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In the first two weeks, I learned ~76 vocabulary words related to landscape (mountains, valleys, hills) and direction (distance, east, west, south, and north). The Anki program has been great, allowing me to not only track my progress, but stay organized. It comes with a built in algorithm that doesn't drill you everyday on the same words, but rather, mixes them up according to how you've rated the word when "flashed" before you: easy, medium, hard. In other words, the frequency with which the word comes up is dependent on the rating you give it. For each week, I plan to label the decks by week. It keeps things in good order and allows me to easily track my progress.

I've also finished a book called Balkan Ghosts. It's kind of broad-brush journalist's travel memoir account of noteworthy locations, events, and cultural references of Eastern Europe. In any case, I thought that this book would be an appropriate place to begin my exploration of Eastern European culture. While not specific to Bosnia, the Balkans, I've learned from skimming a book called Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse, are closely tied to one another in many ways. Due to empire and conquest, the argument could be made that countries of Eastern Europe actually are more similar than they are different, as much as they try to accentuate those differences in the last century. After I read this book, I have actually developed a greater interest in visiting the greater Balkans, not necessarily just Bosnia. Anyhow, The Bridge on The Drina is next on the reading list.

For our meetings, Milica prepared a flashcard game that encouraged me to review my ability to use the past and future tense, which proved to be a bit rusty. Mixed in the flashcards for instance, would be the word "crkva" and "alert." If the former was drawn, she would talk about the word without saying it, in Bosnian of course. If the latter was drawn, I would talk about the word without saying it, in Bosnian. This semester is quite busy for the both of us. I'm furiously working through an honors thesis, while Milica is working eight and a half dozen jobs, so our meeting schedules are a bit flexible. At this point, we're aiming for 4 days per week.

Week 1: Assessment and goals for the semester:

According to the Levels of competence and LinguaFolio document, I am a novice learner at the beginning level of one. I am able to understand familiar words and very basic phrases concerning my family, my immediate surroundings and myself when people speak slowly and clearly. The korean language is spoken very fast so in order for me to pick up on familiar phrases and words, I need to listen very carefully to the people talking. I can recognize all the characters that are used most often to read sentences slowly. I have an understanding for the basic structures of simple sentences. I can ask and answer simple questions with a little help (some in formal and some in informal). I can also text my partner about the times we can meet and what day is good for us. 

This semester I plan on focusing more on grammar so I can try to formulate sentences correctly, start to learn to conjugate simple verbs, and learn negation. I will also focus on listening to dialogues to better my pronunciation skills and learn to distinguish words from one another. My main focus will be on grammar and new vocabulary. 

Week 2: First Cultural Post: What are your cultural learning goals for this semester?

I am interested in learning more about the concept of beauty and how everyone perceives it as a society. Beauty seems to be a hot topic because of the number of plastic surgeries performed annually in order to fit in to the ideal image of beauty as described by Koreans. Just from watching Korean dramas, I know that men and women both wear make-up. I think I will find interesting reads on this topic so I would like to explore more throughout to semester to prepare for my cultural project presentation. I hope to learn why and how the idea of beauty came about and why it is important for them to feel the need to get plastic surgeries. 

Week 3: First bi-weekly post

My partner and I met for the first time during the third week of classes. During our session, we reviewed what we learned from the last semester since it's been a while since we last met up. The task for this week was to rehearse and review the important lessons from last semester so I can be ready to learn new tasks for future sessions. What I hoped to accomplish during out two hour meeting was to revive and pull out old information and vocabularies I've learned previously. We achieved this task by going through my notebook with every lesson in it. I read a few things to her and listened to her speak in Korean to see if I was familiar with the words in the sentences. This seemed to be effective because old knowledge came back to me slowly and I was able to recognize most things.  I will build on to what I already learned by practicing my future tasks and by trying to use it everyday. 

After checking my level of competence, I am, as expected, a beginner0 in Hebrew in interpresonal communication, interpretive listening, interpretive reading presentational speaking, and presentational writing. I met with my language partner and we worked a bit on the alphabet and my learning plan.  My goal for the semester is to learn the alphabet (read and write), greetings, and give a short presentation about food, music, and soccer. My ultimate goal is to speak the language fluently.

I will first work on the alphabet and greetings, and then move on to talking about my family and what they do. I will then attempt to have a simple conversation with my language partner or a friend who speaks Hebrew. I also have to learn about food, buying and describing food. To be able to talk about soccer, I will spend some time learning the positions and names of plays. I would also like to learn to speak about the weather, sports, health, and hobbies. My last two tasks are learning how to use the phone, formally and informally, and learn the travel signs.

I took the test to asses my level of competence in the language and my results show that I am a beginner. I am a beginner in interpersonal communication, interpretive listening, interpretive reading, presentational speaking and writing. I am looking forward to grow my own way from the beginning to hopefully advanced level. 

I met with my language partner and we discussed my learning plans and goals. She is very enthusiastic about teaching me her language, and I am very happy to be able to practice Turkish with her.

The goal that I set out to reach this semester is to pronounce Turkish correctly and read in Turkish (without having to understand everything), alphabet, greetings/farewells, colors and numbers. In addition, I want to be able to talk about food, buying and ordering food in a restaurant, and I also want to be able to talk about my family and to introduce my family to somebody else. I want to learn how to talk about school and lead a basic conversation with my Turkish friends. I also want to learn some grammar such as present simple/continuous, and depending on my progress I could also try to learn past tense. 

So my first step is to learn Turkish alphabet, and be able to pronounce every letter correctly. I already practiced Turkish alphabet with my language partner. I can say that Turkish alphabet is not very hard to learn, but there are several letters that are not included in either English or my mother tongue alphabet. So, I still have trouble pronouncing those letters, but with repetition I am sure I will improve. My language partner introduced me to greetings/farewells. There is this one greeting "Merhaba" which we also use in my country so it was easy to remember. My roommate from high school, who is Turkish, would always tell me "gule gule" which means bye bye in English, so my language partner was impressed when I already knew the meaning of this phrase.

I am planning to work more on alphabet as well as greetings/farewell and be very good at it, so that when I meet a Turkish person, I can show off my Turkish skills.

After alphabet and greetings, I will move on to talking about food, family, school and hobbies as well as learning some grammar. I am very excited about learning Turkish language. 

My cultural learning goal is to learn more about Balkan history. To do so, I plan to read the most prolific cultural commentary on the area. These works include The Bridge on the Drina, Balkan Ghosts, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In sum, my hope is to understand the area from a diverse set of perspectives.

According to the "LinguaFolio Self-Assessment Grid," I'm somewhere between "high-novice" and "low-intermediate." From the "Levels of Competence Grid," I'm between novice "beginning two" and intermediate "developing one."

My two goals for the semester are as follows:

1. Learn 300-500 new vocabulary words focused on descriptions of the environment, both broadly and Bosnia-specific.

- I'm using a program called "Anki." These flashcards quantify and analyze your progress. It is specifically designed to help you remember things.

- For this semester, I'd like to be able to describe an environment and demonstrate a knowledge of notable Bosnian geographic and historic locations.

2. Improve conversational fluency (speaking and listening) on familiar topics and vocabulary.

- Sessions with my language partner will be half free conversation, and half vocabulary and SDLAP 110 practice. The latter may be in the form of activities such as "describe the word without saying it," reading, writing, or pictionary.

- Intermittently, I plan continue to work with an elementary Croatian workbook, Radio Televizija BN, and Oslobodjenje.

I found two resources that are very helpful for learning Urdu.  Neither of them were found directly in the Global Studio.  My language partner helped me find them.  Coupled with online resources they will serve as valuable textbooks for the entire semester.  Both resources are Urdu lesson books, entirely written in Urdu, and designed to teach children, which is great news for me because they both have pictures and bright colors as result (I admit that I am partial to pictures and bright colors).  One is especially helpful with phrases it includes, and the other is very helpful as it is a good visual reminder of how the letters in Urdu change when connected in a word.  He recommended them as material because I believe he found them to be helpful for his own learning.

My%20learning%20plan-%20Lejla%20Muhamedagic.pdf 

Like Noraya I found this article particularly interesting, especially once it started discussing how different languages "parcel out the world in different ways," and particularly referenced familial assignments. As in the examples of Pitjanjatjara and Swedish, Persian also has specific names for family members contingent upon the side of the family and relation within that side, like father's brother's daughter is closest to the english concept of cousin or sister's child isn't just niece or nephew depending on gender. I think this ties into how Persian is not a gendered language, something that is an interesting concept for me. 

Even though in depth specific terms are not used for relatives, I find that within my family, we differentiate especially between cousins by means of referencing the generational connection. I guess this corresponds to the antecedents like, grand-, great-, or great-great for parent's parent, grandparent's parent, and great-grandparent's parent. Given the size  and varying age groups of my extended family, I grew up knowing the generational connections between myself and other relatives. I know my aunts and uncles children are my first cousins, and we're more or less within the same generation. However, I also have cousins that are my age that are children of cousins; I know that they are my second cousins, and their parents are my first cousins. This was definitely a learning curve when I realized that many of my friend's did not conceptualize their ties to their cousin's in the same manner. This touches on the notion that the article opened with: that we think that our language is the only way that the world is conceptualized. I think that it may even go a step further into how one's community uses a groups collected language and the differences within and between communities. This makes me think of how important it is to travel and meet new people and experience different cultures in order to introduced to the cast complexities of the world and universe via language. 

SDLAP – Sindhi

Week 1

• Work on the learning plan with my language partner

Week 2

• Learn basic greetings in Sindhi and introducing myself
• Have a basic cultural conversation with my language partner to get a deeper understanding of Sindh and the prevalence of the language.

Week 3

• Learn numbers from 1 to 20 in Sindhi and understand the use of counting money. Also learn basic colors in Sindhi.
• Basic cultural talk to understand the different sects of Sindhis.

Week 4

• Learn food related vocabulary including fruits, vegetables etc.
• Basic cultural talk discussing popular Sindhi dishes and what are eaten during what time period.

Week 5

• Learn the days of the week, and understanding tenses.
• Basic cultural talk on a traditional Sindhi wedding.

Week 6

• Learn family related vocabulary and construct short sentences related to family.
• Basic cultural talk about formality and informality in Sindhi culture.

Week 7

• Listen to short stories on YouTube with my language partner and try to understand the meaning of the words.
• Have a basic cultural conversation with my language partner on concentration of Sindhis in different parts of the world.

Week 8

• Review my progress in Sindhi and see my memory of simple words post Spring Break.
• Conversation with my language partner about Spring Break in Sindhi.

Week 9

• Listen to short stories on YouTube with my language partner and try to understand the meaning of the words.
• Have a cultural conversation with my language partner to understand the differences between Sindhis in Pakistan and Sindhis in India. 

Week 10

• Building my vocabulary by writing down simple objects, animals, professions etc. in the target language.
• Conversation with my language partner in Sindhi and fixing my grammatical errors.

Week 11

• Deciding a topic for my final presentation and working on that. Using online resources to research on the chosen topic
• Cultural conversation with my language partner on stereotypes about Sindhis.

Week 12

• Narrating a Sindhi story I watched on YouTube to my language partner and translating it back into English.
• Conversation with my language partner on understanding the history of the language.

Week 13

• Review of the semester and planning of my monologue and dialogue for the final exam.

Reading these articles were very enjoyable because it spoke about many aspects of the brain and language. One of the articles that my sciencey and nerdy self enjoyed was the one that discussed Broca’s area due to the fact I have some previous knowledge. The ability to speak a language is a very unique and important function. It has been argued by many that language is an instinct, even being compared to by scientist it is similar to the upright posture. It is not know if the emergence of language arose slowly with the adaption of primate abilities, such as the ability to use tools. Language itself has man hierarchical structure of set rules, such as grammar. The portion of the brain that is associated with language is Broca’s area. Going more into the nerdy science aspect of Broca’s area, there still is currently research that is done. One aspect of research is aphasia. Aphasia is the disability in language. This disorder has different ranges of impairment which can range form having issues from slight issues such remembering the proper word, to greater issues such as not being able to speak, read, or write. The study of chronic aphasia has proved that there is an important role for Broca's area in different speech and language functions. And I currently am aware of the fact that my language learning days are mostly based on this part of the brain.

Another aspect of this article that I thought was equally interesting was the idea of slip of tongue.  This is when a person makes the mistake of saying a word that rhymes with their intentional word. After listening to some Korean online by watching videos, I could tell the difference between some of the words. But after reviewing the alphabet, I think there will a great chance of many tongue slips for me. For instance, the Hangul for ㅈ (j) and ㅊ(ch) sound somewhat similar. I believe I’ll say the incorrect word if there are any similar words that separately uses these letters. 

we worked on greetings

how to write dari/ farsi

hello: salam

how are you: chetori  or "chi hal dari"

i am fine: man khob astam

and you? wah shoma

(with language)

I used byki to work on vocabulary: i am up to animals.  I don't know how to spell from memory so I skip that part.  I worked on alphabet.  

Jurnal #2:

How the brain handles langauage:

The article talks about contents on brain regions, dominance, localization, and neurolinguistic processing. The section that especially interested me is the concept of dominance, which is the functional relationship betweent he brain’s two hemisphere. Each is dominant for certain mental functions, the two major factors of cerebral domance are language and handedness (the left hemisphere are right handed people) but the relationship is not a symmetrical, right hemisphere is fominant for language in left handed people, which is not always garanteed. I am a right-handed person, so I am specialized in analytic tasks, caterozation, logical organization, information sequencing, and language.

“How we mean” and “ How we analyze meaning” are helpful to me because it states that it is not important to understand the meaning of each specific word, but more important to comprehend as a whole.  The last article “How to investigate language structure” is also interesting in the four models of language. It reminds me the time when I studied English. When I studied grammar, it is not only exist in a sentence, but also the word structure. In the future, when I study Korean, I will start with a bigger picture, such as learning the whole meaning of the conversation, and try to get the meaning in a big picture, instead of memorizing each vocabulary.

Annalee Yin

SDLC 105 jurnal:

Article1: What is learner autonomy and How can it be fostered?

                Overall, I think it is really interesting to know what is autonomy learner and how it works in different situation with the specific skills, plans, and learning strategies or evaluations. I can easily make a link to my own experience to learn a second language. I really agree with the idea that motivation and interests is crucial when people are trying to self study a language. It is the exercise of learners’ responsibility for own learning, which is without external pushing factors. As a result, learning strategies and planning are important. We need to constantly practicing the language, so repetition, resourcing, translation, note-taking, and using the knowledge to understand the background or cultures are also important. Moreover, asking question is required if we want to improve because we are actually learning from the mistakes. It will help us to memorize the language in a much more effective way. Other than those, keeping diaries and evaluation sheets is something new to me. After reading the article, I think this is a possible way to learn a different language too.

This semester I am learning Sindhi. Sindhi is one of the many languages spoken in India. I am a Sindhi and want to integrate myself into my culture by learning the language, which is slowly dying. Growing up, my family barely spoke in Sindhi and used more of Hindi to talk, which made it hard for me to learn the language. Through the SDLAP I plan to be able to have a basic conversation with my grandfather because he is the one who motivates me to learn my language.

In my learning plan I made sure to not only include learning of words and phrases but also to understand certain cultural aspects of Sindhis and Sindh. Sindh is located in Pakistan and I have never been there and because of the political tension between India and Pakistan I don’t know if I will ever get a chance to go to Pakistan. So learning about the culture through this program is one of my major goals for the semester.

I also want to be able to tell stories so that I can narrate my life in Ricmond to grandfather in India. I plan to achieve this goal by reading short stories made for children so that I can get a hang of that. By the end of the semester I also plan to be able to talk about my family and introduce the different members in my family.

It is interesting how cultures differ among each other and how one thing can have completely opposite meaning in two different cultures. I was raised in Bosnia which is very similar to Turkey in terms of culture and tradition, since Bosnia was for a long time under the Turkish Ottoman Empire and therefore we share many common characteristics. However, when I came to the United States, I was really surprised by how much the culture of U.S. differs from Bosnian as well as Turkish culture.

When it comes to individualist/collectivist approach, the U.S. is known to be an individualist culture. In cultures in which individualism predominates, people belong to loose social frameworks, and their primary concern is for themselves and their families. Basically, people are responsible for taking care of their own interests and they believe that individuals should make decisions on their own. Turkey is characterized by collectivism in which individual members depend strongly on extended families. Unlike in individualist culture, collectivism values and accepts group decisions. Turkey emphasize group welfare and harmony. In individualistic cultures, managers emphasize and encourage individual achievement, but in collectivist culture, managers seek to fit harmoniously within the group and they encourage these behaviors among their employees.

I have learned a lot about nonverbal communication in my organizational behavior course at UR. Nonverbal communication is an extremely important part of communication. It includes all elements of communication such as gestures and facial expressions. Nonverbal behavior is culturally bound, and gestures, facial expressions and body locations have different meanings in different cultures. For example, the U.S. hand signal for "okay" is an insult in some other countries. Also what I found interesting was that one research found only three nonverbal behaviors associated with lying: nodding, foot and leg movements and certain hand movements. Although there are many interpretations of nonverbal language, smiles have universal meanings that display positive emotions. In Turkish culture you will notice that when you want to say no you would click your tongue and accompany it by a quick upwards tilt of the head and raise your eyebrow. This same gesture of clicking your tongue is used in other cultures such as U.S. to show displeasure. Turkish people also shake their head to show confusion. 

Another aspect of how cultures differ is based on mono-chronic and poly-chronic time. Basically, the US is mono-chronic as people see time as quantifiable and do not want to waste time but use it wisely. However, Turkey is characterized by poly-chronic in which people see time as limitless and not quantifiable. For example, when people in Turkey go for a coffee break, they would chill for at least an hour or two. This is not a case with Western culture, where coffee break is considered a five minute break.

Cultures also differ in terms of direct and indirect communication. For example, people in indirect cultures tend to suggest rather than say things directly. Turkey is characterized by indirect communication as people have more instinctive understanding of others. People in direct cultures (the U.S.) tend to lead more independent lives and there is less instinctive understanding of others. People usually say things directly without suggesting. They believe that direct communcation is the best way in getting or giving information as no misunderstanding would occur. 

Turkish language belongs to Ural-Altaic family of languages. The Ural-Altaic languages are distinguished from the Indo-European by: the absence of gender, adjectives precede nouns and verbs come at the end of a sentence. Until 1928, Turkish was written in the Perso-Arabic script also known as the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.

Text in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was written right to left. The appearance of the letter actually changed with the position of the letter. For example, the position could be:

- isolated (one letter word)

- medial (letter joined on both sides)

- final (the letter is joined on the right to the preceeding letter)

- initial (the letter is joined on the left to the following letter)

In the early years of the establishment of Republic Turkey and under the role of Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, numbers and letters that were written in Arabic were replaced with Latin alphabet. Transition from one alphabet to another one lasted only a few months. On January 1, 1929, it actually became unlawful to use the Arabic alphabet to write Turkish.

Today, Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters and the letters that English alphabet does not have are:  Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, Ü

  Ç as in CHAT

  Ğ is silent- lengthens preceding vowel 

  I - e sound in label

  İ - ee sound in bee

 Ö- e sound in her

 Ş- sh sound in ship

 Ü- ew sound in few

The “How We Mean” chapter was of particular interest to me because it deals with the question of meaning. The conventionalist view holds that there is no such intrinsic connection between words and things, that meaning is arbitrarily assigned. I think I personally subscribe to this view more than the naturalist view, which maintains that there is an intrinsic connection between the sound of a word and the thing it refers to (the chapter gives the example of onomatopoeic words). For instance, if I have water and call it wine, most people would say that I am wrong, I wasn’t calling it by its name, water. But what if the majority of the people in the world begin calling water, ‘wine’? What if everyone calls water, ‘wine’? Then what used to be ‘water’ is now ‘wine’. That the names of things are contingent upon what society chooses to call them is another score for the conventionalist view. What we choose to call something, we decide upon as a whole, and determines what a thing is.

That being said, we still use words to establish a sense of the thing, and in the case of language learning, we most often turn to vocabulary. But the chapter is clear to point out: “vocabulary within sentences, always,” for it is “the interaction between words and sentence structure which actually conveys our ‘sense of sense’.” This is, of course, something I already know—that vocabulary learned in isolation, for example with flashcards, doesn’t help commit it to long-term memory. As I continue my language studies, I will try to learn words as they are embedded in sentences because as the chapter points out, the meaning (and nuance) of words change depending on the context. 

I will not be using the free Byki software since it's a little too easy for my competence level. The two resources I've bookmarked in Diigo provide cultural information from the perspective of a Canadian couple who have moved to South Korea in 2008. Some things that are included are fun posts about music (not just on K-Pop) and video blog entries concerning such topics as "What are weddings like in Korea?" and "Korean vs Western Humor." The other resource I've bookmarked in Diigo is a webpage collection of lines to online resources including articles on Hangul (the alphabet), grammar lessons, useful expressions, free language courses, links to Korean news and video lessons. 

These internet resources will be supplemented with my own Korean textbook borrowed from the library (I'm a tactile person; I need to be able to touch what I'm learning), my own Korean music collection, Korean radio on iTunes, and speaking in Korean with Labiba and my language partner. 

This is based on the reading "How the brain handles Languages" 

The human brain is divided into 2 great lobes-the right cerebral hemisphere and the left cerebral hemisphere. Information is transmitted from  one hemisphere to the

Other. The hemispheres control movement.

It is said that in right handed people, it is the left hemisphere that is dominant in  language and vice versa but not necessarily so.

The learning of languages helps the brain to stay in shape by allowing certain parts of the brain to grow. Learning a new language and putting in great efforts to learn show a definite growth in the cerebral cortex which is involved in language learning.                               

Sometimes it is very easy to forget the neurological planning that goes into the production and comprehension of language—be it spoken or written. It involves several steps that take part in the brain. This is called Neurolinguistic Processing. The analysis of slips of the tongue also tells us how the brain works and functions and about the neurological process that underlie speech.

Learning foreign languages definitely has a miraculous effect on the brain.