One of my goals this semester is to strengthen my vocabulary to allow me to have a more diverse conversation with others. I would especially like to learn how to talk about politics in Turkish because I am hoping to go towards this field. Another goal is to have basic Turkish writing skills. In order to achieve these goals, I will set smaller goals along the way, which I mention in my cultural post #1. I believe that I am at the novice developing 1 stage, according to the Levels of Competence and Can-Do Statements.
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These past few months, I have been able to challenge myself to learn a variety of new words from simple greetings like how to say hello, to classroom objects and clothing. Overall, I would estimate that I have learned around 150 new words. I learned most of these words via classroom exercises stemming from classroom games, memorization, using them in conversation and visually seeing the objects and connecting the Turkish word to them. For instance, I was able to learn how to say Turkish numbers like (bir, iki, uc, dort, bes, alti, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, and on) from memorizing them and then filling in the blank when playing a classroom game. Other terms like mehaba, which means hello, and gule gule! which is goodbye in Turkish have been learned by constantly applying these words in everyday interactions with people. Overall, I do think that my goals are on the right track. I know that I will not learn 1,000 words in a semester, but I do know that this course will give me a foundation of basic vocabulary that I can continue to expand on throughout my travels and studies.
- Reflect on how knowing a language's history can help you learn the language.
When you know a language’s history you will be able to understand where some of the words roots come from and how they have stemmed from other languages. Each language carries with it all of the history and culture of the area that it arises from. The political, social and economic history of the country influence its vocabulary and the meaning of its words. By knowing the history of words, I can understand how they are put together, and therefore better understand what they mean.
For class presentations, our assignment was to share some aspect of the language and culture that we are learning about. While I presented on the rich history of traditional Turkish coffee, my classmates focused on the Korean culture. They discussed Kimchi, which is found in most meals in Korea, as well as restaurant etiquette. Before these presentations I had never heard of Kimchi so I found it very interesting to learn about this new foreign food. From what I learned, Kimchi is a traditional fermented Korean side dish made of vegetables with a variety of seasonings. There are hundreds of varieties of kimchi, (190 to be exact), made with napa cabbage, spicy, white radish, raddish, scallion, garlic, ginger or cucumber as the main ingredients. According to the presentation, 95% of Koreans eat Kimchi once every day and it is regarded as one of the top five most healthy foods in the world. Kimchi is so popular and valued in Korea that they even have a cultural festival just for Kimchi. Kimchi has been a long standing tradition in Korea, therefore it is incredibly important to the elderly and their culture. Apart from Kimchi, I also enjoyed learning about proper etiquette for paying for a meal in Korea. Based on my classmate’s presentation, the elderly always pay for the meal because they are seen as more established and are highly respected in South Korea. There is also apparently a double standard for gender where men are expected to pay for the meal when on a date. However, in modern times South Korea is now experiencing a social change where there is more gender equality and it is becoming more acceptable to split the bill at restaurants. Overall, it was so fascinating learning about the different traditions and proper etiquette that Koreans value and I hope to learn more as the semester continues.
I am very happy with the progress that I have made up to this point in the semester. The material's level of difficulty from one unit to the next (sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture) is decidedly increasing. That is, each successive unit (I am currently on the third unit out of four in total) not only builds upon the last but introduces a range of new material that sometimes makes me feel uneasy and frustrated. Nevertheless, the utility of the material is what drives me forward in the endeavor. I use what I have learned every day outside the SDLAP context with my language partner. It is rewarding to be able to apply what I have learned from this course to daily-life activities and scenarios.
In short, my learning plan is effective, and I intend to follow the learning plan's goals and objectives throughout the latter part of the semester.
So far, I have completed in full Unit 6: Describing Humans and Animals and Unit 7: Locations and Directions. Currently, I am on Unit 8: Daily Activities / Hobbies, and I plan to finish this during week 9 of the academic calendar. Once that is accomplished, I will begin Unit 9: Physical Characteristics of Objects and Body Parts.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to fulfill my goal of completing one unit per two weeks. However, this does not impact my learning plan as I have plenty of time to finish the remaining two units. Indeed, I made a conscious decision halfway through Unit 7, which proved to be dense and lengthy, that I would follow the mantra "quality over quantity." I would rather absorb and learn the material to the best of my abilities than to race through the units and learn half as much.
In addition, I worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills through the units' activities. My favorite exercise is before reading the comic strips, I temporarily ignore the sentences and instead insert my own dialogue according to the pictures at hand. I find this exercise to be challenging and edifying because it forces me to stretch my imagination as well as to tap the depths of my vocabulary reservoir.
In sum, I am staying the course, and will not make any major changes to my learning plan.
Finally, my learning language partner has been indispensable throughout this endeavor. Her presence is a testing ground on which my Bahasa Indonesia has flourished.
My goals for these past two weeks were to:
- A) Finish unit 7 Directions/Instructions, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, and begin Unit 8: Daily Activities
- B) Continue reading Indonesian comic books, sourced from the internet
- C) Meet with my partner for four hours
Strategies to accomplish these goals:
- A) I completed unit 7, which proved to be quite lengthy. Moreover, I began unit 8 (daily activities / 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. Now, I can describe a building's location vis-a-vis its surroundings. In addition to describing the location of people, things, and animals, I have amassed a large vocabulary pertaining to the topics that will prove useful in daily conversations. For example, I can ask where objects are in a given room and describe its location. Moreover, I learned how to make a noun into a verb by way of attaching prefixes and suffixes to nouns. For example, "perjalanan" means "journey." The root word here is "jalan," which means "walk." the per and an in "perjalanan" are the prefix and suffix, respectively. For unit 8, I began amassing vocabulary pertaining to hobbies / daily activities, although I am in the early stages of the unit.
- 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.
- 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.
My learning goal for this week was to be able to listen so portuguese at the speed of a native speaker, and some what understand the main idea of the sentence. This is something I am still working on as people speak Portuguese quite quickly. I practiced this by listening to the analysis of soccer players. I was able to pick up that they were speaking about soccer, but not much more.
This week my goal is to improve my listening skills or to at least test my listening comprehension. I will be going about that by watching a TV show or podcast in Korean, writing down my thoughts about the show, and then watching/listening to it again with English subtitles and then comparing the differences.
I'm just now starting on this goal. So far, I have selected the TV show that I plan to watch. I'll be listening to a 15 minute segment of it so that I can make the assignment more manageable. I chose a variety show since it's in a talk show format and people will use natural expressions, unlike dramas or cartoons where the expressions tend to be abstract and written specifically for that purpose. The show comes with English subtitles so I'll be referring to those during my second portion. I will be keeping a list of vocabulary as I go about the exercise.
For my second artifact, it was a dialogue regarding response to a question on preference of coffee. We learn how to answer do you like coffee and how to respond to you don't like coffee? So depending on the way the question is asked we learned how to respond in both situations.
SDLC 110 Learning Journal #5
For this week, my first artifact involves gretting, an introduction of myself, including my name, age, job, where I was born, nationality, hobby, where I live, finally farewell. My language partner Minkyung helped me to structure the sentences. I think at this stage I am just remembering the sentences without actually knowing about the sentence structure. However, I am able to speak at a moderate pace to greet, introduce my self, and say goodbye.
As for my goals for week 4 and 5, I pretty much met my goals because I constantly practiced Hangul as well as learning new words. I also practiced simple dialogue with my classmates. I gradually realizing some patterns in the pronunciation and am getting better at it.
History is so important to language. History is why languages persist, why they die, and why we study what we study. I think that the entirety of academia is based on history; whether it be an historical accomplishment such as a mathematical theorem, a piece of literature, or a work of art. In this way, there is a sort of language to every subject. Language in its purest form of communication, spoken and written word is instrumental in life and is one of the qualities that makes us human, separating us from other living creatures and other mammals.
Our history as a species has evolved and with that evolution has come a progression of the ways in which we communicate with each other. Language has caused war, peace, and everything in between. It is arguable the reason for the divisions of territories and how countries have established a set a values and beliefs that shape their culture. A person's first language is responsible for lending a basis for meaning for everything that someone learns. You listen and interpret everything around you based on what you already know, so it makes sense that different people have different interpretations of texts, art, and situations just because of the nature of their first language.
Unfortunately, we did not learn telling time, although we do know the word of clock/watch: "saat".
I have learned a game to learn the numbers, in which we go around the room and count upwards, but every time there is a number that is a multiple of 3 or contains a 3, we clap. It makes us pay attention to the number that came before and it makes you think about the number you are about to say instead of automatically saying what comes next. We have found it extremely effective in learning the numbers.
Progress: I am very pleased with how I am learning. I am impressed that I have actually been able to speak to my friend in Turkish. Of course it is basic, but he understands what I am saying without difficulty. I will keep my learning plan as is because I think we are covering all the bases, but maybe a little out of order or a little slower than I anticipated.
For my learning activity I decided to teach a friend how to make their family tree in Korean. Korean offers a wider variety of familial terms than English. For example, there are terms to differentiate the age or "ranking" of uncles within your family, different terms for mother's side of the family than father's and so on.
To teach this activity I first showed my friend my family tree and went through the different terminology and then I had them make their own family tree, first in English. Once the tree was set up, we worked on translating the different titles so they could better connect the concepts. After, they were done making the family tree, I used it to quiz them and see how many terms they retained. For example, "what would you call your uncle bob?" and so on.
Within the moment, it seemed like my friend was grasping the activity well and could piece together answers while I was quizzing them. However, I'm not sure I could say they retained the knowledge. If you don't have much interest in a language or you won't ever use it, it really becomes an "in one ear, out the other" type of situation. If anything, the activity was most useful for me because I had to be able to answer my friends questions and compile the information beforehand.
My learning goal for this week was originally to write Korean entries in my diary, however, since I completed that during the first week, I decided to change my goal. I recently joined the app "hellotalk" in which native speakers and learners communicate together to strengthen each other's language skills. My goal for this past week was to post daily on the app in a diary style and also chat daily in Korean. I felt that putting the language in use would be a more effective goal. So far, I have done well on keeping my goal. I only missed my daily posting once and I've been chatting with 3-4 people daily. It has been helpful to see their messages and see how they create call and response patterns. Furthermore, it's been very exciting to see people use grammar points that I've been studying lately. It feels somewhat rewarding to be able to notice the grammar points and understand the intentions behind the messages.
I think knowing the history of a language can be helpful during the language learning process. For example, the Korean language heavily relies on "loanwords" which are words from other languages, typically from former ruling powers of Korea such as China and Japan. Chinese has such a large influence on the Korean language that Chinese words are called "Sino-Korean" rather than being categorized as loanwords. According to the book "The Korean Language" by Ho-Min Sohn, Sino-Korean words make up 60% of the total Korean vocabulary while native words make up 30% and loanwords make up 5%. Written Korean utilizes actual Chinese characters, called Hanja, and Korean children are taught how to read and utilize these characters throughout their schooling. Chinese numbers are also used for counting most things in Korean ranging from time to prices to the number of classes you have in a day. Native Korean numbers are not used as often as the Chinese number set is. Understanding the history of Chinese and Korean is truly vital for learning Korean. I would think the same can be said of many languages. Languages can be impacted by religion, ruling powers, and social structures.
- Third Artifact: Document a learning task that you have completed.
Dialogues:
We continued to learn the rest of the Korean Hangul. We learned the consonants, vowels, and monophthongs. We learned how to combine it to form an actual Korean word. It was very hard to see and understand how combining the different parts of a vowel and consonant would make what sound. Also, it was hard to understand how sometimes parts of the consonants were not pronounced but when alone it had it before. In addition, there were also a lot of parts to remember and it was hard to remember both how to write and the sounding of the word.
It is important to know the history of a language in order to fully understand why certain rules governing the language exist. A large proportion of language learning requires memorization, but having a background in a language's history allows this process to be a bit smoother. A language like Spanish has many cognates similar to English words, but for those words that are different it definitely helps to know where they originate from. It is especially important to know why grammar rules are the way they are, since grammar is responsible for the structure of the language itself. Language learning can be daunting, but understanding a language's history can make it more manageable.
In order to know about the structure of Korean, I should learn at least three things: phoneme, semantic, and syntax. From my previous experience of English learning, I figure out the way to learn the structure of a language is to start from the smallest element. I should first learn the phoneme, which would be the alphabets in English, so that I can read. Then, I try to form the letters into words and understand what each word means. Lastly, I will learn about the order and arrangement of those words. When I finish this process, I’ll get the whole structure of Korean. In accomplishing this process, a reference grammar is definitely a useful tool for me although it might not be useful for kids. Kids, with undeveloped language system, can acquire a language through listening and speaking. However, for adults who have already formed a language system in their brains, mother tough can significantly influence the process of learning a new language. Therefore, a reference grammar is especially important. For instance, when I learn English, I have to use a reference grammar to understand tense because tense does not exist in Chinese. For Korean, a reference grammar will be equally important because Korean is a subject-object-verb language, which is different from Chinese. If I do not learn grammar, I will know only the pronunciation and the meaning of each word but the meaning of the sentence.
- Post your fourth bi-weekly report on your language-learning activities.
We continued working on dialogues. We learned a conversation that would happen on the metro. Especially in Asian countries specifically Korea, there is a hierarchy and respect for elders, pregnant women, and handicapped individuals. So, we learned a conversation similar to that. In addition, we also learned a dialogue in running or recognizing the wrong person. We also reviewed our old dialogues of greetings.
