Classes

First two days of classes and my heads spinning a little bit. I'm taking 4 classes this summer. Here's a brief summary (in very non-linguistic terminology).

Second Language Acquisition- this class provides models and practice for learning a new language. A major component of the class is the lab where we work with a native speaker of another language. I'm learning Kirundi this summer. We spend an hour every afternoon listening to Pascal, our nurturer. The focus is on listening and understanding. So we won't work on speaking for a few weeks yet and not on writing or reading.

Articulatory Phonetics- we will learn to identify and produce sounds used in spoken languages. I've never spent so much time thinking about what my lips, teeth, tongue, & diaphragm are doing when I'm making a sound. There's lots of sounds used in languages that we don't use in English, so that's fun (read- very hard) to figure those out. We also learn to classify each of the sounds. For example, the f sound (as in fun, four, family) can be written as "voiceless labiodental fricative with egressive pulmonic air". Sounds fun, no?

Syntax & Morphology- a study of how words (morphology) & sentences (syntax) are formed. So far (we only started that class today), it's been an intense review of English grammar.

Sociolinguistics- This class looks at how language is impacted by the culture and how it impacts culture.