- Fourth Artifact: Document a learning task that you have completed that meets a personal goal.
All Posts (9261)
Sort by
- Learning Journal 13: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
Goals / Accomplishments:
Since I finished the tasks I articulated in the language learning plan, I reviewed and practiced what I have learned. Each day, I dedicated 45 minutes to review different tasks enumerated in the language plan. Moreover, I spent at least 15 minutes a day trying to speak bahasa Indonesia with my language partner. I even practiced Indonesian with her sister, who lives in Bali.
This week I concentrated on the vocative case, which helped me learn how to correctly say where someone or something is located. I also learned how to describe people's physical appearance and their character. I decided to continue focusing on the grammar aspects of the language more than the practical aspects because I have applied to a summer Ukrainian program where I will learn the speaking aspect. So now it seems more important for me to focus more on the grammar so I have a solid base going into the summer program and then going into my year in Ukraine.
Attitudes about family in Ukraine are similar to the attitudes we had in America in the 1950s. The men are expected to be the breadwinners and are by default the head of the family. The women are meant to take care of the children and keep the house clean and cook meals. In villages in Ukraine, most members of the family are expected to contribute to the family in some way. If they have a farm, the kids are expected to pull their weight with chores. Often in villages, the families will form collectives to share responsibilities. In my language partner's village, each family takes a turn taking care of the villages cows, which live together in an open area of the village. There are about 40 cows to take care of, and usually you only have to work once every month or so. When it is your family's turn to work, you can expect to be busy tending to the cows from 5am to 9pm. It is a long day and a lot of responsibility, so the family usually takes on this chore together.
Translation:
My name is Taylor and I am a student. I study history. I have a sister named Miki. She is a student in high school. My mom is a housewife and my dad is a lawyer. I also have a dog named Zoe. She is big, white and cute. That is my family.
This week, my goal was to start familiarizing myself with verbal aspects in Ukrainian. This is the most difficult thing that I have done so far because there is really nothing similar in English, so it is hard to know exactly when to use which aspect form. There are two different aspects: perfective and imperfective. Each Ukrainian verb comes with a pair in the opposite aspect. I am familiar with aspect verbs because Russian uses them too, however, aspects have been the most challenging thing for me to get right in Russian as well. I did the practice questions in my textbook and still had some trouble with deciding when to use which aspect, but I am getting more right than I thought I would. When I was learning Russian, I thought that in real life, someone would understand what I needed if I used the wrong aspect of a verb, however I learned this summer that that is really not the case. I am assuming that it is the same in Ukrainian, so I really want to try to gain a better understanding of Ukrainian aspect verbs before I move there next year.
As in most post Soviet countries, is very important to be on time in Ukraine. While it is customary to be "fashionably late" to events and parties in America, being late for things with a set starting time in Ukraine is considered very rude. This attitude about time carries over into multiple different aspect of life in Ukraine. For one thing, train schedules are incredibly precise. If your train ticket says that you will depart at 5:03pm and arrive at 8:17pm, those are the exact times that you can expect to leave and arrive. The same thing usually goes for public transportation as well. It is in fact more common for a bus to not show up at all than it is for a bus to be off schedule.
upfile_271377493%20%281%29.mp3
Translation:
What are you by profession?
I am a student.
Where do you study?
I study at the University of Richmond.
What do you study?
I study history.
This week, my goal was to learn how to talk about professions. In the corresponding chapter in my textbook, there was a list of professions that I wanted to learn. This will be an easy way for me to make conversation with people when I am living in Ukraine next year because it is common small talk. My exercise for learning this is to give someone a list of professions and ask them to make sentences from it. For example, if I wanted to make a short dialogue asking about my friend Oleg's profession, I would say: -хто Олег за фахом? -Він журналіст. (who is Oleg by profession? He is a journalist). This could be the example for someone on a worksheet about asking about professions. I would give lots of different examples of professions and ask the student to create different dialogues.
For my fourth artifact, I decided to have a texting conversation in Korean with my mother. This was the primary learning task that I wanted to accomplish.
For this week, I will mainly focus on my cultural presentation. For my cultural presentation, I decided to switch to the topic of the education system in South Korea. I am already going in depth on why it is so successful and what effect the rigor has on the Korean students. Diving deeper into this, I realized that although the Koreans have a very successful country based on their knowledge and innovation, the education system needs to be changed and is borderline abusive to the students.
This week, I will dive deeper into the Korean education system and see what that tells me about the culture in Korea along with its history.
For my third artifact, I am going to summarize a short newspaper article in English with limited help from an online translator.
I will translate: http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=shm&sid1=105&oid=032&aid=0002744352
This article is basically saying that Samsung Electronics will be releasing a new color for their Samsung Galaxy S7 line with a new black. The new released color seems to play a factor in the domestic sales of the Galaxy S7, even beating the iPhone 7. Samsung Electronics is hoping to expand the availability of choices for their consumers with the new addition of the black models. It has also been established that the Galaxy S7 sales has surpassed the iPhone 7's sales by a substantial amount. They plan to try and raise the sales of the S7 as much as possible to clear up inventory for their new S8 that will be coming out next year. However, because of the Note 7 recall situation, it decreased their sales by 14.2%.
Family plays a big role in the Korean culture. As I may have mentioned before, Korea is not an individualistic culture, but rather a group-oriented culture. Often members represent their family name, and others will judge the family based on that one member's personality, behavior, and etc. Stating to be from a certain family line creates a pre-set generalization of the person's identity. In this sense, Korea can be seen as a little pre-modern as the world moves towards an individualistic society, but I think this aspect of their culture sets them apart and creates a different, possibly more bonded environment. Although it gives room for certain judgments, and has a negative connotation, I think this aspect also has its upsides. Being part of a family brings great care, and a very intimate relationship with each family member. Even if individually, two family members do not get along, at the end of the day, because they are family, they will do whatever for their family. I believe this insight comes from having been born in Korea, but growing up in America, because in America, I'm being taught to fend for myself, and all about individuality, and becoming my own. But when I go to Korea to visit my grandparents, or my dad's side of the family, I am no longer just Jinhoo, but rather Jinhoo Bong. And this difference brings about loving grandparents, and a close-knit family line. I meet with family members who I either have never met before, never knew existed, or met when I was very young and therefore they essentially don't exist. But each encounter has always been welcoming and inviting because we are family. Maybe America is like that as well, and I just haven't had an opportunity to experience it firsthand, but from my personal experiences, I enjoy Korea's take on family, and what it brings about.
Coming from a Korean background, and coming into this class with a relatively well-versed knowledge of Korean, I can't say I struggled immensely. However, the process of learning the language in a formal setting and actually practicing weekly has helped me to build a stronger foundation, and has helped me fix some of the common mistakes that I had previously always made. Before this, I have not really had a formal class to learn Korean other than when I was in pre-school which I do not remember any of, so having the opportunity to learn in a formal setting has helped develop my knowledge of the language much better. Reading has become a bit smoother as I got more practice. And writing as well, as I sat down and wrote sentences and wrote in a formal setting. Before this, the extent of my knowledge was whatever interactions I had with my parents, which was mostly speaking. I had little experience with reading and writing although if forced to, I could have done it. So with just the opportunities provided through this, I have been able to definitely improve in my reading and writing of my native language. Although I do have to admit, I had much bigger goals in the beginning. Mastering the language has proved harder to do than I had previously imagined. But overall, I think I've improved in the use of the Korean language in more formal settings, which had been essentially a main goal of mine.
I thought the readings were quite interesting as I have never questioned whether being bilingual makes one smarter or not. But the articles brought up interesting points. I have concluded that although being bilingual can make you seem smarter or eventually make you smarter through certain learned traits, the act of being bilingual on its own does not make one smarter. Although it may make you smarter in the sense that you know another language, I don't think it can be use so broadly as to say that bilingualism makes one smarter in a general sense. I do agree with the points that the article pointed out such as that being bilingual can help one to exercise their executive function and therefore create a stronger mental strength in that aspect. And that executive function can assist in deciding quicker and with the ability to switch between two languages quickly creates a sort of seamless interaction within the two, allowing a bilingual person to be able to multitask more easily than those that only know one language. A negative factor that the articles brought up that I agreed with to a certain extent was that by having to learn two language simultaneously, one is limiting their depth of knowledge in one language. That is something that is very plausible, but I still don't think this fact alone is sufficient to overcome the benefits of being bilingual. Maybe in the early stages, such a fact might play a role in the growth of that person's knowledge of both languages, but in the long run, I don't see it playing as big a role. Overall, I found it interesting to see the scientific backings as to how bilinguals think differently, even if it is in the slightest sense, than those who know only one language, and to see how that can lead to one claiming that bilinguals are smarter.
I have learned roughly 25-30 new words in my target language which is Korean. I learned them through the videos that I have been watching which teach a couple words related to a certain subject, some of which I already knew, and some of which were new. Also, I have been learning some trendy vocabulary which is a cultural use of slang in Korean with my language assistant. I don't think that I'll be able to use these newly acquired words as seamlessly as I do with the words that I already know, but I do hope to incorporate them into my knowledge of vocabulary so that I have it ready to use whenever an opportunity may come.
This semester I have enhanced my vocabulary with the feminine aspects of the Hindi language. My main focus was to use political speeches to learn better words, as well as Skype interactions with Indians to enhance communication skills. Mostly my goals are to use informal communication between friends to enhance the way in which I engage with Hindi speakers and using speeches to increase my vocabulary. I believe I have been quite realistic by only wrestling with a specific portion of my target language.
- Learning Journal 12: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
Goals:
- To finish my final task, outlined in the learning language plan as:
Application: Think about context in which you would tell time — transportation — busses and Ojek, and taxi. How to pay, how to ask for price, how to exchange within these circumstances.
- To continue research on my culture project, which examines the use of "kin" terms when addressing others. This research topic, moreover, will provide insight into Indonesian culture more broadly.
- To Finish my culture project
- To rehearse the pronunciation of the Indonesian alphabet
Accomplish:
- This week's agenda was straightforward, so:
- I researched the norms associated with Balinese transportation. There are four main transportation methods: taxi, bus, shared taxi, and a motorbike-type taxi
- I learned how to approach each means of transportation
- I learned how to ask "How much does this cost?"
- I learned how to say "Stop here, please."
- I learned how to say "Can you take me to..."
- I rehearsed the Indonesian alphabet
Finally, I met with my language partner to practice what I have learned as well as to ask for advice concerning my culture project.
