Reflection: Sadly I didn't learn as much as I originally intended too. But being able to learn how to say a greeting and introduce myself to people is a pretty good start. I know that there were some vocabulary that I could brush up on. But in all honesty this didn't go as terrible as I first imagined. Sure I didn't learn all that I set out to know but no one really does when they first start out is what I learned and I'm okay with that. Being able to be okay with not learning and understanding everything is completely fine it just proves that you still have more to learn. Yes I found everything difficult solely because I wasn't used to it but I was able to work on it a bit and after all of it I'm proud of what I learned and I'll just have to continue if I want to know more.
Progress: From the beginning of all of this I went from someone who struggled to even say the greeting properly. But now although my pronunciation isn't perfect I'm able to say words or phrases a little bit better. I still struggle with the accents and I think that's what I have to work on the most because I can feel myself messing up whenever it comes to pronouncing a word that has an accent on the A, S, or other letters. My memorization got a little bit better by just repeating the same phrases in my head over and over again. I mean for spending about seven months on this I know it's not a lot of progress but it's still something I should be proud about. Reflection: The main struggle I found with learning a new language by yourself is the lack of pressure for you to learn everything. There is no one there telling you that you need to learn the new vocabulary by a certain day or that there's a test or quiz on the new grammar. I feel as though I need that type of setting in order to show actual progress but at the same time I also need to apply myself when it comes to learning about this stuff. Progress: I haven't really made that much progress since I'm not really applying myself at this point due to other priorities. But I am fluent in a couple of phrases that are useful for when I'm greeting someone. I can also write out those phrases with little confusion so that proves that I have those words down. But I still struggle on figuring out whether or not certain words need an accent mark and what the accent mark looks like. As a "learning" tool I've been using google translate as a form of seeing whether or not my grammar was correct and usually it isn't.
Reflection: Okay so by this point I'm realizing that there isn't much for me to do other than continuing to do the things I have been doing. I did enjoy learning this language it is truly a beautiful language to learn. But the idea of not being able to share or communicate with others is what bothers me. Since it's such an uncommon language most people wouldn't know what I'm saying so I would always have to translate the very few phrases I know. Progress: In the process of still wanting to practice my communication skills and typing/writing things out I used social media for that. I would go on platforms such as snapchat and send friends of mine some phrases in Romanian so I would get the opportunity to at least share something about the things I've learned. My friends would respond one of two ways which is either saying "What?" or they would actually go on google translate and find something to say in response.
Reflection: Most of the lessons I have done touch on the speaking part of learning a foreign language. It doesn't actually require me to do any type o writing segment. I feel as though writing is really essential when learning a new language. I feel like it actually makes the person think about the grammatical side of the language and also have to learn the conjugations correctly in order to write a complete sentence.
Progress: For me to work on my writing skills I am going to try to write a small summary or short story at the end of every other week. Right now my writing skills are not the best in fact I really don't have any when it comes to writing in Romanian. So if I start writing short stories then eventually and hopefully it will get better. I mostly doing this so I can understand the conjugations a bit better than before since that seems to be where I struggle the most when it comes to writing or speaking. Reflections: I have a very busy schedule as I deal with both school and sports so that takes up most of my day. Plus throughout the entire week I don't really have the time to stop and actually sit down to go over my Romanian lessons. I don't really find the time until it's the weekend and even then I don't have a lot of time depending on the amount of homework I have. If i do find the time it usually isn't a lot of time which is something I want to change.
Progress: I looked up on google what to do in order to make time for me to learn or at least review these lessons. I basically came to the conclusion that to give myself more time to actually learn my lessons I would have to make reminders for myself. Basically setting constant date on my calendar that reminds me to stop for an hour to go over notes, start a new lesson, or try new writing styles. If the reminders on my calendar don't work for some reason then I will set an alarm clock that will remind me to start my lessons. Reflection: I feel with the constant repeating words and phrases used in each app I download it has been permanently burned into my mind. There will be certain times where I'll think in Romanian but it is really basic type of stuff. For instance I can translate in my mind "Hello...How are you...My name is..." which are pretty basic "getting to know you" type of stuff.
Progress: I have gotten into a habit of whenever I am by myself or have nothing else to do I will try to think of sentences in Romanian. But I have failed at that because I haven't been able to get passed the greetings since I am trying to remember how the conjugations work. But when I use the app Mondly it'll underline certain words and if you click on it it will show you the different conjugations in the past, present, and future tense which is a lot more helpful than all the other apps I have used. Reflection: By this point I am constantly trying to find new forms of learning of Romanian but I'm failing rather than succeeding. It has come to my attention that finding apps or other platforms to learn Romanian is a bit harder than expected. Most language apps such as Rosetta Stone don't have a section for you to learn Romanian. Which is a little strange because you would expect a language app to have a variety of languages rather than being limited to the most common ones.
Progress: So I have scoured majority of the app store to find apps related to Romania or similar to learning Romanian. I found two different apps that I have decided might be of good use the apps are called Mondly which sets up different types of lessons for you each day and Romanian Essentials which basically deals with the essential words or phrases you would need for the language and it's all made into flash cards. But with Mondly you would have to do a monthly fee in order to actually get the full experience. So if I missed a daily lesson I wouldn't be able to go back to that lesson unless I paid for the full app. But I guess that kind of kept me on track in order to actually learn something. Progress: For this one there isn't as much progress as there usually is because lately I have been trying to find new forms of learning the language. Although I am still utilizing Duolingo as an easy "on the go" form of learning Romanian I wanted to find a different approach to this hopefully learning more than I do on Duolingo. So far I've found a few videos that explains common phrases and how they differ based on the type of respect you want to place on it, another that goes over the basic grammar/sentence structure of Romanian, and lastly one that teaches me numbers one through ten. Reflection: When learning by watching a video can be very helpful in a way where you can actually see how certain words are supposed to be pronounced and certain sentences phrased. By watching a video that was an introduction to the Romanian language I found that it was very useful because the person in the video was able to discuss the differences in accent marks, how it changes the sound of a word, and how to properly articulate the word. Just by watching the video helped me realize what to do and how to fix when I have trouble with my pronunciation. The other video that was about how to say numbers one through ten was a lot more helpful than it actually seems. The reason being for that is when I started using Duolingo the app's main focus were the words and sentences rather than the little things such as numbers or the alphabet.
Progress:
In the previous blog I stated that I would try to work on my pronunciation as I struggle a lot with that. Since then I have not improved much, I'm still working on being able to roll my R's because I couldn't really do that in the first place. But aside from that I realized that apart from using Duolingo I have no other method of learning the language. So because of that I went to google and searched up different ways or tips I can use when learning a new language. Reflection: When I googled tips on how I should learn a new language some tips were more useful than others and I realized that I can utilize some in my everyday life. For instance one tip that I found useful was to practice in my head after each lesson or every time I learn something new. Because typically for me after one lesson I tend to forget very easily so everything I just learned doesn't stick with me unless I find myself using what I just learned throughout the day. But at the same time the ones that are a little bit less useful are kind of related to what I am doing right now. For example one of the tips would be to learn the basic words of the language first even though that's where I started and planned to start when I began this journey. Progress:
As stated in the previous blog I wanted to try and focus on one thing at a time rather than taking on a whole lot and inevitably fail and I've done exactly that. So eventually I got to the point where I memorized the sentence structures enough to the point where I barely need to look at the pages of notes I took. Since I got the whole memorization thing down I thought I could move onto the next thing I struggle a lot with which is pronunciation. I realized that as I went along with each lesson I can't correctly pronounce certain words so that kind of drags me down a little when learning the language. Reflection: A while back I thought to myself that it would be easy to learn a new language, that I would have little struggles but I couldn't be more wrong with that statement. I struggled so much just to be able to memorize sentences now I'm having even more trouble trying to pronounce words correctly. The pronunciation is my biggest struggle because when it comes to speaking Romanian you have to roll your R's a lot and in reality I can't do that. The S's and T's become difficult because of their accent marks that completely change the actual sound of the letter. Then there are the little things such as the letter C where majority of the time it has a "ch-" sound so you can easily mispronounce something if you forget that certain letters have a different sound to it. Along with the different sounds of letters the speed at which you're actually supposed to be speaking can potentially mess you up and have to repeat one simple word constantly. |
AuthorMegan Lei Archives
May 2018
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