Tag: Language

Free Language Classes in Pittsburgh

Free Language Classes in Pittsburgh

by eastasianlover ♥ 2 Comments

Hi dear readers,

It’s been a while, as usual. This time, I have been actually really very busy. As I stated in some previous post (or did I at all?), I have taken some 5 grad courses, I have research to do and then I have a part time job for which I have to pull all-nighters twice a week. So, I am pretty busy. I have been unable to keep up with new anime even. However, I do find time to go to anime club every week. I have missed only twice this semester. I have been to quite a few movies as well and meet friends not from my department at least bi-weekly. Now that I have written it down, I realize I am really enjoying this sem. And then, I have joined these free language classes which will be the main focus of this post.

One of my Chinese friends knew how interested I was in languages (she herself is a big fan of Big Bang and hence is interested in learning Korean) and she took me to these free language classes that are held in Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (by volunteers I think, not sure). I have joined Korean, which is held every Saturday, Japanese which happens every other Monday and the Russian which happens every alternate Thursday. There are options for Chinese, French, German and Spanish as well. I wanted to join Spanish but had already missed number of classes so gave up on it.

First of all, let me review Korean classes. I joined Korean classes when they had already done 8 weeks of work, out of which 4 weeks were spent in learning the alphabet supposedly. Thank God for that. The best part about these classes is that there is structure, there is review and there are buddies to practice with. We have learnt the general stuff in Korean till now: Where do you go?, Your family, What do you like?, making verbs out of nouns etc. etc. This time, the grammar sticks! Because we’re continuously using it in practice. We form pairs and try to talk. The teacher is really helpful and cute as well. And since she is not actually a teacher, we get to learn from a commoner’s perspective: the commoner’s language. I have been to 2-3 classes and enjoyed them thoroughly. This is the most fun class out of three.

For Japanese, since it happens once in two weeks, I have gone to only 2 classes. They were teaching very basic stuff: What do you like, time etc. I was planning on dropping this class because I thought my level was definitely above than that. However, yesterday, when I got to know that minutes in Japanese are ‘ふん’ and not ‘ぶん’ which I had thought was the case all along (for like 5 years! Gosh!), I realized I have never really paid attention to the details. I was also struggling with numbers greater than 10 somehow (THESE ARE SUCH ELEMENTARY THINGS!! No wonder I don’t pass my JLPT exams ;-;). Well, it gave a huge blow to my confidence but after the practice session, I did get a little bit of it back. So now I am planning to go through it till the end. And if I end up interning in summers in CMU only, then I’ll have access to the new semester of classes, so I can join Spanish and French and second level classes for the ones I am learning already.

Third is Russian. The first class for me was a disaster. Not because the classes were bad, but because I had missed more classes than I had thought I had. I joined them in probably 5th class and though the class was small (like 8 people) all of them were proficient with the alphabet. I had learnt their alphabet 2 years ago, so obviously I didn’t remember anything. But the teacher was quite patient with me and let me attend the classes. I promised her to learn the alphabet before next class and I did well with reading in the next class (a small yay!). I have no clue what happened in the classes I missed though. The one I attended, we talked about family, pronouns and gender. I have also started with duolingo for Russian. Russian is totally alien to me except one song I hear in Ukrainian which is distantly related to Russian language including similar alphabet. But I am enjoying learning it thus far because the teacher is interesting as well.

Here is a link for if you’re in Pittsburgh and interested in attending the free classes: Pittsburgh Free Language Classes
They will start new ‘semester’ of classes in summer, May I think. Check their website for more info.

So, this is what I am doing apart from all the academic stuff. I would have loved to post pics of worksheets but it might be copyright violation so I won’t do that. I’ll post the song I talked about above.

JLPT N4 Experience: Late Post

JLPT N4 Experience: Late Post

by eastasianlover ♥ 2 Comments

This is for the JLPT N4 that took place on 3rd July 2016.

I am going to say this first. I might not clear the exam. Nonetheless, it was a great experience as usual. I came to know a lot about my strengths and weaknesses and yet again, some awesome resources to study the language (last minute prep)

*I still can’t believe I took N4 and I knew half the stuff in it!!!* (I had to come back and edit the post once I saw I had actually written N4 there)

The test: The info about the sections and all would be available everywhere I am guessing. All I remember is, there were 3 sections: Kanji and vocab, Grammar, Listening.

Kanji and Vocab consisted of 5 questions I think, with various sub parts to it, in total 35 questions as far as I remember. Time given was 30 minutes. There was a 20 minute break after this, but no one was allowed outside as this break was just for the teachers to bring the second exam question papers.

Grammar section had 9 questions with many many sub parts, I don’t remember the total number of questions. Time given was 60 minutes. There was a break of about 25-30 minutes after this where we could go freshen up ourselves.

Listening section was of 35 minutes. There was some problem this time with the audio, so they repeated whole first and second questions for us.

For us in New Delhi, India, the reporting time was 8:15 a.m. but they didn’t let us inside the test center before 8:40 a.m. Listening to people talking to each other because they belong to the same Japanese learning academy and you being alone can be a little intimidating. So, I would suggest myself to go a little late next time because the exam, anyway would start at 9:00 a.m. XD

Difficulty: Well, I don’t really know. The grammar was difficult for me, as usual. Kanji and Vocab were kinda breeze thanks to WaniKani. People around me were afraid of Kanji and I was the most confident in that only. Although, some type of questions were frustrating, especially the one with 4 blanks and a star mark to fill that particular blank because in some of the sentences more than one sequence was making sense to me. Of course, that can’t be the case, even so….

Listening section sometime seemed a joke for N4 level and sometime too high leveled. One of the questions was like the introduction of Genki 1. I thought, “Really? Is this N4 level?” And then in the last questions, they spoke so fast and the options were so confusing, again two options seemed apt for the answers.

Reading comprehensions were long and many in number, again, as usual. But this time, I could read faster and understand better (is it translating the manga effect? I don’t know). The content of the comprehensions was interesting as well, not some academic or news article. I really like JLPT that way.

Resources: Well, as I said in my earlier posts, I got really bored with Genki (although, on close scrutiny, one can find the resemblance between JLPT and Genki easily. Hence, if you can put up with it, it’s the best resource to study for JLPT). So I switched to Tae Kim’s guide. It is a nice resource, especially for learning particles, but I got distracted from there too. For grammar, one of the best resources I found was renshuu. It is again a paid website if you want to use it fully (some free resources are available as well), but I think I have become a fan of gamification of stuff. This one is a fun site with various hankos to earn on achieving different stages (thank you for that word by the way renshuu. It was a part of the test as well 😉 )

Another resource for kanji and vocab is Wanikani (which I have been thinking to do a separate post on, for a while now actually but you know...) It is SRS based website and really effective in learning kanji which many find hard. Not to mention the amusing and out of this world mnemonics. At least I remember them now….

In the end, there were a lot of things I could have done before taking the exam. I wanted to take mock tests starting one week before JLPT but ended up getting fever, so couldn’t do it. I don’t blame my cold though. I had enough time to practice from renshuu, but I didn’t. Life happens and I can now, up my game for I can finally call myself at beginner intermediate stage of Japanese (if you take out speaking skills actually). Intermediate is not far enough! *pats her back*

Then, until next time….

Dying Languages

Dying Languages

by eastasianlover ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So, I was taking a stroll with my mom a few days ago when we came across a lady talking to her son who wouldn’t be more than 9-10 years of age in English. The remark I made was, “If people start using English in their daily conversations like this, then what would happen to our native tongue, Hindi? Will Hindi cease to exist? Is that day coming soon?”

People tend to think that since India is the country with second largest population, Hindi must be very widely spoken. According to the stats (here and here), it indeed is true. But it is only 4th most spoken language in the world. It might fall down further in rankings thanks to the thinking of some of the people here. And my fears do seem like they’ll come true soon as this article suggests. Not that Hindi is endangered or anything, as of now. But increasing popularity of English, especially in North India, where people have made knowing English as a status symbol, and all official communication happens in English as well, is definitely harming Hindi.

I, myself, don’t recall the last time I read a proper book in Hindi, or a newspaper. In northern parts of India, those who don’t know English and who don’t talk English are thought to be the same and looked down upon. Which is wrong! I mean, not to brag, me and my family do live in a literate (educated? I have my doubts about that) society where dwell some foreigners as well. And if I am strolling with my family in the colony premises, we talk in Hindi only. I have seen people giving us looks for that (not that we give a damn!) Or people specifically talking in English, so that we don’t understand what they are saying (which has given all of us a hearty laugh many a times XD). Similarly, when I try to converse with some people, especially on phone, people switch to English so fast like speaking Hindi will render them diseased or something.

And hence, we need to learn some lessons from Chinese and Japanese and South Koreans and South Indians. While, many of the East Asians think their English skills are poor and hence shy away from using it (as stated by many of them), I do admire their nature of respecting their languages a lot. On the other hand, a majority of South Indians, I have seen, know English every well, but use it only and only when needed, like communicating with Indians from other parts of India or outside India. Or official communication. I have been on trips to South India, and I have never ever heard people talking in English amongst themselves. And I am pretty sure same would happen if I go to visit China, Japan or South Korea. I am just not very aware of European culture but I do think that same would be the case in the non-English speaking countries there as well. Or probably any other part of the world.

The one thing I fail to understand is, how and when speaking Hindi became a shameful and gawaar (uneducated, illiterate and dumb) thing. The article above, also, points out that Indian English is deteriorating as well. I am witness to this. We used to have such tough grammar lessons in our school time (active-passive voices, narratives and figures of speech were some of the toughest modules we studied during our 6th-7th grades). We used to study Shakespeare and Keats and Wordsworth. Now a days, kids have no real knowledge of grammatical structures, their syllabus pretty much ends at simple continuous tenses. They still study some literature, but majority don’t really know the essence of those works. They just study the subject to score marks. And that annoying ‘you know. at the ending of each sentence to sound cool. (¬_¬”)

I am not saying learning English is bad. Of course not. As a language enthusiast, I can never ever say that. Moreover, English is, kind of, becoming a universal language, so knowing English is definitely advantageous, rather, need of the hour. But in the process, forgetting your own mother tongue is what is problematic.

And, citing the above article again, if people are taking interest in learning Sanskrit or Hindi, that’s a win for the languages and the culture for sure. But it does leave an Indian like me enraged for the languages mentioned there are deeply rooted and always associated to Indian culture. Not that they should be restricted to us or anything. But the things that once used to make us proud are becoming things of past. And I am deeply grieved over that. Many exotic languages are dying, true, and with them, whole cultures. Which is sad as it is. But linguists making such predictions about Hindi is something indigestible but foreseeable as well.

PS: I wrote this post because two of the three languages on the verge of becoming endangered, Sanskrit and Hindi are very close to my heart. I and my sister have won many scholarships and other awards in Sanskrit in our respective school lives. Hence, I have seen the number of people who take up Sanskrit dropping from 2-3 classes of 50+ people each in 5th grade to just 4-5 people in 12th grade. And Hindi is my native tongue.

PPS: Also, this isn’t related to the ongoing political issue of replacing German with Sanskrit in Kendriya Vidyalayas (a type of schools in India) as the third language, at all. Personally, I don’t favour the decision regardless of my above views.