Exploring Culture

One thing that helped me understand other cultural perspectives is that in class we talked a lot about all of their different ways of living, as well as their different norms.

After learning about all of the different norms that exist, I have come to realize that their ways of living are vastly different than the norms I am used to. Some Hispanic cultures have the woman at home and unable to work, when in other places its vise versa. These open my eyes in a way because I thought this way of thinking was outdated. This tells me that theres different views about lifestyles that everyone can see. It however didn’t really change a stereotype for me because I never thought anyone thought like that in the first place anymore

Engaging in Communities

The value of engaging in a community close to you is vital because it can help remind you of your own ways, so you can compare it to other people and their own communities. Some fun activities could be parades in your neighborhood, or even something as simple as playing with the neighbors.

Interpersonal Communication

Some communications that we did in this class was talk to other native speakers. We used a website called TalkAbroad to spend fifteen minutes every other month to have a conversation with a native speaker based on what that unit was about.

Some types of activities that we had in our TalkAbroad conversations was our topics of families and our mental health. I enjoyed talking about my family a lot more than about my mental health, as I had a much more broad vocabulary when it came to speaking about families. I grew however with each assignment because it gave me experience in speaking about what I was learning and hear new words and learning new facts as well. I found remembering what each word is in Spanish was, and had to spend more time to study what words I wanted to say. One thing I will do differently is spend more time to be prepared.

Presentational Speaking

The TalkAbroad assignments that I had to do was always done outside of class. This was fun because it helped me use what I was learning out of class.

(TalkAbroad link won’t work despite my best ability to compress the audio.)

The conversation above was about our family. This was slightly challenging because I had to go into more specifics with what my family did, or their facial features. I exceled at when it came to talking about how many family members and saying who my favorite family member was. One thing I would do different is I would spend more time studying my family features so I can speak about it more.

Presentational Writing

Some of our Lingrolearning projects had us writing about our lives, what our favorite dish was, fliers, and infographics. This was exciting as I was able to take my time and use what I learned for a fun project.

This assignment was about a club I had to talk about that I made. I had fun making this as I could do it mostly any way I wanted, as long as I hit the criteria. This was hard however as I had to spend much of my time to find words in my vocab to use. I excelled at the beginning as it was simple, and talking about what I already knew, like time and dates. I could spend more time looking at my vocabularly to use even more advanced words.

Interpretive Listening

Some listening activities I did was on Lingrolearning, where we had to listen to some audio and complete the activities that were about the audio.

One thing I listened to was about the spanish alphabet when I had to do a quick refresh on stuff I learnt last semester. This wasn’t too hard as it was mainly just refamiliarizing myself. What was tricky was remembering that the H in Spanish is silent. Through memorization however I easily started to remember this. This takeaway is how different the Spanish alphabet is. I have grown in that now I can speak much easier knowing all the different sounds the letters make.

Interpretive Reading

In my Spanish 102 class we read more articles, stories, and websites than my Spanish 101 class. We looked at presentations made on Lingrolearning that showed examples of different places around the world and their type of activities they do day to day.

Some type of activities that they showed us was their favorite types of sports. Some sports that was shown was football and soccer, however they called it fútbol americano. This wasn’t surprising as many people like these types of sports. I found the most interesting thing that we talked about was how every person enjoyed a different sport, as I am not a fan of many. My takeaway from the readings is how everyone’s lives and experience vary compared to mine. I have grown in a way on that I can put myself in other people’s shoes much easier than i could before.