In the section I will be briefly discussing exactly what activities we did in my Spanish 101 course, and how they helped me learn Spanish more efficiently. I will also briefly be discussing my Struggles if I had any, and what I did to adjust. In all of these projects however, I was able to overcome and continue my exploration into learning Spanish.

Exploring Culture

Exploring cultures had to be one of my favorites exercises we did in class. Specifically, because most of the time we were given the free choice of what we could look up, and specifically where. These activities only strengthened my curiosity on the cultures that we explored. In particular I enjoyed our most recent activity. We learned about who people look up to in certain areas, of course everywhere is going to have different people they look up to but I was intrigued by the reading. Overall, these sections definitely help change my worldview. They made me realize that even though there might be a language barrier, we as people all look for the same things. We are all just people and we all care about close to our hearts. these are the things that I think helped me feel like there wasn’t a big difference between me and someone who is from a different culture. So, In short what really truly helped me in this section was that the information was intriguing. A good thing I also always did, was try to pick somewhere I wanted to learn about rather than somewhere that would have an easier answer. Specifically, when you pick somewhere that you want to learn about you end up discussing it more and memorizing it.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in communities I think was one of our toughest activities. Saying that however, I think it’s the most important of them all. Being engaged with your local communities, or communities that you aren’t in are both extremely important. When we engage ourselves in different communities it makes us more well-rounded people, and helps us gain a better understanding of the world around us. When we had to interview a Spanish speaker I was quite nervous that I would mess up but, There’s no messing up when all you’re trying to do is learn and better yourself. I think the biggest thing with engaging in Communities, when interviewing someone is to practice. Try to think of a good structure to answering questions and asking more.  Both schoolwork and performance online, and I think that’s why I didn’t up being one of our funniest ones to look back on as well.

Interpretive Listening

Listening was one of the harder topics for me in our studies. I think only because when you’re learning a language it sounds so much faster than when you’re speaking it. However, this just made me study harder. Overall, the best thing that I did to make sure I understood the listening exercises was to practice. Looking up words and making sure that I knew how they were pronounced, and what would make them change tense. It also helps to seek advice from my professor, or a classmate in the situations. Asking for help is always good and because I had struggles with these activities it made me realize how kind my classmates are. 

Interpretive Reading 

Interpretive reading I think is one of the things I struggled with, only because if I didn’t have a great grasp of the vocabulary in a certain module it would be extra difficult to do these exercises. However, this pushed you to study harder. Also when I’m not struggling with new vocabulary I usually had a similar experience to when I was exploring cultures. All of our readings were very light hearted, and gave insight about how people live in Spanish-speaking countries. I specifically enjoyed the readings we did on college life in Spanish speaking countries. It was fun to see that more often than not people seem to live at home rather than live on campus. But then again a lot of people also worked which is very common here in the states. As I said before, these activities truly helped blur the lines of what makes us so different. Plus, this led to the reading never seeming boring or bland. Which made me want to understand what was being written. 

Presentational Writing

I actually very much enjoyed our presentational writing, it always helped me plan out the presentation that we did. These activities would also give us chances to look into what the rubric might be for the assignment. So, sometimes if I didn’t have a great understanding of what I was going to have to write about, looking at the writing questions I was usually able to break down exactly what I was looking too say. The biggest thing I did to make sure I excelled in these activities was to read what I wrote out loud. Also, it always helps to have a friend in the situation look over writing with you, just like when you do it with English. In the specific example I nominate my mom to receive the best person reward, this is not only just a fun activity to do but helped me once again understand more descriptive words in Spanish.

Interpersonal communication

I truly enjoyed this unit, specifically because we got to talk about our own schedules and daily activities. This helped me gather information that I would need for my day-to-day life with doing fun activities. It really helped me understand grammar like tener and ir. The activity we had to do was a Calendar for this unit, one reviewing two peoples activities together. And then our own calendar we made ourselves, truly I like the calendar we made ourselves because it made me apply my own knowledge of what I do, to some thing that I was learning which always helps me get a better grasp of it. Overall, it definitely helped me learn better grammar, and it was fun to do as well.