Exploring Culture

What helped me understand culture more was music. Music is a big part of my life since it helps me relax, find peace, and focus. I embrace many genres of music mixed in with different cultures and languages that make the song so unique in many ways.

Listening to Hispanic music has allowed me to understand what types of instruments they enjoy using, why type of beat they love to flow with, and it has helped me in a way, speak better Spanish. However, using this strategy wasn’t very helpful for me, making it much more challenging to find an enjoyable study tactic.

Engaging in Communities

Effective community engagement deliberates and purposes interactions between community members and public officials responsible for making decisions that affect them. Prioritizing the experiential perspectives of community constituents and incorporating localized knowledge into the decision-making procedure, presents a challenge to the hierarchical approach to public deliberation. Challanges can be entertaining, energetic, athletic, or even competitive.

Interpersonal Communication

Talk Abroad Is an online service that allows people to have conversations with others around the world in a certain language. I personally did not enjoy having to accomplish tasks on this service because I put myself in a situation where I have to speak without stuttering which is hard for me since I have an issue with stuttering. However, it is the best way for others to test their progress in speaking another language.

I have grown any better with doing Talk Abroad since still have a stuttering issue, However, it did help me do better in Spanish and make me a little comfortable with speaking it. I wasn’t able to do the second Talk Abroad since I was financially struggling at that moment, so I had to make some sacrifices to be able to move forward.

Presentational Speaking

My personal favorite project we have done this year was the cooking project. I love to cook and bake when I’m at home, so this project meant a lot to me. I baked a chocolate lava cake for my project, it was topped with powdered sugar and had a side of strawberries. For the project we had to record the process and talk about it in Spanish, including the recipe.

The biggest challenge in the projects we had done over the year was speaking properly using Spanish. Everything had to be pronounced properly. I Just could never get it right, so my best option was to try my very best with every project. It’s not making it perfect; it’s about making it the best you can to avoid failure. It’s always better to try rather than not.

Presentational Writing

When I was tasked to make pamphlets and flyers for a Spanish project, I usually just flew through them since I didn’t have to do any speaking. Usually, the writing portions of Spanish class is easier since you just have to remember what you want to write about, memorizing a script and what not.

I grown to believe that I do better with writing than I do with speaking. That just proves why I’m a writer and enjoys making stories. However, I do not enjoy writing very formal information articles on a topic I have zero interest in.

Interpretive Listening

In Spanish, all the information given went into one ear and out the other. Most of the stuff we learned just never stuck with me, once we were done with a subject, I completely erased it from my mind and cleared spaced for the next topic. In a way this helps me have an open mind to other things, however, it makes it harder for me to memorizes the things I need to remember for Spanish like informal commands.

When I did projects that required speaking, I would make snippets of my lines to put into the video one by one. I would never speak the entire script in one sitting because of my stuttering issue. I learned that personally from my public speaking class I took freshman year of college.

Interpretive Reading

Honestly, I didn’t read any articles or books that had anything to do with Spanish both in class and out of class. Personally, I had a packed schedule and reading puts me to sleep so I tried to avoid falling asleep while studying. Anything I read was small and simple, a book or article would have to be more engaging for me to stay awake.

However, the question would pose on how I read my books that I write. I still fall asleep while writing and reading, simply because it makes my eyes tired and then they want to close. That was the biggest challenge for me was being able to read without falling asleep, a challenge that I still can’t win.