My name is Joseph Mangelli, I am a Cyber Security major and a second year. I like to watch movies, play games, wrestle, and hang out with my friends. I took Spanish 101 this semester because I was still in need of my language credits.
Exploring Culture
Some practices and products that helped me understand cultural perspective are, seeing how people went about college in some countries. In countries depending on the culture it was more normal to not live on campus at college and to remain home while at college. A product of latin culture I found interesting is their celebration of the dead. They have a whole holiday dedicated to leaving food and other things at loved ones graves and celebrate colorful skeletons.
These celebrations of dead challenged my worldview because death is something people don’t want to talk about meanwhile it is celebrated every year despite the dark tone surrounding it. One thing I remember is how in some countries people don’t refer to their grandparents and parents with the respectful conjugations while others did.
Engaging in Communities
The value in engaging in your local community is to help keep the your culture alive in your community and to help educate people who are from other cultures. It’s important for the global community to feel connected to others of your culture even when they are nowhere near you.
Some of my experience participating in my community would be on the first day of school this year when we had a flood on campus, me and my friends brought out a bench press, kayak, boogie boards, and other things to have fun with whoever wanted to show up in the middle of Kaufman main campus.
Interpersonal Communication
One of the audio activities we did was to describe our campus in Spanish and record it as a project. This helped me realize that when speaking you can greatly effect how long the speech or moment will take due to how nervous or non chalant you are. I tested it before hand and the video came out 2:30 seconds and when I actually did it on the campus and submitted it only came to 1:30 because of how fast I was talking to get it over with.
One of the spontaneous activities would be in class discussions, I feel I did much better speaking in class because everything was fresh on my mind. If I went on break and got into a situation where I had to speak Spanish I feel my brain would fart. The speaking tests were not as bad since I knew before hand and was able to prepare a little bit depending on what my belief was going to be in the exam. Same with the calendar assignment that was sprung on us, I was not prepared at all and pushed through it.
Presentational Speaking
I don’t exactly have a presentational speaking thing, but we had two speaking projects that are unable to be linked here. We had one where we had to speak to a fluent Spanish speaker for about a minute.
We only had two speaking projects, neither are compatible files to submit here. But the first was speaking to a native speaker and greeting them for about a minute. The other was describing buildings on campus and where they are relative to other places and things. The first video I had my friend Carlos speak with me and we practiced what I would say and made sure he didn’t respond with anything I wasn’t able to understand. The second video I had spent some time before hand writing myself a script so I could remember the two minutes worth of Spanish, I had my friend record me and rotate around campus as I described different buildings.
Presentational Writing
The main writing assignment I remember that was worrying to me was making a schedule and describing it with at least 75 words. The actual calendar part of the assignment was easy but the paragraphs were not so easy since we hadn’t written anything of that length up to that point. We also made a social media profile in Spanish.
The schedule helped me write full sentences since we hadn’t done that yet and I was uncomfortable with writing in Spanish still. I also was absent the day most of my class did the assignment making me even more underprepared for it when I eventually did it. The social media profile was not that hard because most words were cognates to english and even the ones that weren’t just made sense based on the location of them in the profile.
Interpretive Listening
I would honestly say the biggest interpretive activity we did was just listening in class and learning things the professor was saying based on context and our notes. We also were given videos of people speaking Spanish in different countries in every unit to see the difference in cultures and trends.
The videos that we listened to were all on Contrasena and unable to be downloaded and linked here. Most of the videos had paragraphs at the top of the page saying things they would be going over so I would use context clues to be able to understand some of what they were saying, what I didn’t understand was usually gone over in class the next day.
Interpretive Reading
During the semester when we researched a country we would look something up in Spanish then again in english to see the difference in what we found. Most websites were pretty hard to read in Spanish due to non professional writing.
Then, write a short reflection paragraph that includes the activities you described above. What was unclear or challenging for you? How did you overcome this difficulty? What did you find most interesting or compelling? What was your takeaway from the reading? How have you grown with each assignment?/ I would often not be able to understand the websites I found in Spanish. The way I got past this was looking for key words that I did understand instead of trying to understand the whole page. The most interesting thing I found while looking at the websites was that people actually use Whats App as like the main social media in a lot of Latin countries.