Exploring Culture

I learned even more about the Hispanic culture this semester than I did last semester. This semester I learned more about the family dynamics in the Spanish culture are similar but different from that of us Americans. In Hispanic culture, the family is a very close-knit group, which does pretty much everything together even with extended family. The American way is that it is more just close family that does things like holidays together rather than the whole family (usually). I learned about the health care that they have in Spain and how if you are a resident or working in Spain that your health care is covered. Unlike here in the U.S. where we have to pay for our own healthcare if we want good health care. I also learned about some of the traditional Hispanic dishes, and believe me they all looked amazing I hope to one day be able to try some of them from that country. 

Engaging in Communities

I have learned that it is very important to be a part of a community. Whether that be through volunteering in your community or just helping out a neighbor in need. Just showing kindness to someone or a random stranger can make the world a better place.

In this class, I engaged in the class community through discussion board posts. Below, is an image that shows one of the last discussion board posts that I posted and the response to one of my fellow classmates.

Interpersonal Communication

This semester I communicated with others who spoke Spanish through a really interesting website called TalkAbroad. TalkAbroad gives people to opportunity to communicate with true Spanish speakers from all over the world. This was such a cool experience and I really enjoyed the conversations that I had with my person from Mexico. I also communicated with my fellow classmates this semester through discussion posts. In these posts, we would write an initial post and then have our fellow classmates comment on that post with their own thoughts. We talked about our families, friends, ourselves, food, Hispanic culture, and even our health.

The following link is a link to the TalkAbroad conversation that I had with Stephany who was from Mexico. In this conversation, we talked about food and our health. It was a really interesting and good conversation. file:///Users/bobbieaustin/Downloads/Bobbie%20Austin%20-%20La%20buena%20salud%20y%20la%20comida%20(U7%20-U9).mp3

With each assignment, we had to write a little bit in Spanish, so this gave me the opportunity to work on grammar and vocabulary. It was difficult because there is always that work that you will say the wrong thing in that other language. I think I did well with writing the initial posts and being able to understand the assignment that was in front of me. I think that we can all learn from each other this way and encourage each other at the same time. 

Presentational Speaking

This semester we completed most assignments like this in LingroLearning. Assignments like these gave me the opportunity to work on speaking and understanding what I was saying.

In this recording that I had to do, I had to complete the sentences with the correct form of the verb that was missing in the sentence. This was a difficult one as I was worried that I would place the wrong verb or the wrong conjugation of the right verb in this spot. I tried my best to excel at the whole assignment but I always worry that I will get something wrong. This helped me realize what words I needed to work on and which ones I needed help conjugating in the future.

Presentational Writing

When writing in Spanish there were a few things that we did during this semester. We did writing in Spanish in our LingroLearning assignments and we also had to answer certain questions in Spanish during our discussion boards.

This discussion board post above was about sports. For this discussion board, we have to watch a video and answer the question “which is the sport that people practice the most in Spanish, based on the video” I had to answer that question in Spanish, so if you look at the first sentence of the post above you will see where I answered it in Spanish. The difficult part of this assignment was figuring out which sports in the video were the most popular. I did this by watching it several times over again with and without the subtitles. I think I excelled at listing the sports that were said the most in the video. Next time I think what I could maybe do better is write down the sports that I hear more than once rather than just trying to remember them.

Interpretive Listening

When working in LingroLearning there were several assignments where we had to listen and answer a question based on what we heard in the recording. This can help when in real-world situations when we are in conversations in Spanish and have to listen to what the other person is saying.

The assignment that is posted above shows an assignment where I had to listen to a recording and fill in the spaces on the family tree. This assignment required lots of thought because I had to listen for the name of the individual and then how that person was related to the main person we were talking about. This was not an extremely hard assignment but it did require a lot of listening and focusing. I think this assignment was interesting in that I had to listen to how that person was related and interpreted that onto the tree. My takeaway from this assignment is how important it is to learn the vocabulary as well as pay attention when someone is talking. This activity helped me grow me making me listen to Spanish words and phrases over and over again.

Interpretive Reading

The reading in Spanish was done a lot in our LingroLearning assignments, especially for the Cultural assignments. We usually had to read a paragraph and then do an assignment based on that paragraph that we just read in Spanish.

This assignment below talks about the different countries where same-sex marriage is legal and where it is illegal. For this assignment, I then had to take the map that is also shown above and pick the countries that are talked about in the paragraphs. This was a challenge for me just because it was a lot of information to try and comprehend at one time. I did find this whole assignment interesting. My takeaway from the reading is that the Hispanic culture is kinda split when it comes to same-sex marriage. This assignment just gave me the opportunity to expand more of my vocabulary and understanding of the Spanish language.