Finals and Concerts

October 15, 2007 at 2:42 pm · Filed under GIAL, Life

Today will mark the completion of my third session at GIAL. In just a few hours, using my extremely limited Russian vocabulary, I will attempt to survive a 10-minute simulation of navigating (buying tickets, asking for directions, following maps, etc.) the Moscow Metro for my Second Language and Culture Acquisition final. I’m pretty sure I have the words for “stick,” “knife,” and “apple” down, so I’m hoping the Metro runs on fruit and pointy things.

After that, I’ll be done with all my finals! And after that, I shall sleep in tomorrow because there are no classes.

Session four starts up on Wednesday and includes such delights as Field Methods, Field Data Management, and Cultural Anthropology. This session is twice as long as the others and will run through the end of my time at GIAL in mid-December. I’m particularly looking forward to Field Data Management because they’ll be teaching is how to use Language Explorer, the program I wrote code for last summer.

I seem to be going to a lot of concerts lately. I’ve been to two DSO performances at the Meyerson, the season premiere of the Longview Symphony in the shiny and enormous new chapel at LETU, and a Muse concert at the Nokia Theatre. They were all extremely awesome and made even awesomer by the cool people I got to be with at the concerts. I guess this is one of the advantages of living in a larger city.

And I seem to be fully addicted to them now because I’ll be going to two more next month. Spoon on Nov. 2, and The Polyphonic Spree (Whee!) on Nov. 6. You should totally come and rock out with me. Just buy pit tickets and we can meet up and enjoy the sonic splendor together.

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One down, Three to go

August 16, 2007 at 4:09 pm · Filed under GIAL

Yesterday, I finished up finals for the first session at GIAL. I have now completed the first half of both Grammar and Phonetics as well as all of Language and Society. I can read and pronounce a good part of the IPA alphabet, do basic grammatical analysis of languages, and at least pretend to intelligently talk about sociolinguistic issues. The finals went pretty well. I don’t think I got everything right, but I don’t think I got everything wrong either!

They mercifully give us a four-day weekend to recover before throwing us into the second session, which begins on Monday. I’ll be taking the second half of the Phonetics course, Phonology, and 2nd Language and Culture Acquisition (aka SLACA). SLACA is particularly intimidating because I’ll actually be learning and analyzing a language. I don’t yet know which one I’ll be doing, but I think the possibilities are Russian, Indonesian, Swahili, and Mandarin. Russian would be cool because Spence and I could commiserate in the learning process, but I’m a bit scared of it too because I hear its morphology is pretty wild.

Thus far, the workload has been bearable, but certainly tiring. I don’t think the actual work is any worse than at LETU, but at least for this last session, I’d spend around 10 hours on campus every day and then have homework every night that was due the very next day. I’m used to having at least a one-day buffer at LETU for homework, so this feels worse even if it isn’t.

I hear the IMPACT retreat starts today (or is it tomorrow?). Strange to think that I won’t be there.

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Back to School

July 18, 2007 at 11:14 pm · Filed under GIAL

Tomorrow morning, I’ll start classes a GIAL in their Certificate in Applied Linguistics program. My first class will be Principles of Articulatory and Acoustic Phonetics. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds cool!

I’m excited and also a bit nervous. The professors keep giving me funny looks when I tell them I plan to cram the whole certificate program into one bimester. But I’m not the only one doing it this way, and my classmates are really great, so at least I won’t suffer alone!

Check out the spiffy diagram they gave us in orientation if you’re curious about what classes I’ll be taking.

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