Mid-Term Update

So, by my shabby calculations it looks like this semester is halfway through. This is a good time to ponder and reflect. Here are my thoughts on my classes so far in the order that I have them during the week:

• Semantics - This class is kind of a mixed bag for me. I am doing well in it, I am learning a lot, and it is interesting, but I don't think I really care for semantics very much. Semantics is a field of linguistics which deals with the meanings of words. I think the reason I don't like it so much is because it is a little too philosophical for my tastes. Indeed, there seems to be a lot of overlap between philosophy and semantics. It's too much of "well that depends on what the meaning of IS is," kinda stuff. Certainly part of the reason I might not like this class so much might have something to do with the fact that Comment-Blurting-Hair-Eating guy is in it, constantly blurting out annoying commentary. But at least I'm doing well in it. We got our midterms back the other day and I aced it! I thought I had probably done at least well enough for a B, but I never thought I would have aced it. That's always a great feeling.


• Portuguese - This class is also sort of a mixed bag. It's not really living up to my admittedly high expectations. I noticed today in class that although we are halfway through the semester, we are probably only about a quarter of the way through the skinny text book. I was hoping that the teacher would take full advantage of the fact that we all speak Spanish already and therefore already understand a lot of the grammar points, but she hasn't. In fact, she spends kind of a lot of time in class talking about concepts that are exactly the same in Spanish. Yet somehow some of the students still don't seem to grasp it and I'm sitting there shouting in my head, "IT'S JUST LIKE SPANISH!" At this point in the semester we should be able to say way more things than we do, and we should be moving a whole lot faster... On the good side though, it is a cake class and it might be the easiest A I've ever had.


• Morphology - This is by far my favorite class of the semester, and possibly my favorite linguistics class ever. Morphology is essentially the study of grammar cross-linguistically. The professor, who I'm pretty sure was a big hippie when he was an undergrad at Berkeley in the 60's (wasn't everyone at Berkeley in the 60's a hippie though?), has done a lot of research on Native American languages like Wichita and Lakota. In this class we learn about all kinds of different and interesting grammatical systems in languages around the world. The homework involves us looking at datasets of different obscure languages and figuring out what all the bits and pieces are doing in the dataset. I actually enjoy doing this homework! And the lectures are always so interesting. It makes you want to just go out and learn every language you can (as if I didn't already want to do that!). If I come back to school for graduate-level linguistics ever, I would love to take another morphology class.


• Spanish Phonetics and Phonology - This class is basically the study of sounds and how sounds fit together in Spanish. I thought I would really love this class because it is a combination of Spanish and Linguistics, but it turns out it's only so-so. I like that it's taught in Spanish, so I get some Spanish exposure, but really I am learning almost all the same things that I learned in my regular Phonetics and Phonology class last semester, except that I'm learning all the Spanish terminology for it. I guess it's helpful to go over it all again in another language and from another teacher though to really solidify it. Also, it makes for a pretty easy class because I've essentially already learned everything. At least there are a few new things that are more Spanish-specific though, so I am still learning a few new things...


• Russian - I am enjoying this class. The teacher is great! She's passionate, funny, and good at explaining things. Actually, now that I think about it, she reminds me a lot of my favorite Chinese teacher in China... I still can't say a whole lot, but I can already see that Russian is a pretty interesting language. It has a some pretty interesting phonetic and phonological things going on, as well as a pretty rich and detailed grammar system. Really it all seems pretty logical though. There is a lot of agreement and inflection going on which means that until everything is memorized to the point that it becomes natural, there is a lot of stuff going on in your brain when you are trying to create grammatically correct sentences. My only problem with this class is that I am not putting in as much effort as I would like to be. I am keeping up fine, but I could be learning it much better if I were putting in more time and effort.


• International Affairs Senior Seminar - This is the class that I predicted I would hate, and I was right. It's dreadful. What a horrible way to finish up a major which I never really grew to love anyway (although I was starting to finally grow more fond of it last semester). This is supposed to be the class that ties everything together, but instead it is an economics class about the European Union. If it had a better teacher I could maybe get interested in it, but not with this teacher. The only good thing about this class is that it only meets once a week and she usually lets us out after 1-1.5 hours even though it is scheduled to go 2.5 hours.


• International Economics - This doesn't really count as a class because I take it online. I started it last December and I have until graduation to finish it. The whole class consists of 6 multiple choice online assignments, each of which takes about 2 hours to complete. I only have two assignments left, and so far I probably have about an A- average... so that's good I guess.

So, overall I would say that classes are going well. I wish I could drop that stupid International Affairs class, make my Portuguese teacher a better teacher, spend more time on Russian, and take the philosophy and the comment-blurting guy out of Semantics. I also wish that instead of re-learning Phonetics and Phonology that I could instead take some sort of psycho-linguistics class, or a language development class, basically a more hard-science kind of linguistics class. Another more advanced morphology class would be cool too. Maybe that's what grad school is for though.

An now for today's video. Do you like Avril Lavigne? Do you like British people? Do you like MIA? If you answered yes to any or all of those questions, then you might like Lady Sovereign. I wouldn't say that I actually "like" her, but she is strangely and mysteriously infectious...