Exploring Culture

Using TalkAbroad helped me better understand and explore culture with someone who lived in a Spanish speaking country. It made me realize that Spanish speaking countries are not as different as I assumed.

I was shocked that me and my TalkAbroad partner shared many similarities with everyday life and enjoyed many of the same foods. I was nervous for this assignment at first but it was really fun and interesting once we began. I was very interested in speaking to someone from a different country but was not sure how I would perform. Overall, I was happy with my performance and it made me realize how fast anf fluent native Spanish speakers were. Although I had to ask my partner to repeat herself occasionally I still feel we had a good conversation and got to learn about each other. This assignment made me realize that we are all not as different as we may seem. We share similarities and life and may share the same hobbies or even our favorite foods.

Engaging in Communities

It is important to engage in your community and the global community because you can meet all types of people. Especially as a bilingual individual you can communicate with many more people and get to make connections across your community.

Interpersonal Communication

TalkAbroad was an easier assignment than I was anticipating. I was scared at first but realized it is not as hard to talk to a native speaker as I imagined. Lingrohub had many assignments where I had to listen to a sentence and choose the correct answers to match the audio. I would have to listen to the audio multiple times to fully translate what was being said.

Throughout the semester I have gotten better with every Assignment. Sometimes it is hard for me to retain all of the Spanish I am learning. The best thing for me to retain my Spanish is to continuously review because I tend to forget vocabulary when I don’t use the language. I am still getting used to the speed at which Spanish speakers talk and sometimes have to listen to the material multiple times on Lingrohub or ask people to repeat their sentences with assignments such as TalkAbroad.

Presentational Speaking

A presentational speaking assignment that I was worried about was when we made a video making our favorite food. I was nervous at first because I usually don’t record myself and I am not much of a cook. However the assignment turned out to be extremely fun.

It took me as couple tries to find the right angle that I wanted to record at, then I had to get my ingredients set up the way I wanted to make the video flow as best as I could. I knew how to prepare my dish I just had to retake a couple portions of my video to get my sentences down right to make sur eI flowed good. But once I started the video I felt much more confident and felt better with every clip I took. If I were to do it again I would review more to try and flow better and try and calm my nerves more. Even though I was only recording myself I always get more nervous when I have to fluently speak Spanish. Although I am not the best Spanish speaker I tried my best to make a good video.

Presentational Writing

Proyecto 7’s task was to create a flyer to get individuals to join a sports team.

I enjoyed this assignment because I made a flyer for a sport I love. It was easy to do this assignment because I used knowledge I had of the sport and my Spanish knowledge to make this project. I thought this was an easy assignment and I ran into no problems with this Proyecto.

Interpretive Listening

The most intensive learning activities I did this semester were in Lingrohub. I had to listen to an audio and pick the answers that matched the audio.

Sometimes I struggled with these and I overcame this by listening to them multiple times and breaking down the audio into different parts so I could gather all of the information. But overall I did good on these assignments I just had to take more time to complete them.

Interpretive Reading

There were many interpretive reading assignments throughout the semester from many assignments in Lingrohub, participation assignments in class. Lingrohub had assignments where we had to read information about individuals in Spanish speaking countries and got to learn about their culture and lifestyle.

I enjoyed the assignments were I got to explore different Spanish speaking cultures. There was a lot of information in these assignments but it was very information and I got to use my Spanish knowledge to complete the assignment. Sometimes I would look back at the information provided because it was easy to get the different individuals mixed up. These assignments made me realize that Spanish individuals are not so different from me. With each assignment I gained confidence.