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On y va!

Hello everyone, my name is Andy Loughran and welcome to my blog post as I study for six weeks this summer in Tours, France. As this trip approaches and I prepare for my time abroad, I face both feelings of excitement and nervousness—excitement to travel and experience France while testing my language skills and nervousness about adjusting to the unknowns of a host family and a different culture and language.

I’ve taken French classes for over five years now (four years of high school and one year of college) and this will be my first time in a French-speaking country. My love for learning French started in high school as I saw the way language can shape community. The community of French students at my school was very small, but the bonds we shared due to that shared language made me feel like a part of a unique and tight knit community.
Through my courses at Notre Dame, I’ve realized that the French language can act as a gateway to learning about art, history, and psychology by understand the formative structure of language in this disciplines.

Beyond just learning the French language, I want to use this experience to grow and by the end of the summer be able to understand French cognition and culture and learn to adapt to new culture and surroundings.
Interestingly, the French and American share some similar values like freedom of expression and religion but use different reasoning to reach those ideals and thus live them out in different ways. I was to use these six to speak with French citizens to understand where some of their national beliefs come from and compare it to my own American values and cognitions.
Personally, I also want to use this time to truly learn to adapt to a new cultural environment. As a native English speaker who’s only ever lived in the United States, I have rarely had the challenge of adjust to a different people or culture. With my time abroad, I want to test myself to experience the uncomfortable feeling of adjusting to a foreign culture and environment and learn to appreciate the way both culture can be a part of my time abroad.

I truly hope this summer will be the experience of a lifetime, and I can’t wait to share the journey here on this blog. On y va!

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First Post

Even after spending my first full day in Tours, I still can’t believe it’s finally happening.

I’ve always grown up split between Europe and the United States. While I was born and spent most of my life in my mother’s hometown in California, the rest of my heritage keeps pulling me back to the other side of the Atlantic. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to learn more about other languages, cultures, and ways of life, particularly in Europe.

This desire probably stems from my childhood, and my continued exposure to international influences. My experience abroad began immediately, as my parents lived in Italy for the first two years of my life. While I don’t recall anything, they told me I learned to walk in the square in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Slovakia, my father’s native country, holds my first memories. We remained there until I was six, so I grew up speaking two languages. Unfortunately, I retained very little Slovak when we moved to the United States, but the passion for recovering it has remained with me. I’ve always been so excited to incorporate Slovak traditions into our family life at home. Perhaps my interest in language and culture stems from my ingrained wish to get back the knowledge I lost.

Since my early years, I have traveled to Europe several times. I have visited Slovakia, Ireland, Poland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, northern Spain, and a few cities in Italy. Technically, I can also claim the airports in Amsterdam, Munich, Frankfurt, Zurich, Brussels, and Split. Despite the lengthy list, these trips never provided the full immersion into language and culture that I am about to experience in the next six weeks.

After studying French for four years in high school and renewing my interest in it at Notre Dame, it’s a dream come true to be able to live and study in France. One can learn about through reading or in a classroom, but I don’t think it’s possible to come to a true appreciation of a place and its people without a first-hand, lived experience. I hope to develop a thorough understanding of French language and culture during my time in Tours, and I can’t wait to see what this summer holds!

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Post 1: Pre-departure

Hello, everyone! My name is Maya, and I’ll be going to Tours, France this summer to study French.

A little about me: I’m a sophomore Physics major and French minor in the Glynn honors program here at ND. I’m from South Bend, Indiana. My dad is from the Republic of Georgia, so I grew up speaking English and Georgian at home, and I studied German through high school (and a bit here at Notre Dame as well). I started studying French in the spring of my sophomore year, and am so excited for the opportunity to immerse myself in the language.

Growing up in a multicultural and bilingual household has shaped me in a lot of important ways. Notably, I have experience with being in foreign countries and facing a language barrier (I can speak, read, and write Georgian, but my sometimes stumble over my words when I speak. Georgian grammar is notably difficult). A source of anxiety, though, is the fact that the language barrier has never been this large. I know that many French people speak English, but I also want to respect others and myself enough to make my way around speaking French, and my anxiety about my comparatively weak grasp of the language is something I have to intentionally ignore. I am thankful for the experience visiting Georgia has given me and am excited to grow by facing my fears.

I hope to get a lot of things out of this summer. As I am staying for 8 weeks, a pretty long time, I first and foremost hope to emerge from this experience with a more solid understanding and grasp of the French language. I am confident that this will be the case, but I am excited to feel myself develop and grow in confidence and competence over the course of my time in Tours. Second, I am so grateful and excited to have the opportunity to visit France. I have never been to Western Europe before, despite having studied two western European languages, so being able to experience life in a new place will be so very rewarding. In general, I hope that this summer is an opportunity for learning and growth through challenges. There will certainly be multiple learning curves, but I hope that I take the challenges I am presented with and make the best of them. How exciting!

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Off to Ecuador!

Hi everyone! Imanallatak kankichik? (How are you all?)
My name is Chihiro, and I am going to Quito, Ecuador to study the Kichwa language. Kichwa is an Ecuadorian variety of Quechuan languages spoken around the Andean mountain range area, and apparently I will be the first student to choose a Quechuan language for the SLA program. I am currently a first-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science. You might wonder why a comp-sci student would want to study a South American indigenous language. It is because my research project addresses documentation and revitalization of endangered languages with the aid of computational technologies, and Kichwa would be a great case study in the project. For this program, I dedicated myself to study Kichwa at Notre Dame for a semester and studied Spanish intensively on my own (learned 5,000 words in a couple of months!), so I am very excited to visit Ecuador finally.

I was born and grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and I came to the United States to start my PhD last year. So my cultural background is heavily Japanese. I have also lived in the United Kingdom for two years, so I think I now have two cultural modes: the Japanese mode when I am in Japan and speaking Japanese and the English-speaking (“Western”) mode when I am at Notre Dame. I feel like I have two completely different personalities depending on which language I am speaking. Yet, the former mode is dominant in myself, and I am still in the process of adjusting myself to the American culture, or specifically the culture in and around Notre Dame.

During the stay in Ecuador, I am curious to know the linguistic power relationship of Kichwa and Spanish. Language endangerment, and ultimately, language extinction, happens when parents of the speaker community cease to pass on their language to their children, and this decision is typically driven by political, social, educational, economical inequality between the two languages. By being in the bilingual society of Ecuador, I hope to hear stories and opinions on Ecuadorians’ choice of the two languages.

Also, I am eager to learn Kichwa because I plan to research the grammar of Kichwa with Notre Dame’s Quechua FLTA. Kichwa sometimes shows striking similarities to Japanese, and it never bores me to study any aspect of Kichwa. In the following posts of mine, I would love to share what is so fascinating about the language and its grammar as well as my thoughts on the cultural adventure. Stay tuned, ashtakashkaman! (see you later!)