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For my third artifact, I am including a reading exercise I did with my language partner. Basically, I read a story in Korean, annotated the story as went along, reviewed my understanding with my language partner, and then wrote down the unfamiliar words and sentences in my notebook. This exercise has been effective for me and I now repeat it weekly.

This week, my goal was to have a conversation with one of my friends in Korean. To prepare for my conversations, I wrote down a few things I wanted to talk to her about and a few terms I wanted to try using. While talking to my friend on the phone, I could easily understand her but I felt that my responses were shaky, messy, and a bit too slow. It was definitley not a smooth conversation on my end. I think this activity was good because it showed me that I do need more practice in speaking and that my writing ability does not translate perfectly into my speaking ability. Overall, the conversation lasted about 5 minutes until I ran out of things I wanted to talk to her about. At the end, my friend said that she felt I made progress since when she watched me learning Korean at Yonsei.

Within the past week, I purchased a vocabulary building supplement from Yonsei so I changed my goal for the week so that it would include this supplement. Since lately I have been focusing on grammar only, I feel as if I have not done much to improve my vocabulary. This supplement from Yonsei introduces vocabulary by themes, shows how they can be used, and then offers practice materials per chapter. So my goal for this week was to complete the first chapter within the book and use it to create new sentences with the grammar points I've been learning over the past few weeks.

So far, I have learned maybe around 500-700 words in my language. Maybe more, I'm not quite sure. However, I have reached the level where I can usually contextualize unfamiliar words with the words around them, which was quite a big step for me. I learned them mostly by learning first through themes (weather, food, sports, etc.) and then by reading. Reading was a big step because it takes constant reading to feel an impact but the impact can be seen after a few reading. Furthermore, reading is helpful because it shows you what verbs are typically used with which nouns and vice versa. Similar to English, Korean has it's own patterns and rhythms, which are not revealed to you by studying just basic vocabulary lists. Furthermore, I have studied by learning phrases and complete sentences. I feel that my acquisition of vocab is far behind my understanding of grammar so I still have room for improvement. The most important part of vocabulary is memorization and utilization but lately I have been slacking on both by simply compiling lists of words without reviewing them or using them. 

In my opinion, the greatest loss is the loss of culture. Not only do you lose a form of expression in a culture, but you lose the ability to engage with that culture in the future. For example, you can't contextualize artifacts from that culture or understand remaining texts. Furthermore, this loss impacts direct descendants from that culture more than others. By losing their culture and their ability to engage with it, descendants can feel as if they lost a piece of themselves. This is exactly why many people learn languages because they have family members or descendants who speak those languages. People often learn languages in order to feel closer to family members and closer to their own backgrounds. I can say that was the motivation for me to improve my Croatian and German.

One of my learning tasks was to text in Korean more and to get more familiar with conversational texting styles. I also wanted to practice my spelling and grammar by texting as much as I could with my family and friends. Below are screenshots of my conversation with my new friends, Yugi and Dali. I asked them how long they have been learning Korean and what parts of Korea they have visited. 

My goals for these past two weeks were to:

• A) Do half of Unit 8: Daily Activities, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture;
• B) Continue reading Indonesian comic books, sourced from the internet; and
• C) Use Bahasakita.com (our language), an online resource, to learn the particles "Sih," "Nah," "Nih," "Tuh," "Kan," "Kok," "Deh," "Kek," and "Yuk." These particles are often used in informal contexts and are a part of the colloquial language. 
• D) Meet with my partner for four hours

Strategies to accomplish these goals:

• A) I am halfway done Unit 8: Daily Actives / Hobbies. At the end of each session, I collected the new vocabulary that I learned. In addition, I worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills through the units' activities. I have amassed a large vocabulary pertaining to the topics that will prove useful in daily conversations. The unit's goals are to learn about the "behavior" of animals and humans (The word "behavior" in Bahasa Indonesia is used to indicate daily activities / hobbies.); To give information about the behavior of humans and animals; to ask for information about the behavior of humans and animals; to give information about objects' functions (think stove, etc.); and to ask for information about objects' functions. 

• B) I continued to read comics whose genres range from comedy to drama to fairytale. Here, this exercise allows me to get a better grasp on the "street" language as these comics use informal speech. It is important for me to not only learn the vocabulary but gain an understanding of the informal sentence structure patterns as well as the culture behind the conversations.
• These past two weeks, I have used the website Bahasakita.com to learn more about colloquial language. I learned about particles such as "Sih," which is attached to the end of a word to add emphasis and or annoyance and "Kok," which, if used at the beginning of a sentence, becomes "How come ...?" 
• C) I met with my language learning partner for 4 hours over these past two weeks. During these meetings, we worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills.

http://www.bahasakita.com ;

So far I would say that I have learned about 100 new words in Spanish, mostly from using flashcards. I focus on the vocabulary that will be most relevant to me while in Spain this summer, such as dining, navigation, and entertainment so that my time is spent efficiently. I hope to learn about 100 more words before the end of the year, which I think is realistic. I know I won't improve my vocabulary drastically overnight, but with consistent practice I think I should be able to achieve my goal.

My goal for this week is to write a very short story. I want to write a story about one of my experiences in New York during the spring break. This time I didn't find any resource first because I think that the best way to write a good story is by practicing. Thus, I just started to write by myself. During my writing, I found the most challenging part of this task is to express my feelings or to describe the views I saw. I could only write some very simple words to express my feelings and always write them repeatedly. So, I turned to the internet to search some useful words for expressing some emotions I will write in my story, and thus learned a few new words that could decorate my writings a little bit. In the end, I finished my writing. Since my story only told about one of my experiences from my trip, so it ended up for around 300 Korean words in total.

Create a learning activity to teach someone else something you have learned in your language; outline this activity in your learning journal; teach someone using this activity; reflect upon the effectiveness of the activity

I want to create an activity about counting numbers in Korean. In Korean, there are two different systems in counting numbers. One of them is basically from Chinese numbers, when the language learner wants to talk about the Months they have to use this system. However, when talking about the ages, the numbers of animals, and population, we have to use another system which is invented by Korean themselves. So, I will design this activity by showing some pictures to the students, and ask them to express what they see in those pictures. Pictures include animals, people, calendars and clocks. To be more exciting, I will also ask them to compete in 5 minutes and see who can speak more and correctly. I think by this activity, it will be very helpful for the students to really understand how to use these two counting systems correctly.

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?

My language learning so far puts more emphasis on readings and writings. However, I think it is not enough for me as a language learner because the most essential thing about learning a language is to be able to communicate with other people and also be able to understand what other people talk about in the target language. Thus, as I wrote in several previous learning journals, I want to practice my speaking more.

I think the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language is very tight and strong. By understanding the target culture, language learners can understand how the people react to each other, and what kind of expressions they will make while encounter certain situations. By watching Korean dramas and making local friends, I have learned and experience a lot of their cultures, and through understanding their cultures I can know how to use my target language adequately for certain situations. For examples, Korean people always put “being polite” in the first place when they meet a new friend. In Korea, they really take people’s ages seriously. Once someone is elder than another person, the younger one should always be respectful to the elder one, no matter in a family or in the working place. Thus, when the younger person talks to the elder one, he or she must use formal and respectful formats unless their relationship is very close. Also, when Korean people meet each other for the first time, a formal format is required. If someone use improper format, the one he or she is talking to will feel they are offended and think the person is acting really rude. Thus, Korean language learners should know this culture first before they begin to learn the language. Another culture aspect is that the Korean people would call each other as “brother” or “sister” even they are not really related. It is because that Korea is a country that emphasizes on the concept of “union”, so they think all the Korean people in the country are like their family. Thus, if they want to call each other they will use these kinds of words to show that the person they are chatting with is very close with them like their family. Thus, if a Korean language learner doesn’t understand their cultures before talking to the local people, there might be a big chance that the Koreans they are talking to will find this person not being polite.

To improve my communicative competence, I need to talk to the natives in Korean to improve my speaking and also practice my listening by watching Korean dramas or listening to their songs. I think by these two methods, I can improve my speaking and listening a lot and learn it correctly. Thus, I will also focus on practicing my communicative ability by the above two methods, and hope that I can have progress in this field at the end of this semester.  

Learning Journal 8

For this week, I reviewed all the words I learned so far and I checked my pronunciations with my Korean friend. Also, I continued to watch a video teaching Korean grammar. In that video, the girl used a trendy k-pop lyrics to illustrate how future tense is expressed. In this case, further tense is applied by adding "ye yo" at the end of the sentence. In addition, we continued to learn dialogue during my meeting with language partner. We learned about asking people if they have time, including "do you have time today", "do you have time tomorrow" , and "when do you have time" and how to answer these questions. We also reviewed Hangul and had contest on quickly pronouncing words. From all of the learning activities, I find words review to be the most effective.

My learning goal for this week is to understand a poem. Fortunately, the teacher in the class taught us one poem in the class as well. I found it quite difficult to understand the meaning of a poem because the way of expressing the author's feelings is very different from writing a book or composing a song, which are more directly most of the time. In order to practice more, I found out that there are some poets will post their poems on the instagram, and most of their posts are very short and not too difficult to understand. Thus, I read several poems on the instagram, and tried to explain them by myself. From this process, I not only learned a lot of new vocabularies but also learned a little bit of the structure of Korean short poems. Also, I really found the ways the Korean poets express about their feelings are very beautiful, and also are quite different from the poems I have read before, which is quite interesting for me.

My goal for this week is to understand the instruction on the airplane. I chose this goal is because that I have taken Korean Air for several times, but I still cannot understand some of the words the flight attendance talk in the short broadcasting on the airplane. So, I wrote down some words that the flight attendance might use during the flight, and then used the Korean dictionary to help me translate these words. After I learned about most of the vocabularies I wrote and translated, I went to Youtube to find some clips about it. Fortunately, there were some clips on the website, and I found most of them are very similar, which was a very good news for me. Then, I evaluate myself by writing down the dialogues of the films in Korean, and then translated the meaning of them by myself. After translating, I then went back to the films and then compared my writings with the English subtitles below the films. 

Reflect upon your progress to date, consider the effectiveness of your learning plan and activities, and discuss what changes--if any--you will make to finish the semester.

The progress I had so far is pretty good although I found a lot of difficulties accomplishing it well, but I still learned a lot from these process during the last few weeks. I think the effectiveness of my learning plan so far is not very effective because I put too many emphasize on trying to understand what other people say, especially the News. However, the dialogues like News will be very fast because they are for the native people. So, I think I will make some changes for my learning plan, such as understanding the instruction on the airplane, which the speed of talking might be slower than the News, or turn my goals to emphasize more about communication or writing. By making the changes, I think I can slower down my tempos and do better on my basic skills like writing or reading.

VivianLeeLearningPlanUpdated.docx

Above is my updated learning plan. I didn't adjust much, but added one additional task (task 8), because I wanted to work on my texting skills in Korean. So far, my language partner and I have worked on most of the tasks I wanted to accomplish this semester. I've learned a lot of idioms as well as Korean slangs.

This week my goal is to further my knowledge about soccer in Portuguese. I did this by focusing my weeks practice on soccer. Rather than duolingo this week I looked at a soccer in Portuguese term sheet. I memorized most of the terms on that sheet simply by practicing throughout the week. Other that I watched another soccer game in Portuguese. I found that this time around I was able to decipher a little more what the commentators were speaking about, but I still do not have full understanding. 

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

Reading the article on the revival of Siletz it was interesting to think about how languages go extinct. While speaking a common tongue may be useful for bringing people around the world closer together, I believe holding on to our differences and the things that make us unique is very important. Languages carry the culture and tradition of their societies and it would be a huge loss if everyone around the world all began speaking English exclusively. No one language today has the ability to convey every sound and nuance of every other language, so inevitably the death of a language marks a huge loss of culture and tradition. However, maintaining a language is more easily said than done. With so many different languages and many only spoken by a handful of people it is a huge challenge to preserve the depth and diversity of languages out there. Furthermore, in many cases like that of the Siletz people, you might only be able to speak to a couple other people. While it is important to hold on to our pasts it may be impractical to try to preserve every language in the spoken lexicon. In some cases our best hope may be in preserving the language electronically like that of Siletz.

This week, Joora and I talked about impeachment of the South Korean president, Park Geun Hye. We read an article in Korean together and learned that Park Geun Hye was the daughter of a previous president, Park Chung Hee. I knew she was the first female president of South Korea, but did not know much about the scandal regarding Choi Soon Sil and the whole impeachment process. According to the article, President Park’s friend Choi had a lot of influence, politically and spiritually, on Park. This led millions of Korean citizens to protest for Park Geun Hye’s impeachment. On March 10, 2017 the constitutional court in South Korea upheld Park’s impeachment. Until the new presidential election, which is in about 2 months, Prime minister Hwang Kyo ahn would act as the president of the country. While reading the article, I learned new political vocabulary words in Korean:

(탄핵) = impeachment

판결 = verdict

청와대 = Blue House (President’s House) comparable to White House in the U.S.

헌법재판소 = Constitutional Court

만장일치의 = Unanimous Decision

선거 = presidential election

I have been wanting to read Korean books and comic books (manhwa) for a while, so this week, Joora and I read three chapters of a Korean Webtoon, which are digital comic books online. Reading has been always difficult for me because of my limited knowledge of vocabulary words, but because Webtoons have pictures/comics, it was a bit easier for me to follow. However, reading Webtoons was still very difficult and I had to stop every couple of pages or so to ask Joora to help translate. It was frustrating, but I definitely picked up a lot of new words and having pictures/graphics to use as context clues helped me understand what I was reading. I might resort to watching Korean cartoons on Youtube to learn more basic vocabulary words before I continue reading Webtoons again.