carlalablog

If I were to be presented with these ten units as one mammoth lesson I am positive that the feeling of anxiety would be overwhelming. Breaking up the various categories into such units helps create conceptual frameworks for the learner, forming connections to previous knowledge and experience. These frameworks can be created by ‘unpacking’ and ‘chunking’ the material being taught, contextualising it, as well as using a variety of activities for motivation purposes. Having reflected on this I begin to realise that even though it is a difficult process, it will be imperative to my future students and to me as a facilitator to break complex and large tasks down to smaller subgroups.

The last two units are taking a boat trip & ordering a meal, what can I say….never ask me to order a meal in Greece if you are hungry, because if it was up to my Greek language skills we would all starve!!!

I enjoyed partaking in this online course but as I have mentioned earlier I do need more time to practice, to actually finish it satisfied with being able to transfer this learning to contextual situations. I plan to go back to it on my university break & do the couse with as much time as needed. I plan to go to Greece one day & I am sure I could complete this course & remember most of the material learnt if I got an oportunity to practice with some Greeks.

Lesson seven going shipping & lesson eight booking a hotel were completed but my score is terrible, I have gotten to the stage where I am almost guessing. This is because I need much more practice time, I am unable to remember any new words without learning the previous ones properly. It is starting to feel quite futile going ahead like this, but our teacher made it clear that we should not give up on the course. So I will complete the last two lessons but I have spent much time on this already & have to get going with the rest of the work I have to produce for uni.

Buying drinks & asking for directions are the first two units that have gone straight over my head. Its starting to sound like jibberish…..
One of the prerequisites of this assessment was that the online course we chose should take 6-8 hours, maximum!!! Well, my Greek course has a lot of sentences to remember & this has become very difficult, there is no way I could finish it in that amount of time. I could quickly go through it & repeat mindlessly, do the challenge at the end of each unit & move on no matter how many questions I get wrong. But then I would not benefit from this information; it would merely be a race to finish.
So I keep slogging away at it, I want to learn these new words, but I have a feeling that my brain stoped soaking up information at lesson four.

As I moved on to the third unit meeting and greeting & the forth unit family and friends it became increasingly hard to retain the new information. What puzzled me the most was the pace of the audio, I suppose the intention is to imitate normal talking speed. However new language learners need to discover the basics before they can speed up their speaking. It was certainly too fast for a person who has no knowledge of the language like myself. Due to the audio being necessary to hear the intonations in addition to the pronunciation, I felt it could be a little slower in these early phases of learning.

Lesson one saying your name & lesson two saying where your from were relatively easy & quite short; learning to say ‘my name is…’; ‘what is your name?’ ‘I am from…’ & ‘Do you speak Greek?’ by repeating after the audio. The Greek alphabet is impossible to decipher and it is necessary for me to have the phonetic and English translation on at all times. Even though making use of phonetics is helpful, I needed to write my own versions of how I heard those sounds. Because of the similarities in pronunciation with my mother tongue my approach to learning Greek is from the perspective of a Spanish speaker. Hence the ‘phonetics’ I am using are based on my latin pronunciation rather than my English pronunciation. For instance the phonetic version given for ‘Yes’ in Greek is ‘Ohee’, but I have changed that to suit my Spanish pronunciation as ‘Oji’.

After competeing each lesson there is a ‘challenge‘ section to gage if one can remember the phrases. These challenges are set up as a scenario, where there is an audio phrase in Greek to listen to, & then the learner must chose one of three options given in English.

The language I am interested in learning is Greek. I have never been to Greece & hope to discover this incredible & ancient land one day soon (possibly after graduation). I have always been curious about the Greek language & culture, therefore I will approach this course with enthusiasm and motivation. I speak fluent Spanish & upon hearing Greek I sense such similarities in the pronunciations, that there is a feeling of familiarity with the sounds, I am hoping this will make it easier for me to speak Greek.

Therefore I have chosen to complete the BBC online Greek language course which was recommended by our lecturer as a comprehensive website for language learning. This language course is free for the first ten lessons, for an additional fee there are more comprehensive materials available for example; videos, books & multimedia CD Rom. Allowing one to ‘try before you buy’ to determine whether to purchase any extra materials by testing the software first for effectiveness.

This basic tutorial is offered in the following sessions:
1.      Saying your name
2.      Saying where you are from
3.      Greetings
4.      Introductions
5.      Buying drinks
6.      Directions
7.      Shopping
8.      Making hotel reservations
9.      Taking a boat trip
10.    Ordering meals

 
In each of the units there are the following options to choose from; the Greek alphabet, phonetic, English translation, audio pronunciation or any combination of these above mentioned features with a summary at the end of each unit. There are also links to useful phrases which act as a review of the unit, some cultural notes, a short challenge to test your knowledge, plus a video of each of the units including transcripts. There is no limit to how many times each exercise is accessed or repeated, & no need to register, log in or download materials. The overall organisation of this site is easy to navigate & user friendly; it is virtually self-explanatory.

For the final section of this subject we are to engage in an online course (not a tutorial) it must have some sort of interactivity & it should contain at least six hours of learning. We are then to write a report which will outline not only the experiences from the onlined course but also the learning accomplished by posting a weblog, and the research which was conducted on the case studies we had to review.