Blog 9: Language Acquisition

http://time.com/3453841/secret-learn-foreign-language-adult/
I found this article which is about language acquisition but for an adult who is learning a foreign language. He only studied it for 17 days and he was able to go to France and people thought he had lived there for at least a year! It was his second time learning a new language but still..17 days?!

Its a short article about how he acquired it so fast. Basically, he immersed himself in the language and practiced it whenever he got the chance. I thought this article was interesting because I myself am trying to learn a new language. He stresses how in a conversation with his French friends, he didn't have them slow down so his motto was: "Learn or starve!"
I am definitely going to do some of the things he said to such as reading children's books in Spanish and listening to more music in Spanish. Best of luck to those of you who are trying to acquire a second language!
                                           

Going...Going...Gone.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages
I have already posted an article about dying languages, but this article is different very intriguing to me. I chose the article because it's very interesting. It starts out by talking about a man who speaks Cherokee and his wife who is also Cherokee, who doesn't speak it.It then goes on to talk about the rate at which some languages are dying off and why it is imperative that we try to save them. One thing I found really interesting was that the article stated even languages such as Cherokee, that have thousands of speakers, are in danger of dying off because children are not learning it. Languages are more than just the way we communicate, each language in itself holds knowledge about cultures and the people within that culture. It also informs us about different topics, some such as herbs and medicine, that we may not know as much about. The article does make me want to learn more about dying languages and see what is being done to try and preserve them.

Blog 7: Genderlects

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/288441/DIFFERENCES-IN-GENDERLECTS-CAN-HAVE-A-PROFOUND-EFFECT.html?pg=all
For blog 7, I found an article on genderlects. The article talks about how these genderlects affect men and women in everyday life. I picked this article because we talked about genderlects in class the other day and I found them quite intriguing. The thing that I found most interesting about the article was how it talked about from when we are little kids, girls are taught to be open and have "feeling talk," and boys are quite the opposite, they are taught not to share their feelings and have to try and be the biggest and baddest of the group to show dominance. The article then talks about how this transfers later into life. I thought the article did very well of explaining the topic-now I am more aware of something I had no idea about, and I hear examples of genderlects everyday!