Blogs

Cultural Post

Superstitions and ceremonies are a big part of Turkish culture. In my last few posts about Turkish culture, I talked about a few of the superstitions and rituals in daily cultural life. I will explore these in my cultural project, with attention and focus on traditions and superstitions around death. What are the beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife? Do those come from religion, or are they from pre-existing beliefs common throughout the Mediterranean? Like weddings, funerals are big events. There are two weeks of mourning are various communal events that occur when someone dies. In America, we have a few traditions around funerals, but beliefs about death and the afterlife differ from person to person. A death in Turkey is a bigger event and the rituals surrounding death are longstanding traditions. There is a specific agenda of activities and food eaten when someone dies in Turkey. I look forward to exploring this topic more, specifically the origins of the tradition. I will also begin to research using resources in Turkish, as my goal is to deliver my presentation mainly in Turkish.

Learning Activity Reflection

I had a couple of people try my activity. One of my roommates studies Arabic with me. She got all of them correct. One of my other roommates, who does not study another language, also got them all right. I know they were all easy sentences and words, but they thought it was fun. The emphasis on this activity was not whether or not the sentences were complex, but it was an activity on using context clues to decipher the meaning of an unknown word.

I am now focusing on reading comprehension and working on my accent when I read. Surprisingly, I understand 90% of what I read, which is cool. I have gotten a lot better at figuring out words I don’t know. I think I know what to look for within the context of the sentence. I am able to answer comprehension questions, such as fill in the blanks, and True (Doğru) or False (Yanlış). I am getting faster at reading. I don’t sound out each letter in the word, because there are more words I recognize immediately.  I really enjoy reading in Turkish, but for the next weeks I want to improve my conversational skills and look for context clues in conversation.

 Activity: I will give someone sentences in English, with one word in Turkish. Given the words you know and context clues, what does this Turkish word mean? 

1) Memet went to the grocery Mağaza to buy vegetables.

A: store

2) Yesterday was doğum günüm. I turned 21.  

A: my birthday

3) Ahmet: Nasılsın Nur? Nur: I am good! Nasılsın Ahmet?

A: How are you?

110 Cultural Post #7

In my experience, attitudes about family are very strong in Korean culture. Growing up, it was normal, if not expected, to be close to one’s nuclear family as well as one’s extended family. Korean people around me generally were close to their family members. Essentially, one’s family was the basis of one’s social life. In Korean culture, there is an emphasis on depending on one’s family members. For example, Korean children are expected to take care of their parents when they grow older. In Western culture, parents generally do not expect their children to take care of them. However, in Korean culture, it is normal to have an elderly parent live with the eldest son or daughter. It is expected that the children will take care of the parent through providing room and board when the parent is no longer able to take care of themselves. Just as the parent provided for the child during his or her youth, it is only normal to return the favor when the parent is unable to live alone.

This semester, with the help of Sezgi, I have focused more on solidifying the grammar and verb tenses rather than focus on learning vocabulary by topic. I am really creating a strong base off which to keep building and applying new vocab. I want to learn the majority of grammatical suffixes and how this affects sentence structure. I originally wanted to learn vocabulary pertaining to travel, etc. But I think focusing on the grammar is more important. The vocab will come with time and I will learn from experience and out of necessity. I can learn vocab from context clues in text and in conversation, but grammar is much harder to just pick up on.

I am now learning the future tense and how to express wishes and wants. Like English, expressing wants requires two verbs.  I also learned how to say I must/should. This is expressed with an affix -meli/mali-. Once again, I feel that I can now say so much more, now that I know another verb tense.

In the following recording I am talking about what I did last weekend using the past perfect tense. 

Turkish: Hava güzel oldu geçen hafta sonu. Cumartesi günü çalıştım ama pazar günü çalışmadım ve tüm gün güneşlendim,  Çünkü hava oldu sıcaktı ve güneşli geçen hafta sonu. Kahvaltı pişirdim ve kendim odamı ve mutfağı temizledim. Sonra akşamları ev arkadaşlarımla bir restorana gittim. Geçen hafta sonu çok güzel bir haftasonu. Bu hafta sonu ne yaptın?

English: The weather was beautiful last weekend. I worked on Saturday but Sunday I didn't work. I sunbathed the whole day because the weather was warm and sunny. I cooked breakfast and cleaned my room and the kitchen by myself. Then, I went to a restaurant with the housemates. Last weekend was a very beautiful weekend. What did you do last weekend? 

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These past 2  weeks I learned the past perfect tense and used a lot in conversation. I can now say what I did in the past and ask questions in the past tense. I am also learning more vocabulary to incorporate into my conversations, such as places I have been and things I have done. I learned more word about temporality, such as “last week” and “yesterday.” I find past tense to be quite easy and it is nice to be able to communicate things that happened in the past. Learning a new tense is kind of liberating. I feel I do not have as many limits on my conversational skills. Next, I will learn the future tense, and express wants and desires. 

The more I explore Ukrainian music, the more aware I become of the complexities of political relations in Ukraine. The 2016 Eurovision winning song was called 1944, and  performed by Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar Jamala. The song talks about the mass deportations under Stalin of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, which was a brutal time. The choice to send a song about mass human rights violations and deportations in Crimea was no accident, and it was clearly a political message referring to Putin's illegal annexation of Crimea. The song is sung partially in English and partially Crimean Tatar, which is certainly a minority language in the world, but it is listed as the second language of Russia, and the fourth in Ukraine. The political nature of the song, combined with its strong emotional appeal likely lead to the song being named the winner of the competition. 

Over these two weeks, my language partner and I took a break from the newscasts and instead did something a bit more fun. We watched the popular Ukrainian competition show "Holoc Deti," which is essentially "The Voice" in Ukrainian. I really enjoyed doing this because it was a change of pace from what we had been doing before, and I understood a lot more during the show than I thought I would. Hearing the language and how it is used conversationally (as opposed to on a news broadcast) was helpful for me because I feel like this is the type of language I will hear in daily life in Ukraine.  

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For this artifact, I summarize a news article about a bomb being thrown into a Polish Embassy in Lutsk, a relatively calm and safe western town in Ukraine. 

I think my learning activity is effective in soliciting answers about a newspaper article from a student. The questions guide the student and help them understand what needs to be talked about. These are the types of questions my language partner asks me after I read an article or watch a news segment. Although they are relatively elementary questions, I feel that they are helpful in guiding my thoughts and helping me put together a coherent answer in Ukrainian. 

My language partner and I have been working on watching news reports and reading corresponding news articles to help me increase my listening and comprehension skills. It is challenging to understand the news reporters, as they talk very quickly, however, I have found that if I keep myself informed about what is going on in Ukraine (in English), the understanding the general topic that reporters are talking about becomes much more understandable. My learning activity is below: 

1. вибрати статтю з газети читати.

2.Підсумувати статтю. Що сталося? Хто бере участь?

3. що ви думаєте про ці новини? це хороша новина чи погана новина?

This activity asks students to read a newspaper article, summarize it, and share an opinion about what happened. This is essentially what I have been doing with my language partner. 

• Third Cultural Post

As I continued to look at the Korean Fashion. I ran into a designer that specializes in hanbok for the modern times. Hwang Yi-Seul is a designer focused on combining both the old and traditional together to create the more trendy relaxed version of the hanbok. It was interesting to see the combination of old and new together. 

My learning goal for week 10 compliments what I learned in week 9 over spring break, when I focused on developing my listening skills. After expanding my knowledge about listening and comprehending simpler Korean audio clips, I will be able to extend this knowledge by attempting to understand some parts of the Korean news. I can accomplish this goal by listening and attempting to translate samples of news clips through SCOLA and GLOSS. My language partner can also help me accomplish this goal by looking at news clips together to identify common news-related vocabulary.

I dedicated at least one goal each that focused on reading and writing in Korean. These two aspects are definitely quite challenging and even more difficult than simply speaking in that language. I rated these two aspects as one of the lower categories, when determining my level of competence because I personally struggle with both of these. However, I would definitely say that writing in Korean is harder than reading in Korean. The Korean alphabet may be simple, but the placement of the vowel and consonants are quite tricky, especially with letters that sound the same. As a result, writing in Korean is the last learning goal that I want to achieve because it is the most tricky, but also the most satisfying to complete. I want to be able to apply my learning by writing a short, heartfelt letter to my aunt and to be more comfortable texting my family in Korean.

Reading in Korean is also a struggle because I am more comfortable with reading in English. It takes me a while to read Korean articles because not only do I want to make sure that I am reading the words correctly, but also I need to properly understand what I’m reading. When my learning partner and I were reading a news article, it was quite challenging because I had to read slowly to understand and I ran across many unfamiliar vocabulary words. However, reading and writing skills can develop through practice, so I will be sure to continue learning and reviewing what I learned to develop my reading and writing skills for Korean.   

As a bilingual speaker myself, it was quite interesting to read these articles that discussed why bilinguals are smarter and/or if bilinguals were actually smarter. The first article details how bilinguals are smarter because the use of both language systems allows strengthening of a brain’s cognitive muscles. The article also describes how bilingual speakers have an increased ability to monitor the environment, which is due to switching between speaking the primary and secondary language. For instance, I usually talk to my family members in Korean, but sometimes we switch our language to English, without even realizing it. This skill has become natural to me and I didn’t realize that this natural flow can actually positively influence my strengths as a bilingual speaker.

The second article takes this topic on the opposite side and questions whether bilingual speakers are indeed smarter. An interesting point that they made was that bilingual individuals may know more words overall, e.g. when combining both languages, but may know less words in each language, separately. I can definitely agree to this reasoning because I basically have two different ways to say one item, such as dog. However, I do sometimes feel like I lack a full span of vocabulary for both languages, when they are separated into the Korean vocabulary and the English vocabulary. Both articles were quite interesting to read because they allowed me to evaluate my skills as a bilingual speaker and how I can assess its strengths and weaknesses.  

About half of my learning goals were directed towards interpersonal communication, which meant that I needed to learn a lot of vocabulary words to have more flowing conversation with my family and friends. As a result, I have learned a lot of new words, maybe ~60 for just words to develop my communication skills. However, I also learned new words while reading and understanding articles, so I think I learned ~80-90, maybe even 100 new words in total. I learned these words by initially using vocabulary games/flashcards, but I also learned these words by practicing with my learning partner. My learning partner was very knowledgeable about the topics of interest and really helped me learn these new words. Even when we read the articles together, my language partner would help me make a vocabulary list for the unknown words because this would help me understand the articles better.

I am aware that I have learned a lot of new words, which will take a lot of practice and reviewing to continue remembering these words. As a result,I think I can better achieve this goal when I actually use them and apply them to real-world situations. For example, I am creating my final cultural presentation about education in Korea because I learned how to say a variety of different majors in Korean. It was beneficial that I could apply my knowledge when making this presentation because it helped me use these types of words and really evaluate my learning.

This reading detailed the existence of the Siletz language, which seems to be slowly deteriorating. One of the individuals who speak the language, Mr. Lane, mentions that their goal with the Siletz language is to simply allow it to become stable. It is eye-opening to hear someone mention that stabilization is all that they’re looking for in their language because the language would disappear without that stability. It is very important for the Siletz people to not lose their language because their culture will die along with it. They will lose the symbols and traditions that are unique to their culture, once they lose their language because language can shape how different parts of the culture are formed. As a result, it is quite amazing to see the Siletz people continue to revive their language by attempting to teaching their language in sixth grade and potentially in high school as well.

They truly inspire me to value my secondary language of Korean because of the variety aspects of culture that make up the language. Like the Siletz, I would also strive to preserve Korean language because I would not want to lose its connections to clothing, food, and other parts of culture that make Korean the beautiful language it is.

My goal for this week is to learn how to order food. The reason why I chose this topic is very simple, it's because that it happens every day! I started this task from learning some Korean dishes I like in Korean. The memorizing part was not very difficult for me because I already knew most of the names of the dishes I will love to try if I travel there. Then, I found some dialogues in my Korea University textbook and practiced them by speaking these dialogues by myself. From this process, I have learned the ways Korean people will say when they go to a restaurant, also knew about some of the Korean cultures. The culture part is very interesting! Like the elders will pay the meals for the younger people, also those who come late have to pay as well. And the way I accomplished this task is by designing the conversation I will have if I go to a Korean restaurant, then I showed them to my Korean friend to see if anything needs to be revised or not.

At this point, I would estimate that I have learned around 150 or 200 words in Turkish. Most of the word we learned within the context of a lesson. For example, we learned a group of nouns so that we could construct yes/no questions. This helps me remember what words go together in context and allows us to build our vocabulary by adding new words to phrases and sentences we already know. In the last few weeks of the semester, I would like to work on more travel vocabulary and I am confident in my basic understanding of phrase construction to be able to work on this on my own.