Exploring Culture

During Spanish 102 I was able to develop my understanding of cultural differences within Spanish speaking countries. My methods for understanding the differences in cultural perspectives are relatively the same as in Spanish 101. One of the main ways that I learned about the cultural perspectives was by participating in discussion boards for class where I would either do research or read the class textbook about things that Spanish speaking countries do differently and converse about them within the discussion boards. The other thing that I did was read the class textbook and learn about the differences there.

My experiences within Spanish 102 were similar to those that I experienced within Spanish 101. As I explained just before I used discussion boards and the textbook to learn and better understand the cultural perspectives in Spanish speaking countries. Doing these activities allowed me to better understand the values and attributes within the Hispanic culture as well as the things that happen within my own culture. I was able to see and reflect upon the things that Spanish speaking countries do differently than the U.S. and that allowed me to gain a better understanding on the topic. I have definitely noticed that Spanish speaking individuals seem to have better communication and connections with family and are more personal in the things that they do. These activities forces me to think outside of my normal everyday lifestyle and think about the lifestyles of the individuals that live in Spanish speaking countries. The hardest thing to remember when doing these activities was remembering that these individuals grew up and live in very different environments and societies than I grew up in and adapting to that way of thinking. The biggest stereotype that I personally had to work through was that Spanish speaking people are not as wealthy as people in the U.S.. I found that that stereotype was wrong because they are able to do everything that we can in the U.S. for the most part financially, only they do those things differently than we do. Overall, these activities allowed be to think outside my normal reality and focus more on how people that live within Spanish speaking countries live and how their cultural perspectives are.

Engaging in Communities

Within our local and global communities there are many great people that all appreciate when people come together and engage in the community. Engaging within our communities can mean the difference of a good day or a bad day for somebody, or it might mean the difference between a meal or going hungry for somebody else. When people are engaging and helping their communities great things can happen and great people can live better lives due to the help you are giving to the community.

In my lifetime there have been a few times where I have helped and engages with the community. I have participated in a color run, formed by my high school honor society. The proceeds from the color run went to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I have also participated as a bell ringer for the Salvation Army which helps to provide goods for families in need. I have also helped my neighbors with different things such as cutting the grass and taking care of pets while they are away. All of these things help contribute to a better and happier community by allowing people to have food on the table when they are struggling financially or helping people battle illnesses as well as overall make my neighbors happy. I am happy to be able to help my community with these things and these helped me to see the importance in engaging in the community, whether it be my local community or the global community.

Interpersonal Communication

Within this semester I have completed a few activities in which I worked or communicated with somebody else. Some of the activities was having two interviews with my professor, one interview with a person on TalkAbroad, and one interview with another student. Another one was participating within discussion boards in Spanish. All of these activities allowed me to improve my understanding of Spanish.

Within the interviews that I completed throughout the semester I was able to develop my understanding of Spanish and communication skills. While doing the interview I needed to be able to remember and understand the Spanish that I had learned throughout the semester in order to be able to communicate properly. This helped me to build upon my understanding of the Spanish language and improve upon my communication skills. This was challenging to do mainly because of having to remember the vocabulary and rules of the Spanish language while having a conversation with another person. I was able to overcome that difficulty by preparing and studying a lot ahead of time. I was good at keeping the conversation going without there being silence and I was also good at answering the questions that were asked in a timely manner. Overall, I learned how to be able to speak Spanish within a conversation, but if there was anything that I would do differently it would be studying more and hopefully sometime in the future actually have the conversation in person.

Within the discussion boards from this class I was able to develop an understanding of different cultures within Spanish speaking countries while also being able to talk to other people about them. One thing that was difficult to do was be able to understand their the other cultures point of view without being in their place, but I overcame that by learning more about the cultures and being able to visualize things better. I excelled at being able to talk about these different things while also criticizing anything or being rude about anything and I did this by trying my best to understand the other cultures point of view. Overall, within these discussion boards I learned about different cultures and if there was anything different that I would do next time it would be having more conversations within the discussion boards so that I can get more opinions and other peoples point of view on these subjects.

Presentational Speaking

Unfortunately I have not had to do any presentations relating to Spanish within this semester. I have done speaking assignments within my homework but I do not see those as presentations. Overall I have not had any presentational speaking type assignments this semester.

Presentational Writing

Unfortunately this semester I have not written any kind of presentational writing relating to Spanish. The closest thing that I have was a quiz that I have to take at the very end of this class where I had to write a ten sentence paragraph making a review on my favorite restaurant. I do not have access to this quiz due to it being locked after I submitted it, so I cannot provide it in this section.

During that quiz that I took, it helped me to gain a better understanding of what I need to work on overall and showed me that I do have the ability to write in Spanish if I try hard enough. The easiest part of the quiz was probably remembering the types of food, while the hardest thing was forming grammatically correct sentences talking about that food. I overcame these difficulties by thinking hard and remembering what I learned within my class. I excelled at being able to get all of the sentences completed within the time limit of fifteen minutes and I did this by being able to create a quick structure of how I wanted to write the paragraph. I could do better next time by reviewing more of the material from class and studying more before attempting another quiz.

Interpretive Listening

During this semester I participated in some listening activities to help my understanding of Spanish. One of the activities was listening to some provided music in Spanish so that I could listen and recognize some of the Spanish within the songs. The other activity that I did was doing listening homework problems where I had to listen and answer questions based on what I heard.

Some of the things that I listened too are music videos that were provided by the professor and the recordings for the listening homework that I had to do. The hardest things for me was actually understanding what it was that they were saying because I am not used to hearing Spanish on a regular basis, but I was able to overcome this by listening multiple times to the recording or videos and piece together what I heard. I found the most interesting thing to be listening to the music videos and being able to understand some of the things they are saying within the song. My overall takeaway from these activities is that I need to work more on my listening skills so that I can better understand what people are saying in Spanish. I personally think that I might have grown a little bit with each activity because of being able to hear different voices and things so that I can better recognize them later.

Interpretive Reading

Within this semester there has only been one thing that would count at interpretive reading that I have done. That one this is reading sections out of the class textbook or on our homework website that would tell us about the different cultures or something like that, and of course it would all be in Spanish.

Unfortunately I am unable to put any examples of what I have read onto this page but I can definitely reflect upon it. The most challenging things about the readings were trying to remember some of the vocabulary and I was able to get by that by finding out what the vocabulary meant and then I could move on. The thing that I found most interesting about these reading was finding out about the different cultures and seeing how they lived. My overall takeaway from these readings was that there are many different cultures and types of people in this world and we have to try to respect everybody the way that we would want to be respected ourselves. I feel that I have grown with each reading because I have been able to learn more about the different cultures with every reading that I did.