you would use the traditional Korean number system, but if you wanted to talk about money or even the minutes in the hour you would use the chinese based number system. Even though you count things in the traditional number system, when you start counting above one hundred the part of the number that is at and above one hundred becomes the chinese based number, while the smaller part stays traditional. The reason that the time system is so complicated in Korea is because in the past people couldn't tell time more accurately than the hour so there was no word for minutes, but with the creation of clocks people needed words for more accurate times, and at around the same time the Chinese based number system was becoming more widely used so people used it for the number of minutes.

• 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 is a recording of a practice conversation with my girlfriend. In the conversation, we exchange greetings and then she asks me what my name is. I respond in the formal version and then she asks me how old I am, to which I say that I am twenty one. We then exchanged farewells, with her saying goodbye like she was leaving, and me saying like I was staying. At week 4 and 5 I was making a lot of progress on basic introductions and I learned a lot about how you address different people and about the Korean age hierarchy.

SDLC 110 Learning Journal #13:

My learning goals for this week were to practice speaking in solely Korean for at least fifteen minutes. I plan to call my mom later today to hopefully accomplish this. I know that I have a limited range of vocabulary outside of topics that I normally am used to talking about. Therefore, I think that I will stick to the more familiar topics. However, I do plan to still be creative and hopefully utilize what I’ve been learning in my Korean classes into my conversation. Some topics that I think will be challenging to talk about but I’ll still attempt to converse about are my future career plans, more complicated emotions that I’ve felt, and the random things I did in my day (for example: describing actions that I normally do not do normally such as building a fort under my bed). If I am not able to describe exactly what I am trying to say, I am going to try my best to not resort to English. Rather, I hope that I have made enough neural connections to creatively come up with a response that is somewhat along the lines of what I am trying to convey. I hope to do this for fifteen minutes, but I think that if I am unable to, I will try again in a future phone call with my mom again. It is one thing to learn about a language. It seems to be another applying what I have learned into a real-life conversation that is meant to be fluid and natural.

SDLC 110 Learning Journal #12

I wanted to familiarize myself with the vocabulary used to describe the weather for my learning goals this week through incorporating weather vocabulary into my daily lifestyle. When I talked to my mom, I was sure to mention the weather changing from cloudy (흐린) to sunny (햇빚) in Korean. In addition, I also talked about how it was supposed to be warmer (따뜻해) this weekend in Korean. I also changed my phone language to Korean for a day in order to familiarize myself with the language used to describe weather. Furthermore, I drew pictures of what the weather was going to be like with the Korean vocabulary word for it under to make it easy for me to look over and make the connection between the two without trying too hard. I wanted to naturally implement weather vocabulary into my life without it being too rigid. I think one thing I have difficulty with is that I am not sure which words are and are not usually associated with the weather. I can say that the sky is dark or is gloomy, but I am not sure whether the words I am using are usually associated with the weather or if I am indirectly personifying the weather by giving it vocabulary words that are only used with humans. I hope that through my phone calls with my mom, I will be better at distinguishing which vocabulary word is acceptable in the correct context.

Second Artifact:  Show that you can ask and answer questions about identity

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The pictures are the conversation I had with my Korean friend. I asked her to practice this task with me to show that I am able to ask and answer questions about identity. The translation is as below:

Me(A) / My friend(B)

A: Hi! My name is Yuchi.Wu. I am Taiwanese~

B: I see~ Hi~ My name is Yerin.Lee, I am Korean.

A:Yeah~Nice to meet you! Where are you studying now?

B: I am studying in Taiwan now! What about you?

A: Wow! Really!? I am studying in Virginia as an exchange student.

I will go back to Taiwan next month. Do you want to go traveling together?

B: Really!? Sounds great!

A:Ok! I will contact you when I go back.

B:Ok~I will wait for your messages.

SDLC 105

Post Learning Journal #10 on Your Blog in the Ning

• Reflect on your experiences of (trying to) read and write in your target language.  

I think that I am terrible at reading and writing in Korean. However, I have improved in my reading skills this semester, and I have been working on stressing the right sounds in order to make the sentence make sense. Quite frankly, I am very mediocre at writing because I have not had any formal training in it. I know how the alphabet sounds like, and I attempt to piece those sounds together in order to form words that I am trying to say. However, I will often make mistakes when doing this because there will sometimes be consonants that I did not realize were in the word, or the word is spelled slightly differently than how it is pronounced. In terms of reading, I am slow, but I have been working on it. I have a difficult time reading and understanding what I am reading at the same time. I have to read the sentence multiple times in order to say it correctly as well as understand what the sentence is trying to say. As a child, I remember having a textbook that I would read stories from for Korean school. Though I would be clumsy at first when reading the stories, I would eventually get into a groove and be able to read with more and more ease. In retrospect, I think that I am still the same way. Once I get into the habit of reading more than a few sentences, I am better able to shift into reading the words more fluidly.

I thought that these readings were quite interesting. Though I am not fully bilingual, it was nice to read about how being bilingual offered many benefits such as more neural connections, delayed onsets to Alzheimer’s Disease, and heightened awareness abilities of the environment. It encouraged me to pursue being bilingual even more. One thing I found interesting when reading these articles was that one side effect of being bilingual was having a limited vocabulary. I related to this very much, and I was slightly relieved to know that there was a reason for why I couldn’t think of what an object was called. I have many instances where I would be talking to someone, and I wouldn’t know what word to use to describe what I was thinking, and I end up having to pantomime what I am saying. I thought it was also interesting how bilingual babies were able to be more aware of their environment. I would have never thought that a mental ability of being bilingual would also translate into physical abilities. The babies essentially demonstrated what they had to do in their head (switching from one to another) into actions in real life.

This week, my objective was to focus on learning political termanology in Czech to better communicate what I am studying and any current events. For example, one event that I wanted to focus on was the impeachment of South Korean President, Park Geun Hye. To do this, I had to learn the words for impeach, president, politician, government, political party, etc. I asked and conversed with my Czech friends and utilized online resources to learn the words and form sentences. "Dobry Den, videl jste obžalobu z prezidenta Park Geun Hye? Delala Spatne Veci a mluvila se jeji pritelka o dulezity politicke veci." Hello, did you see the impeachment of president Park Geun Hye? She did bad things and talked to her friend about important political things. 

Trying to learn another language is never easy. I think that my experience in learning languages has definitely benefited me through this experience because I surprisingly can speak pretty well. Writing is something that I have not spent very much time on this semester. I am not sure that was really in my learning plan though because I knew that this is a rather short-term commitment for me, with graduation around the corner. Mainly I wanted to be able to speak on basic terms in case I visited and also because I do know quite a few people who speak Turkish.

In terms of reading, I have gotten the sounds of the letters down, so I can effectively pronounce words and if the words are in my vocabulary, I can understand. One thing I have struggled with recognizing is the conjugation of verbs. In Turkish, words are often combined to conjugate them and I have found a little bit of struggle in being able to tell what the root of the word is.

I can effectively talk about the weather and talk about the day/night, including:

• Date
• Time (morning, daytime, evening, night)
• Sunny or cloudy
• Warm or cold
• Rainy

I am still pleased with my progress and I am interested in how to see how I can communicate the weather and dates with my friend who is a native speaker. He was very impressed with how well I was grasping the language so quickly. 

We also listened to a Turkish pop song by Edis called Dudak. This is a song where we also learned about body parts on the face to be able to follow along because "dudak" is the word for lips. To challenge us, Sezgi had printed out the lyrics of the song and as we listened to it, we tried to fill in some random blanks that were words that we have learned. This was helpful because it gave me a little bit of confidence that I actually could recognize some words.