Exploring Culture

Something I did to gain a better understanding of the material was try to think about the sentence in English and if it would make sense and see if the Spanish would sound similar to the English word if it did then I would try to connect the words in my brain that way.

Something that this practice showed me was that Spanish may be a different language and very difficult at times especially when it comes to conjugating verbs, but in terms of speaking the words, it’s not as difficult as it may seem. When we did the oral exam and we had to describe what we would I really just thought about the verb I was thinking of and wanted to use, and from there, I built my sentence around it. As soon as I got the verbs and actions I started to understand the rest.

Engaging in Communities

I believe it is important to engage your community because living in this diverse world that we live in and going to such a big university it is important to know how to communicate with multiple different ethnicities and backgrounds. Even being able to understand bits and pieces of what someone might say to you while speaking a different language would help out a conversation.

Learning how to speak Spanish and being able to understand bits and pieces of the language has been a huge help in making me more versatile in speech. I can understand what a person might say to me in conversation or what someone might ask me based on keywords. In class, there will be certain times I’m not sure what is being said to me, but I hear keywords in the question or key vocab phrases to where I know how to respond, like “llamas” would be asking my name or something related to my name.

Interpersonal Communication

In Spanish this semester we had to do a lot of videos that reflected how well we could have conversations and overall speak in Spanish. A lot of the time it was a back-and-forth conversation connecting to basic information about ourselves and how we would speak in an actual encounter.

One of our assignments this semester was to pick someone in the class and pair up with them and record yourself having a conversation with them and going back and forth saying things such as your name, where are you from, and how would you describe yourself. Having that practice made me more comfortable thinking about what I might say in an interaction like that and how I would answer those questions.

Presentational Speaking

This semester we had to do a project where we walked around campus and told the camera about our favorite places on campus. We had to describe the building and we also had to say 3 things we do in the specific place to back it up.

In this project, I struggled with knowing exactly what to say and what to speak on in my project but once I took a second and thought about what I could say for each place I actually pulled it together and got clean good sentences out, it was honestly a matter of figuring out the places then adding on what verb would fit with the location that I used, once I matched a location to an action I was set.

Presentational Writing

One assignment we did as presentational writing was when we had to write down what we do every week and go through every day and explain what our day looks like. Although long and tedious, this exercise made me use all of my vocab to figure out my weekly schedule as much as possible.

I grew in this assignment but making sure I utilized not only all the days of the week but also utilizing all of the activities I do on a day-to-day basis along with all the locations I go to. I had a hard time trying to get all the verbs in there correctly and use them to support my case on how and when I do things with people, but overall it made my Spanish stronger.

Interpretive Listening

In a lot of our homework assignments, there were listening audio exercises that would say something and we would have to figure out the spelling or connect it to a word that was used and make sure we knew how it looked while it was being said.

Although a lot of the time I was very confused about what the question was asking me and sometimes the word did not match up at all to how it would sound, I thought this exercise really helped me think about listening for essential sounds or thinking about how the person would pronounce the Spanish. This also helped me understand how vowel sounds can sound and how they can change the sound of a verb or word.

Interpretive Reading

In class, we would go around and be asked sentences about whatever was going on in class as a way to keep us engaged and utilize a real-world setting and conversation. For example, the teacher would go “Como te llamas” and I would go ” me llamo miles king” very engaging back-and-forth interactions.

This exercise really pushed me to not only make sure I am paying attention and knowing what the question is but being able to re form whatever the question is and give it back as a response. knowing how to format a response to a question often times confused me because I didn’t know the proper way to start but knowing how to say it back properly and having a sentence ready with the proper verbs and conjugation made it better practice.