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Author: brynw16 (Page 1 of 4)

Danish Discoveries #5- Reflection

Over this past semester, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning Danish as well as exploring a bit about Denmark’s culture. I have actually gotten into looking at TikToks made by Danish creators and I can usually understand most of what is being said! This surprised me the first time it happened since I guess I hadn’t noticed just how much I had learned.

On Duolingo, I am now diamond league which is the highest league possible for experience points. I also now have a 217-day streak and I have just begun unit 4.

Out of reading, writing, speaking and understanding Danish, I definitely feel that reading is my strongest point and then either writing or understanding is my weakest point. Duolingo has an activity that lets you type out the sentence rather than selecting the words however, it does not come up that often since it is a more challenging activity. As for understanding spoken Danish, there is also an activity where you can listen to a phrase in Danish and then select the words that you are hearing however, I am finding that this activity has not been super helpful in actually understanding what is being said. This activity also has a feature where you can slow down what is being said so that the person who is speaking goes word by word.

I am very proud of the progress that I have made in learning Danish. One day, I hope to travel to Denmark so that I can put my new knowledge of Danish to use.

I also hope that in the future, I am able to incorporate some of the Danish that I have learned into my classroom. One daily activity that I have been thinking about doing once I am teaching is a word of the day. My idea is that, every morning, I would have a word in a language that is not English or French written on the board. I might choose to do words from the same language for a whole week and then change languages for the next week. I feel like this would be a fun way to incorporate languages into the classroom and maybe it will spark a love of languages in some of my students.

Memorization

In the past when I have learned songs on the ukulele, I have always found memorizing the chords to be a lot more challenging than memorizing the lyrics. With lyrics, I find that memorizing them comes easily to me when I listen to the lyrics being sung many times. With chords however, I can’t memorize how to play the chords just by listening to a song on repeat. This means that memorizing chords will take a lot longer for me than lyrics.

Going into memorizing the chords, I began this process by practicing until I had the finger formations for all of the chords memorized. So for example, before learning this song, I would not be able to just play an A# because I had no idea which of my fingers would need to be on which strings and which frets. After practicing, I am now able to look at the chords that are in the song and automatically know where my fingers go.

My next step in memorization was memorizing the order of the chords as well as when to change chords. To accomplish this, I practiced section by section. I would not move on to the next section until I had the last one memorized. I also would start from the beginning again after getting a couple of the sections completely memorized. I found that memorizing the chords got easier as I went through the song because many of the chords repeat.

Danish Discoveries #4

Here is the trailer for the show Rita! My mum watched this show about a year ago and I would watch some episodes with her from time to time. This show is what piqued my interest in learning Danish and, now that I understand more words, I want to watch the whole show and see how much I can understand.

This is a clip from the Netflix show “Somebody Feed Phil”. This episode, where the host Phil Rosenthal travels to Copenhagen, is something else that got me interested in learning Danish. Before watching this show, I was already learning Danish, but then after watching this episode, I now am very interested in travelling to Denmark. I hope that after I graduate from UVic, I am able to visit or even live in Denmark for a short period of time.

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