My name is Sofia. I go to Smith. I'm a senior, and I'm taking Sinhala.
My name is Alex Bogden. I go to UMass Amherst. I am a grad
student there in my first and last year.
My name is Margaret Nakayima. I am a junior at UMass.
This is my third semester studying Swahili.
I'm a second year student at UMass and here at the Five College Center I study Turkish, but my major is
Middle Eastern Studies, and I also study Arabic.
I'm Julia. I go to Hampshire College, and I study animal psychology. And I'm currently taking Swahili classes.
I chose Romania because they are currently doing research on prediction
models for cervical cancer. So Romania has the highest levels of cervical
cancer among any European nation, and it's also been known since the 1940's
that arsenic naturally contaminates their groundwater. And so the work I'll
be doing is developing statistical models to see if there's an association
between the latent arsenic exposure and the incidences of cervical cancer.
Studying animal psychology, I've done research on elephants, so my goal was
kind of to go back to East Africa, and I figured that learning more Swahili would
probably be beneficial.
So the big difference is communication. I firmly believe that if I'm going to a country where English isn't the spoken language
that I should learn that language. Not only for civil reasons, but because you
really can't experience a culture without knowing the language.
Many people in the area I would be going to speak English. But to truly understand
the food, the people, the music, the whole sphere of things, I'm going to need to
know Romanian, and I look forward to studying it.
I think there's a lot of ideas about Africa in general that are really mislead, especially in this
culture here in the states. We think of Africa as entirely being safaris because
that's what people primarily go there for, and so going there and
seeing the diversity of both the landscape, and the cultures, and the
languages and - everything was just so incredibly diverse, you know. You'd be in one town that, you know,
In Tanzania they pretty much everywhere speak Swahili, but
they also have these clan languages. So you're in one town and you say like
'hello' in their clan language, and then you're in the next town and they speak a
completely different one. So you can communicate in Swahili, but it's like
just maybe 50 kilometers over they're speaking an entirely different language.
I wanted to study Swahili because I am Ugandan, and it was the closest thing
I could find to Lugando, which is the language that my family speaks. And I don't know,
I'm just like very into African culture and just like especially East African
culture, and I thought Swahili would be a great way to connect with other people
that come from that part of the world.
Going to Turkey was an experience for me
which brought on this aspect of learning Turkish, and I really came to enjoy
learning the language. You know, in a classroom setting in high school it was
very different, and then being in the country itself, so Turkish was a whole
new world. And I came to love this country, this language that the people spoke
and felt like it was very much part of the culture. And if I wanted to wholeheartedly embrace this other country, another like nation,
that I should also learn the language. Which I came to find is very beautiful.
The main reason why I'm taking the language is because I applied for a Fulbright fellowship
to go to Sri Lanka for next year. So it's 'recommended' that you learn the language.
I'm also going to be like being a teaching assistant full time,
so I'm going to have like a real job that I'm like responsible to people for, so that's a whole other level.
And then I'm just excited like, how is like- how's cooking and like
just getting around and it's gonna be- I'm going to be a lot more independent.
So I'm like a little nervous with that because I don't know, to be honest like,
I'm, you know, I don't know how to navigate adult life in any circumstance.
So it's going to be really funny trying to do that in Sri Lanka.
It'll be amusing.
I didn't think I was going to be able to really retain anything, or like to really
be able to see Judith or see Agnes and greet them in Swahili, or, you know,
like maybe not be able to say things right off the bat, but know how to say
something or like structure something in my head.
I didn't think I was going to get to that point because I was like 'what is Swahili? Like I don't know any of those languages.
It's not French, it's not Spanish. I can do that but I can't do that.'
So it just made me realize, like, not to write off languages that are not particularly Western.
And just to really learn like how languages borrow from each other
and like learn that I can also learn those languages too because Swahili
borrows a lot from Arabic, and I never thought about considering Arabic, like
ever. But because I learned Swahili and see the Arabic words, now I want to learn Arabic.
I studied languages in high school and in college, and this
experience was very different- not a bad way but just in a unique way, in that I
was the only person in the Five College system studying Romanian, and there was
only one person in the system who spoke Romanian. And so every Monday I would
take the bus over to Mount Holyoke College, and I would talk with my
language partner Lena for an hour each week. And we conversed about a lot
of the content that was in the book, but we also talked about things that I
might expect to see over there. So using real-life situations. So instead of going
to a coffee shop and ordering coffee, ordering tea or the beverages more
commonly ordered in the country.
I mean it's hard having to do more things
independently, but I think what's good about it though is that you have to- if
you're in the conversation session like you're going to be- your partner is going to
be saying things that you don't understand, and you're going to have to
say things that are like wrong. And in like a larger
language class, like you kind of have the option to sort of like not say
anything unless you're fully sure. Like you can be some more scared of
making mistakes for longer, whereas you really do have to speak up and you
really just have to like sort of live in that space where you don't really know
what's going on. And so you can't be embarrassed. Like you just have to say
stuff. So you do kind of have like- you pass that barrier I think a little
sooner in the tutor sessions, rather than you would in a large classroom.
Before I went to Turkey most people were going to Europe, when I
was a part of that program, and talking about you know French and Spanish, these
languages that are more widely spoken. And I thought that, oh- you know I did have thought that Turkish
is not spoken by many people, I think it's maybe 90 million. And that idea was
completely erased though after I started learning it. And coming back here, I did
realize that it is spoken in different areas of the world, and I don't think
that the reason, you know, it's not as widely spoken as Spanish and French and
other languages, that it is not as important.