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My learning goals for this week is to try to put post its up around my room and my suite so that I can learn more vocabulary words as I keep going with my journey of learning Korean. Although this process has not been the easiest it has been quite enjoyable because now I can read hangul. However, it does sometimes take me a bit of time to read it because I read slowly, I’m glad that I have gotten the hang of it.

In Korea, just as in many other Asian countries, family is important because it can define your entire life. Family is the single-entity that is passed on from generation to generation besides customs, languages, etc. Family not only includes your living relatives, but also the ancestors that have come before you, who you should still honor and pay your respects to. There is the the duty to obey your parents even when you become an adult. This goes along with the Confucian concept of filial piety, which is about family being at the center and respecting one’s elders. In some cases, one must subordinate personal interests if it is not good for the family. This is not always the case because each family is different. Some families may be more traditional while others may have embraced the modern era.

My learning goals for this week is to continue learning hangul and learn how to say the numbers and dates (i.e. months and days of the week) in Korean. I will accomplish this by using my Korean from Zero book, resources that I found online for vocabulary words, and just constant review.  I find that the Korean number system and the Sino-Korean number system are quite difficult, but I will keep practicing

When I saw the title of the first readings “Why Bilinguals Are Smarter” I first felt proud and delighted. I am in fact speaking more than one language and I cannot say that I did not feel flattered. However, after a second thought and before even looking at the second reading I had the same question in my mind what the other title questioned: "Are bilinguals really smarter?"

In fact, being bilingual has great practical benefits. It lets us communicate with a wider range of people and it also eases the learning of new languages. According to research, however, speaking more than one language affects cognitive processes as well. Apparently, the second language behaves as an interference, but it enables the brain to solve internal conflicts, which strengthens the cognitive muscles. Researchers have done several experiments in the recent years that showed that bilinguals have less problems to stay focused, switch attention and ignore distraction. Since bilinguals have to switch languages quite often they tend to be better at monitoring the environment. But does that really mean that speaking more than one language makes a smarter? Is our intelligence measured by the amount of languages we speak? Other scientists argue that it is the executive function that seems to be more developed in bilinguals. The executive function is a system that helps the brain to access certain memories when prompted. What I found interesting is the fact that we do not really mix languages. When I think about the languages I speak it is true that when I speak one language I do not mix up words or the sentence order with words and sentence structure from other languages. True, sometimes I cannot remember a certain word in one language, but I am able to fill in the gap with a word from another language. Scientists argue that for each language we lean we develop a lexicon which tells our brain how to use the word. Thus, the true relation between language and intelligence is unclear, but one cannot deny that languages improve cognitive processes and that beyond all the science of brain functioning, knowing languages makes us global citizens.  

Family seems to be a central part of Korean society. Based on the research I’ve done on filial piety and what I’ve observed at my Korean friends’ houses and in Korean family dramas (i.e. All About My Mom), I can tell you that Korean children were raised to show respect towards their elders and parents regardless of their mood, personality, and circumstances. They may show their respect in subtle ways such as bowing and using formal speech. 

South Korea is a country highly influenced by Confucian principles, which emphasizes filial piety and hierarchical structure in families. Although I’m not entirely sure about Korean-American families, I think they uphold a similar structure. South Korea is still very much a patriarchal society, so the father is the head of the household and is responsible for providing food, shelter, clothing for the family and arranging marriages for his children. The eldest son also has quite a bit of responsibility and therefore receives a lot of respect as well. If the father is no longer present, the eldest son takes over as the head of the family. This is why in the past Korean families typically preferred having a son. However, to combat the male-preference problem, the government revised family-related laws to establish equality between sons and daughters in terms of inheritance. The wife of the household is expected to take care of her husband’s aging parents. Traditionally, men were the sole breadwinners and decision makers in the family, but in modern day South Korea there has become a lot more flexibility.

Traditional Korean households were also fairly large. In fact, it was not uncommon for three or four generations to live together under one roof. During the Korean War, there was a period of famine and the infant mortality rate was high, so children were seen as a blessing. Later on, industrialization would further complicate the family structure in South Korea. Nowadays, many young married couples live away from their parents and extended families. Most South Korean households are now couple-centered nuclear families. 

What I have been working on: I have been working on learning weather terms and practicing talking about the seasons. I have been continuing to learn religious words and signs that I would use on a daily basis.

Statement: I want to speak in multiple complete sentences.

Strategies: I have been practicing with other speakers and watching videos without captions.

Effectiveness: As mentioned before, watching videos without captions is a good way to gauge how much I am learning.

Building on what I have learned: I am continuing to put the vocabulary I am learning into complete sentences. I am also continuing to find resources that can help me learn more words and more about the culture. YouTube is becoming a great resource, especially with finding videos without captions. 

My learning goal for this week is to watch Korean for Beginners II Lecture 1 from MasterTOPIK on YouTube. Each lesson/lecture is about 45 to 50 min long, and I found the Beginners I Lecture series very helpful so I want to continue with the series. The video includes a lot of dialogues and is very engaging. The first lecture went over a lot of grammar structures and common mistakes. When I watched the Beginners I lecture series, I took notes on grammar and tenses. I would also follow the instructor and say things out loud with her to further my reading skills and pronunciation. 

Link to the Video: http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEsB9pxfZl8

I also posted pictures from my trip to Korea last year during winter break! Feel free to check them out under my photos tab on my page!  

So far, I have been pretty pleased with how far I have come in Korean. I have learned simple conversational skills, I can count basic numbers, and I can read a fair amount of the alphabet. I think that my process of finding learning materials on the internet has been a mostly successful one, so I will try to keep doing this until I run into difficulty. My language partner has also been very helpful, because I can go ask him questions about anything that I am struggling with. 

My goal for this week was to learn the months and learn how to count from 1-10 in Korean. By learning these numbers, it should be much easier to build off of to learn bigger numbers. Learning was relatively easy, because there are a lot of youtube videos that I can watch to help with my pronunciation. This one in particular I watched a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yOqYzqUWCo. ;

For my culture project, I would like to study sports in Korea. My goal would be to have a better understanding of the role that sports play in Korean culture. I know that soccer is Korea's most popular sport since the 2002 World Cup, but baseball and Taekwondo are also very popular. I would like to learn about attendance at sporting events in Korea, as well as how strong of a sport-watching culture there is.  

I believe from my Korean from zero I have learned about 100+ words as there are vocabulary lists at the end of every chapter that go along with the lessons to be covered. At the beginning of the semester I used Mango languages more, but I prefer learning the vocabulary from Korean from zero or from talk to me in Korean because of the way they present the vocabulary. In Mango you just pick up the vocabulary as you learn how to say things and progress through the lesson, but I prefer having a set list at the end of the lesson to look over what vocabulary words I learned. In my learning goals I don't really have a set list of vocabulary words I want to learn, but more as much vocabulary as I can attain while to learning how to say things in different conversation topics. Although I may have to revise my learning goal once more. I didn't expect it to take so much time learning the basics of introducing myself and my family and learning how to construct certain sentences. sometimes I forget about what specific conversation topics I wanted to learn since I spend so much time just going chapter by chapter. But I don't feel like I could really skip around chapters because then I feel like I'm missing an important basic grammar topic that I need to actually learn for my learning goals. I think from here to the end of the semester I need to find the right activities and lessons that will help me focus more on my learning goal topics. The chapters I have gone through in Korean from zero have gotten me through dates/times, introductions, body parts, and directions. 

My main learning goal will be to understand and say basic terms related to healthcare and injury. I will focus on learning names of body parts and various injuries as well as how to ask for and recognize someone who is asking for help. Being that I plan on attending medical school, I think it is most relevant for me to learn terms related to this field. There is a possibility for me to go abroad to India during medical school and the phrases that would be most important for me to know relate to healthcare as well as basic conversational skills. I have already started to learn the body parts but I think it will be helpful for me to know things like numbers for age and dosages of medication. I think that if I do end up working in India, even for a few short months, I will be able to connect better with patients and gain their trust if I am able to speak at least a little bit of the language. 

This week I've been mainly focusing on trying to learn the body parts and words for different types of injury or disease. I've decided to focus on some aspect of healthcare for my cultural project so I think it will be important for me to know body parts. I've learned words for: hand, foot, head, hair, fingers and toes, back, chest, stomach, eyes, ears, mouth, nose and face. I have also learned how to say that some body part was injured (literal translation injury has struck in a certain body part). I am finding the way in which Hindi speech identifies action very interaction. For instance in aforementioned "injury has struck my hand" instead of "I hurt my hand." There is a similar situation when stating that you have lost something, instead of "I lost my wallet" it literally translates to "my wallet has become lost." I feel like this way of stating things takes some of the blame off of the person. It suggests that the action happened to someone instead of the person being the causative agent of the action. In further terms of healthcare I have learned how to say "I need help" and "Call a doctor." Through the next week I will try and focus on more specific health vocabulary like rash, itch, bite, etc. 

After reading the New York Times article “Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction,” I’ve become more aware of the importance of languages to one’s identity. As one of my classmates mentioned, language is part of your culture, and since you are exposed to a certain culture growing up you naturally develop an attachment to it. Thus, losing a part of your culture can be painful because it’s essentially like carving out a piece of your identity. That is probably why the five remaining Siletz Dee-ni speakers feel that they have a duty to preserve what’s left of their culture: their language.

I’m pleasantly surprised that outsiders of the Siletz Dee-ni language are helping with the Siletz Dee-ni dictionary project. Most people usually learn languages for practical reasons and for fun, so learning the language for the sake of keeping it alive is admirable to me. But, if we think of language as something we use solely to communicate out of necessity, the task can seem burdensome at the same time. There are only five speakers and the odds that learners will be able to study and use the language accurately and regularly is very slim. Once those five speakers aren’t around anymore, the learners won’t be able to progress in their study of the language anymore (unless they construct a comprehensive dictionary by then, but even so without native speakers it is quite possible that the language will become diluted overtime) and the interest in the language might decrease in future generations. I guess one way to keep it alive in the meantime is to create a community of Siletz Dee-ni speakers and meet regularly to speak in the language. I cannot predict whether or not future generations would continue the practice, but I guess preserving the language for the short term will help support the remaining Siletz Dee-ni speakers and that’s what’s really important.

Most of what I know about family dynamics in Korean culture have been through watching Korean dramas. It seems that family is very important in Korean culture. There is a big hierarchy and respecting your elders is a must, so they are the priority. When the elders cannot take care of themselves it seems it becomes the unspoken rule that children have the responsibility to take care of their elders, whether that means taking them into their house, which seems to be the usual case and particularly for families that are not as rich. For the rich families it seems there is always a caretaker in the home, whether or not the elderly family members live in the same house as the younger ones. In one drama I watched called Can we get married, the family status and roles really come out as the two main characters are trying to go through with their engagement and get married. The girl seems to have to make efforts to really please the mother-in-law. Buying gifts for the family is considered a must for the bride and it shows commitment to the family even if the bride is not rich. The groom is stuck in the middle of trying to please his mother's wishes and ideas as he cannot go against her and eventually he breaks up with his fiancé once in order to maintain peace with his mother. It shows that the people currently in the family take priority. Even though people who are actually family are considered most important, it seems that neighbors and friends are also considered as family in some cases. In many dramas, I saw best friends living under the same household and neighbors taking in their neighbors as family. 

This week my learning goals are to continue with my lessons from Korean from zero. I have been having trouble with chapter 10 and I've been searching for other sources that can help me solidify the grammar. One website that my friend recommended to me has been good for review and advancing in my skills. It's called Talk to me in Korean. It seems most of what I have learned so far is covered through all the chapters in lesson 1, so I think I will step back for a bit and review lesson 1's chapters. Then continue on to future and past tenses in Korean from zero and perhaps lesson 2 in Talk to me in Korean. 

Language is much more than a means of communication. It serves as a reflection of culture, beliefs, and values of a certain country. When a language dies, much more than a means of speaking is lost. When a language is not utilized anymore, the process of cultural knowledge that the language exhibits begins to deteriorate. For example, if Korean became a dead language, less and less people would remember Korean dialect. Many stories and sayings are told in the native language, so the history and cultural norms will slowly diminish. When language is forgone, the culture begins to fade as well. Language of any country possesses deep historical routes that tell different stories and historical events. 

     According to the New York Times article, Siletz Dee-ni currently has five speakers left and is on the verge of extinction. Speakers of Siletz  Dee-ni have been putting in tremendous effort to keep the language alive. Bud Lane, a tribe member, has logged in around 10,000 audio entries to an online Siletz Dee-ni dictionary by himself. This effort has not gone unnoticed; there have been increase in the number of accesses to this online dictionary. The tribe members just want to bring stability to the language with enough speaker pool so that the language doesn't go away.

     When you think about what language symbolizes for unique groups in the world, these immense efforts that the few speakers of the tribe are putting in is not surprising. Language gives identity to groups. When we talked about the Chinese letters being mixed in with the Korean language and the discussion of "purity" of language, we can see how people think of language as the symbol of identity of the group. Many Koreans wanted to make the language "pure" by getting rid of the usage of Chinese letters(hanja) because they felt that by using having these Chinese letters mixed in with Korean, they were tainting the identity of Koreans with a hint of Chinese. Similarly, if you think about what is lost when a language goes to extinction, the group that the language belonged to loses their identity. Once Siletz Dee-ni goes instinct and English takes over, they will slowly start losing their cultural identity. Language is a main tie one has to one's heritage. Without it, it is hard to feel the connection to one's heritage and culture. 

The New York Times article “Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction” and the video interview of David Harrison talked about the seriousness of losing a language and efforts being made to rescue/ prevent the loss of languages. Due to globalization, the world has found established predominant languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin which have been enforced in society thus pushing minority languages. In the article, the author discusses how the Siletz language, a tribe language, reached a point of near extinction due to historical and social pressures pushing it away. Many languages around the world that are at risk of being terminated are spoken by indigenous people. Many people, specifically anthropologist like David Harrison, are examining the causes and locations of this language extinction. They noticed leading causes are due to the lack of continuity and reduction of the population by an aging population. It was interesting to see the data collection and challenges of their studies in Siberia. I like how the very thing that can result in the extinction of a language is the same thing that can help revive it or strengthen it, globalization. The internet helped Siletz come back by providing websites or online dictionaries to record and spread the language. Many people have shown interest in Siletz which has allowed it to increase in numbers and use. Language extinction is severe because it is a huge part of a culture, potential a crucial aspect. A language offers much knowledge and understanding of the world, hence knowing more than language helps one in comprehending this diverse world. One’s language shows a small aspect of the world. I believe languages are a pieces od the puzzle of the world, and the lost of one is detrimental to the wholeness of the puzzle. It affects by leaving a gap socially, historically and other aspects of life.

The New York Times article “Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction” and the video interview of David Harrison talked about the seriousness of losing a language and efforts being made to rescue/ prevent the loss of languages. Due to globalization, the world has found established predominant languages like English, Spanish, and Mandarin which have been enforced in society thus pushing minority languages. In the article, the author discusses how the Siletz language, a tribe language, reached a point of near extinction due to historical and social pressures pushing it away. Many languages around the world that are at risk of being terminated are spoken by indigenous people. Many people, specifically anthropologist like David Harrison, are examining the causes and locations of this language extinction. They noticed leading causes are due to the lack of continuity and reduction of the population by an aging population. It was interesting to see the data collection and challenges of their studies in Siberia. I like how the very thing that can result in the extinction of a language is the same thing that can help revive it or strengthen it, globalization. The internet helped Siletz come back by providing websites or online dictionaries to record and spread the language. Many people have shown interest in Siletz which has allowed it to increase in numbers and use. Language extinction is severe because it is a huge part of a culture, potential a crucial aspect. A language offers much knowledge and understanding of the world, hence knowing more than language helps one in comprehending this diverse world. One’s language shows a small aspect of the world. I believe languages are a pieces od the puzzle of the world, and the lost of one is detrimental to the wholeness of the puzzle. It affects by leaving a gap socially, historically and other aspects of life.