Exploring Culture

A number of cultural products helped me gain a better understanding of the Spanish-language perspective; the television show Gran Hotel was a soap opera I watched this semester about a high-end hotel and mysteries surrounding its staff. I discovered and fell in love with the song “Tu” by Maye, which exposed me to more Spanish-language music and art, broadening my cultural horizons. As far as work goes, the short story “El Eclipse” and its subsequent activities helped me understand Indigenous-Spanish relations and history.

Art is, fundamentally, superfluous. No society requires art to sleep, or eat, or for shelter. Art, at its core, is an optional expression of human creativity and emotion. Works of art always help humanize and make familiar initially foreign societies and cultures. For instance, “Tu” by Maye is a sappy pop song about falling in love. I imagine for a Spanish language native, it would be a catchy but eventually tiresome song. For me, however, it was a watershed moment that helped me link Spanish and English cultural products together. This changed my worldview surrounding Spanish art dramatically, as did the soap opera “Gran Hotel”, which is to television as “Tu” is to music. It’s easy to operate under stereotypes that denote some peoples as being alien and impossible to understand. Understanding the unity of human creativity destroys these stereotypes, as it did for me. Spanish speakers fundamentally want all the same things, good and bad, that English speakers want. Spanish language art helped me understand that.

Engaging in Communities

Without your community, you only have yourself to rely on. In this world, billions of people exist, and almost everyone has a perspective that can provide insight on any number of topics. When you interact with your community, you don’t just help others and better the place you live in, you also better yourself. The same principle exists for the entire world; if you could learn from the perspectives of those from wildly different communities, you and your community would learn even more. It’s important to preserve the environment for the same reason- all great artists and thinkers are inspired by some aspect of the natural world.

I work every year to educate people on writing and speaking, as well as to preserve the environment. Because of this, I’ve met people from all over the world, and many of the ideas I’m using in my work today stem from insights I’ve gained from the global and immediate communities I’m a part of. In the same vein, I’ve learned much from my interactions with the Spanish-speaking community at home and abroad.

I learned both about the environment and about Ecuador during my TalkAbroad interviews, in particular TalkAbroad 1: La moda y el ecoturismo (U11-U12).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cZTC_avGVKbhPC-W6yO75qkkr02LkSCq/view?usp=sharing

Below is a link to a project about ecotourism, which is vital for sustainably supporting and developing communities in the United States and all over the world.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ASS8ygkJN1rj6KjioYuYsPGVQyUc_43A/view?usp=sharing

Interpersonal Communication

In this course, I participated in planned, unguided conversations solely in Spanish with Spanish speakers from around the world. Topics ranged from ecotourism to stereotypes and cultural traditions. In class, every single day we participated in guided Spanish conversation activities, and were aided by our teachers. In the same vein, we completed guided written/presented group collaborative Spanish assignments in class. We also did a Spanish-language conversational project about a misunderstanding- I completed mine with a classmate.

The project—->

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EK3zxuQxXvSocXB2pqrOIwr4nihBCaRm/view?usp=sharing

Interpersonal communication is difficult for me, as I am autistic and have a harder time picking up nonverbal cues. The interpersonal communication work this semester has helped me work around this issue with practice and real world application. TalkAbroad in particular helped me a lot with this issue, as over time I got to know the person I was corresponding with. Knowing the person on the other side of the screen is also a human being has greatly helped me in understanding interpersonal communication. Some of my best work was in the Unit 16 project about misunderstandings, as I was already friends with Patricia, my classmate, and so working with her in Spanish was easier. TalkAbroad and the Unit 16 project helped me in this regard the most.

Presentational Speaking

This semester, presentational speaking was required for several projects. One such case was project 18, wherein I read an excerpt from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MwVnZlHlynLC0KqKFki_EnstUytfTze2/view?usp=sharing

For this project, I excelled at a choice of poem, as I already loved the works of Lorca and was familiar with them. However, emoting convincingly has never been a strong suit of mine, as well as changing my tone. Next time I would have practiced emoting and changing my tone more to make a more convincing performance.

Presentational Writing

This semester, I completed a number of in-class activities of presentational writing wherein I would write a number of sentences according to a prompt and read them off to the class. I also completed a project centered around a style guide for a client, in flyer form.

In terms of the in-class written presentational assignments, I could’ve certainly prepared better, especially with regards to the vocabulary. However, I was confident in front of my classmates at all times. With regards to the style guide I certainly could’ve used a wider range of verbs and tenses, and I relied too strongly on a fixed formula. Next time, I plan on having a more natural flow of events in my writing and presentation.

Interpretive Listening

This semester, I listened and interpreted a number of videos and readings of texts in Spanish. The embedded video is a Spanish language video about the history of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires. This video comes from their official YouTube channel; I found it by way of its placement in LingroLearning.

Interpreting actual Spanish-language audio was the hardest part of the entire course for me. Every person talks differently, which means that even if they’re speaking in perfect unbroken Spanish with perfect audio quality, it can still be difficult to understand them. At the same time, it is the most realistic and applicable of any of the audio based activities completed this year. Practice and repetition were very helpful to me for this activity; I simply had to become more comfortable with listening to the Spanish language. This video includes a number of people speaking at different volumes, at different ages, and from different places, so it was certainly helpful in that regard.

Interpretive Reading

This semester, every unit included either a written, audio, or mixed media text that had to be read, understood, and used for a variety of activities. Once such activity was a Spanish-language authentic text about a trip to a student’s college and his experience of leaving his family. This link takes you to a document transcribed from LingroLearning.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Po4zP6ZKz0hyd_-QgpdveQkrdgwuElebUzYU1xRLnWk/edit?usp=sharing

When reading a text in a language you’re not completely familiar with, there will always be words, phrases, and verb uses you’re not familiar with. This adds additional obstacles to understanding the story; however, this semester I learned to use context clues and to skim. This allowed me both to understand the general contours of a story and to decipher unfamiliar terms. I have improved greatly in this regard, and I sharpened these skills after every assignment. My favorite of these assignments has been linked above; it resonated strongly for me as a freshman college student.