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Relevant to All Courses

Courses for high school and college can be developed within the same environment. The Afr 101 and 102 courses listed here are used at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee for the two online courses.



Pronuncation

Specific Focus:
1st 4 weeks: repeat specific focus daily. It's essential to ground your pronunciation proficiency.

Holistic Focus:
Doing songs, stories, etc. will expose specific things to tweak from to the Specific Focus section.
With songs and stories, focus on pronunciation first , not the meaning. Then with good pronunciation, focus on understanding. Repeat till you understanding everything with ease.  Make notes of words that you feel are difficult for you to pronounce or that you still do not get. Share that with the class on the class forum.

Vocabulary

Follow these steps when learning a new list:
• 1st: Focus on pronunciation.
• 2nd: Focus on recall each term.
• 3rd: Repeat till you have automated recall (no hesitation!)
• Make a short sentence with each term.

Grammar

After listening to the Introduction and you should be able to explain the following concepts:
The sentence:
• What is: a subject, a verb, an object?
• Word types: What is: a noun, a pronoun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition?
• Tenses: What is present, future, and past? What is a progressive (continuous) tense, and the perfect tense?

Do the activities on the Web site and know each word without any hesitation.
• Learn a list of regular verbs like slaap, sit, werk, eet, drink, etc. and make sentences in the present, future, and past tense.
• Replace names of people with pronouns.
• Make questions with sentences that are in the present, future, or past tense sentences.
• Make a sentence in present, future or past negative.
• The first spot is the subject, the second spot is the verb, and the third spot is the object.
• Work on sentences with either an object pronoun, a negation, or a time word and learn to place them correctly.
• Learn a select group of verbs that take prepositions, e.g. 'I speak TO you', and not 'I speak you'.

Culture

Language is the medium, yet it constrains and habitualizes the habits of communication and influences the way of doing. A wind in the opposite direction also blows. Tradition, habits, the will of leaders and groups, and decisions alters language, which in turn enforces the patterns. Did you get all of that? In short, it is very important to study culture to appreciate the language, to understand the bigger picture of communication and intent, and to avoid misinterpretation, over generalizations and bias and assumptions. Beyond the topics suggested, you are welcome to suggest further topics of interest.

Communication

Reading -- Read and explain selected texts
Listening -- Hear a story and explain what you heard.
Speaking --  Effectively achieve the communication tasks in Afrikaans only.
Writing -- Build a sense of the language structure to build fromthe phrase to the sentence level. And then from the sentence to the paragraph level.

Underlying structures to build
Pronunciation -- Read and pronounce so that any native speaker will understand everything you say
Vocabulary -- Know all the terms so that you can do an English to Afrikaans test on all the terms.
Grammar -- Know the concepts, explain each principle and give examples. Do sentence translations.
Culture -- Connecting to appropriate cultural use of the language