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I found the readings this week especially interesting because I am bilingual. It felt like these readings offered a little speak at my own brain. I mostly consider my bilingualism between English and Croatian since I speak in those languages more than I speak in German or Korean. While I agreed with many of the points that the articles brought up, especially the points regarding focus, there were many that I disagreed with. For example, one researcher stated that bilingual speakers can completely block one language when speaking in another. I think this is pretty incorrect. Of course, there is the basic ability to suppress the other language but I still slip and use the wrong language. This is especially true when I am just starting speaking after being stopped for a while. In the flow of a conversation, my brain is able to "warm up" in the same way a car does so that I can easily flow in one language. But often in the beginning or when having sudden bursts of speech, the ability to suppress is much lower. 

I think the greatest benefits for speaking two (or more) languages are increased focus and a framework for other languages. Since bilingual people have to constantly make a choice between languages, there is a much higher level of focus. I have seen these in between my friends. I feel that my bilingual friends tend to pay more attention and engage more than my monolingual friends. Furthermore, all the languages I've learned have made it easier to experience and learn new languages. My biggest benefit has not be in grammar but in pronunciation. Since I usually use a wide variety of sounds, my accent tends to not be strong when learning new languages because I am more accustomed to the sounds they may use.

For this week, I learned the sentence of asking "do you like xxx?" and to answer yes/no.  We practiced a dialogue during learning sessions where we insert the words we learned previously to the question and fully answered them. Minkyung helped to correct our pronunciations.  We also learned a set of words about vegetables, including eggplant, tomato, potato, celery, lettuce and more. There are some words that sound very similar in English, for example, tomato.  This is because some of the vegetables were not orginally from South Korea and were introduced to Korea later.  Some other vegitables have simlilar sound as Chinese words.  

I also watched a video regarding how to ask for price in Korean.  The video created a scene so audience can feel involved in learning the conversations.  I am still not familiarize with numbers but I learned how to ask for price.   

First Artifact

I talk about my trip back home using the present continuous tense and connectors. I feel my pronunciationArtifact%201.mp3 has really improved and I am able to speak longer on one topic. 

Bi-weekly reflection

This week I reviewed present continuous tense. This semester I am really focusing on using the verb tenses to expand my conversational skills. I did a lot of exercises in my Istanbul Turkish book and practiced them in conversation with my language partner. In our conversation, I had questions about how to say certain words. I love how organic and natural my questions were. I was asking how to say words relevant to our conversation rather than memorizing a vocabulary list and only using those words. I have learned how to say "my boyfriend and I went to a winery and drank wine" and I asked questions about her boyfriend. I love that I'm learning how to say things that friends actually talk about, which is such a different experience than a textbook based, traditional classroom setting. I will review past tense next week.

My goal for this week is to know how to buy tickets in Korean. The reason why I chose for this topic is because that I had many experiences of buying tickets during the time I stayed in Korea. It is not very hard, but still have some details that I have to learn about, such as the words for student tickets, discount tickets, and the opening time or the closing time, etc. Thus, I looked up those words I need to learn if I want to buy a ticket in the dictionary. Then, I designed a simple dialogue by myself. The simple dialogue is like:

Hi, here is my student ID card.

Can I get a student ticket please? Thank you.

Also, when is the closing time of this museum?

Except this one, I also write another dialogue under the situation that they don't want to admit my student id card since I am not a student there. So, I will add some conversations like " how can I get a discount", etc.

This week rather than learning more material I would like to review what I have learned so far. I will practice my vocabulary and review more soccer vocabulary. I will also attempt to look into how what I have learned has also contributed to learning about Portuguese culture. 

Why are bilinguals smarter? Well one of the articles claims that bilinguals are smarter because when they see an object they dont instantly see the objects name in one language. Rather they have to decide which language they would like to call the object in. This means that the person has more neural pathways, which means that the person probably has a higher neural plasticity. This shows that even though one may only be using one language the user has both languages going at once. Having the ability to comprehend in both languages also improves ones brain's executive function. 

Knowing the history can improve the language learning in several ways. At first, history creates words, especially those proverbs, idioms, and analogy. For instance, an idiom might come from a historical story. In this case, knowing the story helps to better understand and memorize the idiom. Plus, for Korean, the history of the language ties to the history of the country. Hence, figuring out how the language has changed over centuries helps knowing the structure of the language. In addition, history promotes the culture formation, and culture deeply influences the language. Thus, knowing the history helps me learn the language from the cultural perspective. For example, in all ages, Confucius has been playing an important role in the Korean culture. Therefore, knowing this fact allows me to understand the use of honorific and the implicit way of talking. Furthermore, history is fun, and it is like telling stories. Knowing the history can increase my interest in learning Korean. Also, I can talk about Korean history and culture with Koreans to practice the language.

I think progress is going well. After actually starting the bi-weekly meetings with my language partner and doing exercises, I realized that my learning plan has to updated to more vocabulary centered goals. I am far from being proficient in the Korean language in terms of vocabulary and reading. I was really disappointed with my reading skills because I used to be decent with my reading and had no trouble smoothly transitioning from word to word. Now I tend to stutter or have trouble pronouncing some words. I think our reading exercises have been great because I am learning new vocabulary, the spelling and pronunciation  of the words, and meanings that go beyond what it says on the surface layer. I have really enjoyed the historical lessons that Joora, our language partner, provided us in our classes because it is one of the few times that I learned about Korea's history. There is a lot I don't know about the history so the more I uncover the more I feel closer to Korean culture. Overall, I think I should focus on the smaller goals that have more depth to them than just learning how to do some basic interaction.  

I was curious about the student life in Korea, so I decided to do some research on this topic. In Korea, the average high school student has class from about 8am until 9:30pm or 10pm. The reason for this insane amount of school hours is because the competition to get into a good college is very high. Since everyone is working this hard, everyone has to try as hard. On top of that, many students attend hagwons which are private after school learning programs. These programs help reinforce higher education and English skills. As a result of these hagwons and long school hours, the average teenager doesn;t get home until midnight and dinner is served at school. There is also school on Saturdays. I feel blessed to have been a part of the American education system throughout my entire life after learning about what Korean students have to go through. Even in college, my studies aren't as rigorous as these high school students, which isn't something to brag. I think Korean shouldn't push so hard on these students because I also learned that because of the immense pressure of having to get good grades and go to a good college, some students commit suicide because they fail to do so.  I think this is pretty depressing and something should be done to prevent this action.

For the past two weeks we have been going over more vocabulary that is a bit more advanced and can be helpful for practical situations. For example, we went over how we can answer interview questions. We learned vocabulary that related to my major and the extra curricular activities that I participate in. We learned how I can present all these in a coherent way and we practiced formal interactions with what I just learned. Since I plan on going to Korea for the spring semester next year we also went over vocabulary relating to tourism. I think this learning activity could be useful for anyone trying to go to Korea as a tourist so I will be using this activity to teach someone a lesson. My learning partner had found a Korean website that already had translations for common phrases and words relating to tourism, so it made it easier to find what could be helpful to know. It was well organized into categories so we could nitpick exactly what we wanted to learn. We learned phrases relating to interactions that dealt with making purchases, learning how to navigate around, and where I can find information that would be helpful for a oblivious tourist lost in a unknown place. Overall, everything we learned these past few weeks were very helpful and practical which I really liked.

For the past two we went over a brief period of Korean history when Korea was taken over by Japan. This was really interesting to learn because I don't really know much about Korean history at all and it is a difficult topic to discuss with my parents or grandparents because of the communication barrier. We watched videos on YouTube on a channel of a Korean guy who discusses the history of Korea and the important people who were crucial to the specific events. Unfortunately, there were no subtitles so that made understanding the videos a bit difficult. However, I think it was good practice to try to keep up with more sophisticated vocabulary and our learning partner, Joora, was there to help translate and explain what was being said.  

We switched learning partners to Joora so Jacob and I explained where we were in terms of proficiency in Korean. We explained our learning plans so that she can incorporate some lessons relating to what we wanted to learn. For the past two weeks we reviewed basic aspects of the language to get a good review before adding newer material. For one of the weeks we basically just went over the Korean alphabet to refresh our memories on the language. We focused on vocabulary related exercises because this is an important part of the language that I have some trouble with. We did some practice by spelling out some difficult words. We discussed Korean vocabulary that we usually found difficult to spell. She explained why things were spelled a specific way and some tips that could help guide us in spelling correctly. I realize my vocabulary is very weak, so I hope to expand my abilities.

This week we learned the names of animals and foods. It was very interesting to see how many of these words are similar to Chinese. We learned how to say animals like: ostrich (ta zho), tiger (ho rang i), cat (ko yang yi), fox (yo yul). For the food, I knew many of them from eating them before. It was interesting to see both the word and learn how to read it and practice writing it out.

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I would say that my vocabulary is somewhere around 200 right now. I have learned much of my vocabulary through apps and by asking Sezgi what words mean when she says ones that I am not familiar with.

Something that she does that frustrated me at first, but I have grown to appreciate is that she does not merely translate the word. She tries to use it in other ways or show me what it means in order for me to create an association rather than a definition.

I think I do have realistic goals because even though I am not moving incredibly quickly with my vocabulary, I am learning how to make use of the words that I do know and I believe that I am learning relevant words.

Family Introduction

We are learning about food. In fact, we had a meeting outside of class in which Sezgi went out of her way to make us Turkish coffee, bring us Turkish delights, and do a fortune-telling session. It was so cool to learn about how this custom is so important to daily ritual and how frequently it is used in both casual and professional settings.

I am able to introduce my family and talk about my house.

I personally am not bilingual, but it would make sense that in certain ways bilinguals are smarter than those who only speak one language. The ability to think and express those thoughts in multiple languages seems like a skill that would translate to other tasks, such as multitasking, especially if one has the ability to code switch well between languages. I think saying that bilinguals are smarter in general does not paint an accurate picture, but there is obviously evidence that the ability to speak multiple languages translates to other tasks as well.