Reflection 4 – week 12

A copy of this reflection can also be found in my reflective journal.

This is the final reflection in this e-portfolio.

It is end of week 12 now and according to my updated and adjusted plan, my e-portfolio should be completed by now. And it is!

This is so encouraging to see the result of your work. A lot of things have not been going according to the plan and I am pleased that I have been able to adjust to all the changes to be able to finish the e-portfolio on time!

Overall, this has been a very educating experience. Not only have I learned a lot about Chinese idioms and Chinese language and culture in general, I have also realised how little I know about English! Creating this e-portfolio has helped me to find the areas where my knowledge is weak and now I am working on improving myself.

On top of educating myself about languages, I have also learned to manage my time better, to procrastinate less or in a more productive way (Thanks to Antonella who gave me an idea of switching to another action instead of just stopping doing anything at all). I have also realised how crucial planning is and how important it is to understand that not everything will go according to your plan.

At the beginning of the semester I have aimed to gain more understanding about Chinese ChengYus, English Idioms and idioms in general. I have been very confident about my choice of topic for this project as I have considered it to be a fairly easy task.

However, during the first couple of weeks (my Research stage) I have realised how wrong I have been. I have underestimated the scope, which led me to spending much more time on the research than I have intended. On top of that I have been too confident with my knowledge of English idioms which, as a result, led me to more time spent on the research I have not been planning to do at all!

All of that made me change my initial weekly plan numerous times. I think I had to adjust something every week to be able to finish this project on time! This e-portfolio is not what I have expected it to be, but I am still pleased with the result.

Despite loosing my confidence along the way (there had been times when I was not sure if I would be able to finish the e-portfolio at all), I am satisfied with the result. I set the goal to find out more about cultural background of the idioms, why people are using idioms and learn something new in both English and Chinese. At this stage I do understand why people are using idioms, know the stories behind some of them and have learned 4 new ChengYus and couple of English idioms, so I guess I can say that I achieved most of my goals and there is still some room for improvement, which is always a good thing.

At this stage I am determined to continue learning idioms. I have found it very helpful to learn idioms in pairs (English-Chinese) and would like to continue my study this way.

 

Overall, developing this e-portfolio has been a very interesting experience. As in any project, I have been facing some technical difficulties (WordPress is still very challenging to use sometimes), some planning has been lacking and time constraints have been very obvious (I had to stop my research due to lack of time).

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this little project of mine and it has been great to see from the comments that other people have been enjoying it too.

Reflection 3 – Week 11.

A copy of this reflection can also be found in my reflective journal.

It is end of week 11 now and my project is slowly coming to its end.

According to the initial weekly plan, between reflections 2 and 3 I was supposed to:

“Week 10: In week 10 I am going to arrange all of my findings into separate posts, each containing Chinese Idiom, it’s origins and meaning, as well as corresponding English Idiom with it’s origins and meaning.By this time I will have enough knowledge to link the idioms and evaluate whether they have similar meanings.

Week 11: In my final week I am going to look at all the work I have done over the past 6 weeks and evaluate on the progress I have made. By this time I will have a better understanding of the purpose idioms serve in language and culture. This knowledge will help me in my future study.”

However, this plan has been changed dramatically due to several reasons.

First of all, I have counted the number of weeks in this semester wrong. Which gave me an extra week (Week 12) to work on the e-portfolio and another week (Week 13) to add finishing touches to my project.

By now my portfolio does have separate postings for each Chinese ChengYu, as I have found organising my work this way as a more efficient solution. I hope this made it easier to follow my progress and made my e-portfolio more enjoyable to read.

I believed that half of the semester would be a long enough period of time to gain certain knowledge about English idioms and Chinese ChengYus. However, after starting my research, I have realised that I have underestimated the size of the field I have chosen for this portfolio. At this stage I think that in order to have a decent understanding about idiomatic expressions, much more time should be invested into the research than I can afford to spend.

Due to planning my time wrong, I am now behind my schedule. By the end of week 11 I have been expecting to finish my portfolio. But I still have some blanks to fill and some work to do.

I am planning to have this e-portfolio finished within couple of weeks and I do believe this is an achievable goal at this stage.

Some of the difficulties I have been facing over the last couple of weeks:

Research is way more time consuming than I have expected due to the amount of information I had to go through. Over the last week I had spent over 6 hours trying to find appropriate English idioms and its background and I still do not have some of the information I need;

It has been a challenge to find English idioms. I have realised that most of the English native speakers are using idioms without realising that these expressions are idiomatic. A good example is Waste of Time. People have no idea this expression is an idiom, which makes it harder for them to answer the question “Do you know any idioms with the meaning…?” as they do not even think about these expressions. This made it harder for me to find appropriate idioms.

Along with that, I still have difficulties with using Chinese ChengYus in a right way. This causes a time delay in posting appropriate examples in Mandarine, as I am trying to make up sentences that would capture the ChengYus meanings and I have to ask native Mandarine speakers to help me by checking my examples and fixing them if necessary.

Finally, I am also restructuring my blog to make it easier to read, which causes some changes in posts and the way I structure my work and findings. I am still searching for a perfect layout.

 

All in all, at this stage of the project I feel less confident than at the beginning. I realise how little I know about English and Chinese languages and cultures and how much more I need to learn. I am glad I have decided to develop this e-portfolio, as it has allowed to outline my weak points and now I know what to work on.

Plan for the next week is:

To finish all of the research and post findings;

Finish restructuring the blog;

Post examples in Mandarine;

Draw conclusions and evaluate on my work.

Reflection 2 – week 9

Week 9 reflection.

For the time-tracking purposes I have decided to duplicate my reflections into separate posts. Because of that, my first 2 reflections will have delayed timestamps. All the reflections can still be conveniently found in the Reflective Journal Page.

Reflection 2.

According to the initial weekly plan, between my Reflection 1 and Reflection 2 I was supposed to:

Week 8: in Week 8 I am going to start researching for English idioms with corresponding meanings. By this time I will know way more about Chinese idioms than I did in Week 6, which will help me to find an appropriate ones in English language.

Week 9: In week 9 I am going to look at the background of  English idioms of my choice and evaluate whether they suit my goals. To do that I will look at the examples of use to get a better idea of idioms’ meaning.

However, as I have mentioned earlier, I have decided to change my strategy a bit. Following my weekly plan have caused me some more difficulties which I am trying to resolve at the moment.

The main issue is that I am not a native English speaker (my native tongue is Russian), which makes it more difficult to find appropriate English idioms for my e-portfolio.

On top of that, Chinese ChengYus turned out to be a greater field of research than I have expected at first.In week 5 I have started developing this portfolio knowing nothing about both English and Chinese idioms. It is end of Week 9 now, and I still know almost nothing about Chinese ChengYus and still do not have much information about English idioms.

The fact that idioms are usually metaphoric sentence and cannot be translated literally is another challenge!

As a result, I have fallen behind of my own plan to conduct more research. Doing this helps me to gain better understanding of why idioms are used in modern Chinese language.

Along with that, I have started my research on English idioms. I am using various online dictionaries to help me find English idioms that would have somehow similar meaning to the Chinese ChengYus of my choice. Next week I am planning to choose four idioms I want to be using for my portfolio and start researching on their background, origins, meaning and usage.

At the end of week 12 I am willing to compose final examples, which would be represented by sets of sentences, 2 sentences per set: first sentence would be in Mandarine and would be composed using ChengYu, and second one would be the first sentence’s English interpretation, that would be composed using corresponding English idiom.

Although this concept seems hard to implement at this stage due to my poor knowledge of English idiomatic phrases and me still being unable to find connections between Chinese ChengYus and English idioms, I expect my knowledge do develop enough over the next couple of weeks to make the implementation possible.

Reflection 1 – Week 7.

Week 7 reflection.

For the time-tracking purposes I have decided to duplicate my reflections into separate posts. Because of that, my first 2 reflections will have delayed timestamps. All the reflections can still be conveniently found in the Reflective Journal Page.

Reflection 1.

Over the last several weeks I have been trying to follow the plan I have initially created for this e-portfolio. I have been researching about the Chinese idioms I would like to use, idioms background and how and where they should be used.Here is the summary of my findings:

There are hundreds of idioms in modern Mandarine language and most of them are used in everyday conversations. All of these idioms have undergone a very long process of language evolution and have not disappeared over hundreds of years of changes that Chinese language has undergone. This makes it almost impossible to choose several idioms that I want to use in this e-portfolio, as each and every Chengyu has a very interesting background. On top of that, most of the existing Chengyu’s are used very often in everyday Mandarin. I could not find a single text of conversation written without at least 1 idiom!

The weekly plan I have written for this little project of mine and the plan I have outlined in my Proposal for Brief 2 are not enough for me to critically reflect on my work. Therefore, I now would like to use my Proposal as a baseline for this e-portfolio. I will be adding more content into each post about idioms. For doing this I will have to do some more research, which will result in better understanding of the topic. I am now planning to add more idioms background information, how idioms have ‘settled’ in the language and why people are using them.

I also want to include some more example sentences and show, using translation, that idioms indeed are metaphoric phrases. I plan to do this by giving 2 translations to each example sentence in Chinese: first translation will be literal, where I will give exact translation of every word from Chinese to English, second translation will be logical, I will translate the sentence keeping in mind the idiom’s meaning. Doing this will give me a better idea of how idioms work.

Overall, this portfolio is getting bigger than I have expected it to be.

I started knowing next to nothing about idioms and I can feel how my knowledge is improving with the development of this project. At this stage, I have learned 4 new Chinese ChengYu, their background (the story of how these idioms appeared in the language) and where these idioms can be used. I still need to do some more research on why these idioms have been used in the language for so many years and what are the advantages of using idioms.

I also feel the need to set up new boundaries to this project, as this topic turned out to be broader than I have expected at the planning phase.

My next steps would be to keep researching on 4 ChengYu I have already chosen, find out why these idioms are still used in modern language, set up boundaries to the project.