This week has been slightly less productive than previous weeks, partly because of Halloween and partly because I have had a million other things to do. I wasn't able to meet with my language partner this week either, which made it harder for me to stay motivated. However, I did attend the first semester Zulu class this past week, and I feel like I really learned a lot. We did a role play where we went to a restaurant and ordered food. I learned a lot of new vocab and was able to activate it in a conversational setting, which was nice.
This week, I decided to try and employ the "guessing words" strategy mentioned in the Peace Corps chapters. This involved listening to my dialogues a few times before I looked at the written version and trying to guess words from the context. I also looked at the pictures in my textbook and tried to guess the words that were under them without looking at the vocabulary. I think this helped me retain the words better and will keep them in my memory for longer.
This upcoming week I'm going to focus on learning more verbs and a lot more grammar. I want to learn a lot about the different noun classes, so I can more easily understand why words change when they do. I want to learn verbs so I can come up with more interesting sentences to say.
I am wondering how successful you felt you were at teaching yourself Zulu grammar? Do you think you were able to understand the concepts you were teaching yourself considering your limited knowledge of the language? I know that when I first started to learn Yoruba, my TA refused to teach us grammar concepts because he wanted to have more of an immersion setting because he wanted to us to be able to speak the language. Do you think that learning the grammar has helped you with your speaking abilities? Or do you think you could have continued to work on vocabulary and speaking without working on grammar? Or did you find it was pertinent to continue your language studying?
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