I thought the presentations today were very good. I especially enjoyed the ones on Turkish culture since it is not my target language, I felt like I learned a lot. Also, since a lot of my family is from the Balkans, I was shocked by how similar my traditional culture is to Turkish culture. This makes sense since the Ottoman empire ruled over Bosnia and other Balkan nations for hundreds of years. It's interesting to see how remnants of the culture still remain today. For example, as a child, whenever I went to Bosnia my grandmother would "read my coffee." We also create the same type of coffee, with the same process, and we even call the pots by the same name (ibrek). Bosnia is a muslim majority nation so many of the holiday traditions discussed in classes are the same in Bosnia.
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What are your cultural learning goals for this semester?
I would like to explore the business side of Korean during this semester. Since I will be majoring in Accounting and hopefully have a career in that field in the future, I want to be able to understand news articles or conversations about that area in Korean. I also hope to expand my knowledge on the culture of Korea because culture is such an important part of a country and it is an essential topic to learn in order to learn about the country.
I plan to read more articles in Korean especially about business and economics and watch more videos explaining the cultural phenomena in Korea. I hope to learn how to have a conversation about complex topics and be more situationally aware of what is going on in South Korea.
Since English is my second language, I have experiences of learning a foreign language since very young. I really enjoyed learning English through a conversational environment. After learning basic grammar and simple phrases, it was always fun to talk with people with similar proficiency to practice and learn from each other. However, remembering vocabularies is always the most boring but necessary process of learning a language. I was never a big fan of learning new language because nothing has intrigued me enough to start a long and challenging process. However, I now realized many practical benefits of learning a new language.
According to the FIRE model for integrative thinking, I mostly prefer insightful and rational thinking, as opposed to factual. I learn best when provided with theoretical frameworks, logical rationale, and rules, and given questions for serious thought and reasoning. As a social science major, most questions I encountered do not have one set of answer, so I am used to open-ended questions. Also, I realize that I like to learn in a safe, comfortable, and pleasing environment with attention given by classmates and instructors.
Also, I noticed that it's very helpful to be in a conversational environment when learning a new language. As I just started to learn Korean, I found it really helpful to practice simple dialogue during classes as well as learning the basic alphabets with visual images. My language partner also make some popular culture connections to our learning materials, such us showing Korean Music Videos that contain the phrases we just learned. By doing so definitely makes the class more interesting, and easier to remember.
I have mentioned that I really enjoy to have be in a conversational environment when I learn a new language because I tend to speak more and be more active when there are other students who are at the same level. However, I would not like to be put into a place where everyone is a native Korean speaker when I just started to learn this language because it gives me pressure and cause anxiety when there are too many unknown sentences. I prefer to learn a new language in a conformable setting, and with some fun ways. Also, it's better to know some basic phrases and be somewhat conformable in learning this new language before starting to learn grammar. I think Korean grammar is somewhat complicated and I could feel overwhelmed if given all kinds of information at one time. However, I recognize the importance of studying grammar and set a good foundation for future.
Lastly, I should expand my learning activities by watching Korean videos or TV shows that presents Korean popular culture. It's always easier to learn a language if you love its culture. Also, I am in the process of studying Korean alphabets. Listening to some educational songs regarding how to write and speak the alphabets would also help with memory. I should also find a study partner outside of classroom so we could practice more and be comfortable in speaking the new language.
Do some research about the culture of your target language and write about the 'linguistic aspects', e.g., body language, how people talk about time, etc.
Turkish and Korean have lots of similar linguistic aspects. People are more like collectivists so that there are more references of "we or us" than "I or me". Turkey is more like polychronic that people look at time as "how". Because there are numerous Muslim believers in Turkey, it is possible that people are external than internal. They believe things happen regardless of our will. Turkish is also a indirect (or High Context) society because Islamic culture is dominant and people who believe in Muslim will share the common sense within the language. Foreigners and who are non-Muslims might have hard time to understand the language that is related to the Turkish culture.
My goal of the week was being able to read all the alphabets, be familiar with them, and learn how to introduce myself. I reviewed Turkish alphabets and be more confident saying "r" and "u" sound, which I was not familiar with. I learned how to greet people, say hello/ bye, good afternoon, good evening, nice to meet you, and thank you in Turkish. I also learned "where are you from" and "I am from South Korea" in Turkish. I learned how to say from America and Greece, too since there were Americans and Greek in my class. I practiced vocabularies through dialogues with my classmate. I learned that different words come after group of a, i, o, u and e, i, u, o. I also learned how to say Mr and Mrs/Ms. I think the best part that I am in a group of people who are learning Turkish is we can get feedbacks from each other and practice speaking through dialogues.
My first artifact will be my Korean diary which was my first task. These are just six samples from my diary and are not all my entries. These entries show the general length of my writings which is about 1 paragraph if formatted differently. Also, my entries cover a wide range of topics from my interest in returning to Korea for graduate school to my family tree.Korean%20Diary.docx
In Crystal’s reading, “How the Brain Handles Languages,” I enjoyed learning about how the different parts of the brain function especially when it comes to learning languages. I especially found the relationship between languages and handedness to be very enlightening. I had no idea until this reading that being right handed correlates to the left hemisphere of your brain being dominant for learning languages (173, Crystal). Following Crystal’s second reading, “How We Mean,” she explores exactly what the title means by looking at the different ways ‘meanings of meaning’ are used in languages. According to Crystal, Greek philosophers debated this topic and developed two main views. Plato argued that naturally “there was an intrinsic connection between the sound of a word and the thing it referred to” while Aristotelian took the conventionalist view by claiming that there was no such connection. From my experience learning languages, I agree with Plato’s naturalistic view. Words do sound like they mean. Above all, this article raises a crucial point in learning languages. We rely on words to understand one another, to understand concepts, and we depend on words to grasp what is going on at the moment in time. Words have a variety of meanings and we can understand what a person means mainly in part by the words they choose to express themselves.
Based on my research, the distinctive linguistic aspects of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. Essentially, Turkish has a two dimensional vowel harmony system which means that vowels are characterized by two features: front and rounded. These two sets of vocal harmony systems are characterized by simple and complex. The simple vocal harmony is concerned with the low vowels e, a and has only the front feature while the complex one focuses on the high vowels and has both front and rounded features. The basic word order of the language is subject-object-verb and there are no noun classes or grammatical gender. Stress in letters tend to be on the last syllable. Since Turkish is an agglutinative language it uses affixes especially suffixes or endings often. Also, there are six noun cases in Turkish and all of these endings follow vowel harmony. Last but not least, the informal and formal language is again distinguished by a change in ending.
For weeks 4 and 5 I intend to learn the basic greetings and farewells of Portuguese. To do this I will watch lots of interviews as at the beginning of every interview there is always an introduction, and at the end of the interview there is always a farewell. I also hope to learn some basic soccer terms such as kick the ball in Portuguese. I will do this by also watching interviews, but more specifically soccer interviews. As they will probably mention soccer terms during their interview. To track my progress, at the end of each week I will try to say all the terms I have learned by memory.
Document (a) your goals and tasks for weeks 4 and 5, (b) the resources and activities you will use to achieve your goals, and (c) how you will evaluate your success.
A secondary goal is working on my pronunciation. By the end of week five I would like to be able to have the introduction conversation we had in my first language session from memory, and to have better pronunciation. In order to achieve this goal I will practice having the conversation with my girlfriend and have her correct my pronunciation whenever I mess up.
By the end of week five I should be able to sound out most characters and to both read and speak about introductions and farewells, with proper pronunciation.
Conjugation grammar is something that I think I could spend a whole semester learning. I think that it wouldn't be very hard because it is all compounded, but trying to identify what the root word is when I don't really have an extensive vocabulary is really difficult. I think it is something that I will get more comfortable with as my vocabulary increases and I become more familiar with the language. I will do this by practicing vocabulary, assessing words carefully, and reading critically.
I have posted my learning plan to the Ning.
In the coming weeks, I will try to solidify my ability to hold a basic dialogue. I don't find it too difficult to partake in basic conversation in Turkish. This includes:
- What is your name?
- My name is...
- How are you?
- I am good.
- Where are you from?
- I am from...
- Goodbye!
We also learned certain nationalities. We also began to learn how verbs are conjugated.
"I love you" - "seni seviyorum" (seni - you, sev - love, iyor - present tense, m - I)
Some activities that I will do include speaking to my Turkish friend twice a week in addition to class because he is eager to help me. I think that my learning plan was a bit ambitious, but I will try my best to stick to it. It's a little hard to take into consideration that it's an entire class of us that are trying to learn and not everyone learns at the same pace.
What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Do you think a reference grammar can be useful? Why or why not?
Korean has a variety of different grammatical structures you can use to build sentences. There are four main sentence structures that are commonly used but there are many different types of sentences you can use. One major difference between Korean and English is that in English you have the action before the object, but in Korean you often have the action after the object. While in English you would say, "I closed the door", in Korean people say, "I door closed". When learning Korean I think it is important to familiarize yourself with the different sentence structures of the language, and one way to do this is by reading and listening to people speak Korean. Having a quick reference guide for common Korean language structures would definitely help with this process, especially in the beginning while you are still getting used to it.
- What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Do you think a reference grammar can be useful? Why or why not?
The structure for Czech is quite different than English. You need to know that the Czech language is very conditional to context and there is no "one-fits-all" sentence structure. In all languages, you change the verbs to dictate the subject and the object, but in Czech, you change the verb, the adjective, and the object on top of a dynamic sentence structure. To acquire the knowledge, you need to keep an open mind and know that its ok to make mistakes. While I was abroad, I didn't want to make mistakes because I was embarassed, but I realized it made me work harder when I made an embarrassing mistake in public. I told myself that I won't do that again. A reference grammar must be useful in helping visualize to individuals who are new to languages. Because of my exposure to multiple languages, I have gotten used to uncertainty with sentence structure and not using a static grammar approach when learning a new language.
Informal versus formal language in Turkish does matter a lot, but isn't really that complicated. Other than things like informal and formal greetings and farewells (Selam meaning Hi and Merhaba meaning Hello, things that we also find in English) the difference between formal and informal language is often the change of ending in a word or phrase. For example, "Adin ne?" meaning What is your name? would be considered informal. But the addition of the suffix "iz" to the word "Adin" makes the phrase appropriate for a formal language situation. I think this is a lot easier than in Spanish where the difference between formal and informal language is in the conjugation of the verb.
