Week 5 Learning Experience: Making progress

Week 5

Word of the Week:  diidxa’rusibani ‘language that gives life’

(I’m beginning to read!  One word can make up a simple sentence.  Isthmus Zapotec is an ‘agglutinative’ language: forming new words by combining simple words without changing their form.)

Learning Experience

           

Making Progress with Memrise:  I feel like a sales representative for Memrise http://www.memrise.com/course/46103/juchitan-zapotec-2/, but it really has become a great language-learning tool for me.  Firstly, it adds some needed structure to my random learning style.  It provides me with a starting place for my language learning sessions and supplies me with gratifying feedback on what I have learned.  According to its count, I have learned 101 IZ words through the vocabulary exercises.  I am happy with this progress since I have only just begun this online course less than two weeks ago (April 18^th).  My vocabulary includes some verbs and all the pronouns.  The time I spend on Memrise in one sitting ranges from ten minutes to one and a half hours.  I have discovered that more than one and a half hours is too long without taking a break.  Besides, I like to use this program as a warm up for studying my collection of Terán poems http://www.poetrytranslation.org/downloads/24, or other grammar-learning or cultural resources.  

This course does have poetry, too, though!  I listened to a poem by Enedino Jiménez called Diidxa Naxhi Sti Binni Zá ‘Poem of the Zapotecs’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wzWByWLpsI.  The poem showcases the identity of the Isthmus Zapotecs, the Binnizá ‘people of the cloud’; people who love their origins; people who love the Sun, the eagle, and the jaguar; they sing and they dance about the wind, the clouds, and their dreams.  I love learning through poetry, because while learning the language, I also learn about the speakers of that language.  This poem contains much of the vocabulary learned from the course.  I was able to follow along with the words as they were read aloud.  The translation is in Spanish, so I am also getting lots of practice in this language, too.  

Noticing Reading Improvement:  As I picked up Sullivan’s article http://www.ou.edu/wlt/01_2012/essay-sullivan.html to read it for the second time since beginning this research, I surprised myself by reading a line of IZ poetry that I could not read before.  I read effortlessly, “diidxazá, diidxazá, diidxa’rusibani naa, naa nanna…”  (“Zapotec, Zapotec, language that gives me life, I know…” Poem by Gabriel López Chiñas, “Diidxazá”) This was an informal way of assessing my progress.  I am making noticeable progress, as I should be since I am beginning week 5.  I will be assessing my progress using the Midterm Progress Report that I created in Week 2 http://jessicabruin.blogspot.com/2013/04/normal-0-false-false-false_11.html by the end of this week.