Exploring Culture
In order to gain an understanding of cultural perspectives, I was able to use my prior knowledge of Latin American culture as well as the use of media (internet, tv shows, music, etc.). Over the course of this semester, I learned that family values and embracing one’s heritage are important in the Spanish-speaking world.
It’s very common in Hispanic culture that extended family members to communicate through WhatsApp and Facebook. Specifically, roughly 80% of Puerto Ricans use Facebook to talk to their families and update them by uploading photos to their pages. As someone who has family in the Caribbean, I can also relate to my family’s usage of these two social media sites.
Engaging in Communities
When learning a new language it can be very helpful to engage more in the culture. It can be especially beneficial to communicate with native speakers to get a better understanding of their daily life, slang, etc. The video below shows my interview from Unit 2, where we were assigned to talk with a native speaker. Since I couldn’t find one at the time, I decided to interview my mother. Although her first language is English, she is still very well-versed in the Spanish language. From this interview, I have learned some new words in both the present and past tenses.
Interpersonal Communication
This semester was my first time using the Lingrolearning site, which I enjoyed as it was easy to navigate and the material was beneficial to my learning. At first I wasn’t a fan of the audio questions, but I’ve learned to pick out keywords that I know to get a general idea of what is being asked of me.
Presentational Speaking
I have completed several presentational speaking assignments, however the interview with a native speaker (with my mother and the two with my Professor), and the campus tour video. I enjoyed the campus tour video because it was a great refresher on the use of ser and estar I haven’t really gone over much in a little while.
For each of the speaking assignments, I found it a little difficult to come up with questions and responses off the top of my head. My goal for each was to improve on this in order to improve my fluency. At times I had moments where I would be stuck on which verb tense to use or the proper vocabulary word. For future assignments like these, I would practice more to make myself sound native.
Presentational Writing
In Unit 3, we were assigned to create a schedule of our daily lives, which I found to be surprisingly enjoyable. I also liked how I was able to learn how to ask and answer questions about my schedule using the days of the week as well as the time.
This helped me a lot in using tener que and it to better state what I needed to do on that day. Throughout this course, I found it challenging to decipher the audio clips but was able to improve over time.
Interpretive Listening
As previously stated, I had difficulty with the audio portions, especially in Unit 2 but I felt a little more confident by Unit 4. Since Unit 2, I began watching more Spanish-speaking shows and movies to help with my listening skills.
Interpretive Reading
A lot of reading content came from different articles within LingroHub talking about different Spanish-speaking countries. I found the reading to be fairly easy because I can see the word in front of me and know what it means as opposed to hearing it. Of course, there was some difficulty with new words, but I find reading to be easier when you are able to look at the surrounding words and use them as context clues.