As a Language and Culture Learner, How Have You Grown?
How have you grown as a student of language and culture in the last fifteen weeks?
Please write your reflections as a comment to this blogpost.
Think about how much speaking and listening practice you have had in our online sessions. How has this affected your comfort in speaking English and understanding native speakers? What can you do now that you couldn't do at the beginning of the class?
Consider the cultural topics we worked with during the semester: humor (New Yorker cartoons; Exporting Raymond and the other TV shows we looked at), American digital news resources and the Occupy Wall Street movement (Michael Moore, Occupy Louisville interviews, photos, videos and texts), Literature (The Story of An Hour, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, She Can Kill With a Smile, others....). Which did you enjoy the most? Which did you learn the most from? Be as specific as you can.
Summarize your progress toward goals for this semester’s language and culture learning experience. Did you learn what you were hoping to learn? Did you develop skills you were hoping to gain? Did you push yourself to learn and learn-to-learn in ways that were unexpected to you?
How do you plan to continue contact with the language and culture you are studying in the future, when the semester is finished?
As you write, think about what kind of advice you might offer another student, new to the translators’ program. If you got a do-over, how would you approach it differently? What have you learned about how you work?
This is about putting it all together, as a way to make sense (or meaning) of the whole experience.
I hope that one thing you take away from your semester in America and Americans Today is an appreciation of your ability to sift and sort through an incredible amount of data and come out with a holistic view of the process and how you make it work for you.
“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”
–Henry David Thoreau
More Reading, Less Hassle :RSS feeds
Here's a way to save time and simplify your life:
Instead of going to all your favorite blogs and news resources to see if anything new has been posted, you can set up an RSS reader and subscribe to your favorite blogs and news resources; then you only have to look in one place. It's easy.
Here's a short video with good instructions on how to set up your reader.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU&list=FLhCQesKshn6J8nDWudqsjEA&index=38&feature=plpp_video
Even if you are scared of the technology, follow the two steps to set up the reader. You will find it easy. The first step is to get a gmail account (it's free) and go to the Reader (the video explains this in detail). Then, go to the first of your favorite blogs and subscribe to it. Your reader collects all your reading in one place.
Let me know how you like this. Just try adding two blogs to a reader, and you will be addicted, I promise.
Audio recording: She Can Kill With A Smile
Here's a "three-minute story" which you may be reading. I've made a quick recording of it so you can read along while you listen. If you can actually read aloud along with me, y experience is that you will improve your spoken fluency. Try to read it more than once.
Here's the audio:
... and here's the text:
"She Can Kill with a Smile..."
I smiled at the workers in the back, busily snipping stems and arranging arrangements. They nodded back at me. I browsed the Hallmarks for a minute. Then I walked out, the door jingling behind me.
She was in the car. She stared straight ahead, careful not to avert her eyes from whatever she watched as walked in front of the car. I sat down in the driver's seat.
"For you, m'dear," I said, leaning over for what I hoped would be a kiss worthy of a certain kind of cinema.
"Nice," she said instead, looking down at the flower then taking it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger. "What am I supposed to do with it now?"
"What do women ever do with flowers?" I said, leaning back, silently swearing at the car roof. "We buy them, you tell us how sweet we are, you stick them in a vase, they die a few days later, you throw them out and life goes on."
"So, it's the thought that counts? That's what you're saying?"
"Yeah. I guess so."
"Nice."
I looked at her, noting how her long black hair was pulled tight over her head and tied into a ponytail. At her full red lips, lightly lipsticked against her light brown skin. Her dark eyes, framed by unnaturally long lashes. I looked at her and I could feel her moving against me.
Moving against me.
"You thought this would make a difference?" she asked, brushing the red petals against her lips as breathed its scent.
"I took great risks," I offered.
She was quiet for some time.
"Did it work?" I asked. I raised my eyebrows for comic effect.
"Not really," she said I and I slammed my palm against the steering wheel.
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
"Nothing really," she said.
And then she turned to me and smiled.
Reading: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Some of you will be reading The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, by James Thurber. I
have made a quick audio recording of this story, following up on my last post about
listening strategies. I did this recording in one take, and it's not perfect. But it
will give you some idea of what it sounds like. If you can, read along with the
recording, so you can hear the words spoken while you're looking at them.
Here is the recording:
Enjoy!