"Peer Review"

             This week we tried something that was new to me when it came to writing a paper. I'm used to having to write a few drafts of a paper before you actually turn it in. But the new thing we tried this week was called "Peer Review". Basically you get in pairs and read each others papers to each other out loud. The point being that if you hear what you wrote out loud then you might pick up on any mistakes you made or anything that just doesn't make sense. Whereas when you just read it yourself your mind tends to just fix any of the mistakes that you made, because you know what you were trying to say. Then after we did this we had to fill out a form that had some questions about the person's writing. Pretty basic, just what did you like, dislike, what would you change, detail stuff, etc. I do feel like this was a good idea because of the reasons I stated previously about being able to point out mistakes that you wouldn't otherwise notice if you had been the one reading it.

"Me Talk Pretty One Day" Writing Assignment

           While I am at Western I am studying to become an Interpreter/Translator. I'm Puerto Rican so I grew up around Spanish as well as English. But when I got to my senior year of high school and I decided to take French and I was a bit nervous. Most people had told me that French, Italian and Spanish were all so similar that if you knew one then you could easily learn the other two. So I figured that it should be a piece of cake to learn French right? Well that wasn't entirely the case in my personal experience. First off I had my Spanish class right before my French class at the end of each school day. So that was difficult enough, speaking English, then transitioning into Spanish and then French. Lets just say that my French teacher was irritated at me a lot that year because of my "Franish" (aka French and Spanish mix sort of like Spanglish). But honestly the hardest part was reading and writing in French. I mean my teacher said that I got the French accent down easily. When you write in Spanish it's pretty much how things sound minus the accent marks. But in French there are so many hidden letter sounds in the words. For example in Spanish the word "como" is spelled exactly like how it sounds. But in French it's spelled like "comment" like when you comment on someone's blog, needless to say it was very confusing at first. My fear when taking this class was that it wouldn't come so naturally to me like Spanish always did. In Spanish class I just about never had to study it just came naturally. But once I started taking my French tests (without studying I might add) and received A's on all of them barely making any mistakes. That's when I really started to consider studying languages more and looking into interpreting as a profession. A specific example I can remember being nervous about and a little embarrassed in my French class went like this. I remember having to present a poster that represented pictures of my family and I accidentally switched from French into Spanish. The funny part was that I didn't even realize that I had done it. Better yet harldy any of the other students noticed either. Reason being that I was a senior in a predominantly freshman class. When I finished my presentation my French teacher had a grin on his face and he said "you did a good job but on a few parts you spoke Spanish words in place of French words". I started laughing because it wasn't a huge deal but it was still embarrassing. Reason being that most people told me that I wouldn't be successful speaking French because in the beginning I spoke it with a Spanish accent. So starting off that class I was adamant that I was going to sound like a native French speaker, which by the end of the year I am proud to say I was.