Another year, gone.

Assalamualaikum everyone!!! Allahu lamanya tak ngeupdate blog tercinta ini. Kihkihkih. Well, it had been a busy semester (all with the lost souls wandering about) and OF COURSE I WAS LAAAYYYYZAYYYYYYYYYYY. My second year (or sophomore year, they call it) has passed! 21st May was my last examination paper, Introduction to Psycholinguistics (but we prefer calling it Psycho for short), and here I am, heavenly free from any academic responsibilities! (not quite, tho)

Since it's the end of my second year, I'm going to do a recap on Semester 4. And also, because I have nothing better to do.

In Semester 4, we had to take 6 subjects. They were:

• Introduction to Psycholinguistics
• Critical Reading
• English Morphology and Syntax
• Negotiation Communication
• Media Integrative
• Ilmu Wahyu & Kemasyarakatan (for Muslims)
• Perbandingan Agama (for non-Muslims)

Introduction to Psycholinguistics

This subject studies about language and its correlation with the mind, on which parts of the brain that are crucial for language, speech production, speech comprehension yada yada. We were using the book by authors Danny D. Steinberg and Natalia V. Sciarini, and personally, I think it is quite an interesting subject (although there are too many reports to be remembered on case studies).

In this subject we also learn how deaf people acquire language. Do the people who CANNOT SPEAK or mute have language? We also learned a bit about sign language (theoretically, we did not learn how to sign). The best part is the studies on wild and isolated children who went on years without speaking/speech production and at some point in their lives, the researchers found them and trained them to speak/read/write (the results were somehow different for different ages and life trauma).

It's an interesting study, for me. But then when it comes to Noam Chomsky and the Behaviorists and Mentalists etc (these are in the last chapters), hahahahaha bye too much information. It is somehow hard to REALLY understand what these people had in mind, their opinions and such.

By the way, Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.

Chomsky's Views on Language Acquisition. Chomsky proposed some ideas that were new ways of thinking about language: the theory of universal grammar (UG), the idea that language is innate and the notion that language acquisition occurs during critical development stages.

Language people might know him. Others? Probably not x'D BTW HE IS STILL ALIVE AND KICKING CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? EVERYONE I KNOW IN THE TEXTBOOKS ARE ALL HISTORIANS AND DEAD AND HERE'S NOAM CHOMSKY ALIVE AT 88 YEARS OLD

Difficulty: 6.5/10
Interesting level: 9/10
Overall rating: 7/10 (not a favorite, but not bad either)

Critical Reading

It's only about reading reading reading and you have to be critical about it. That's just it. In short, we need to know how to do an analytic summary and response to the articles provided. Sort of like, you have to read the article, and then you have to do a review about it -- but not just on anything, you have to analyse the tone, language, and fallacy and whatnot.

In all honesty, I think it's a boring subject. I'm not saying it's easy (it's KINDA HARD) but it doesn't pique my interest. We didn't use any textbook, just a few reading materials - 5 reading texts.

Difficulty: 6/10

Interesting level: 2/10

Overall rating: 3.5/10 (least favorite) (wow I'm so honest)

English Morphology and Syntax

For the first half of the semester, we learned morphology. Morphology is the study of forms of words. All the words in English that we know of, we study it in morphology. There are rules in forming a word and we have to use those rules. Mind you, it's simple but we need to remember a few things. Need to know what suffixes, affixes, prefixes are. Inflectional, derivational etc.

Difficulty: 3/10 (not that difficult, quite easy)

This is a word tree

In the second half of the semester, we went through syntax. Syntax is the scientific study of sentence structure. This second topic, on the other hand... Let's just say that if I were to take extra credit, I wouldn't have taken anything related to syntax. We have sentence, noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase bla bla bla and ambiguous sentences we have to do tree diagrams on those ambiguos sentences. Like this sentence, "Helen asked how old Sam was."

THAT sentence has two meanings: 1) Helen asked the age of Sam and 2) Helen asked old Sam how was he doing. It's a pain in the cerebrum.

Difficulty: 8/10 (bye)

These two are examples of tree diagrams (they're not ambiguous sentences)

Overall interesting level: 7/10 (not a favorite but it's fun doing word trees and tree diagrams)
Overall rating: 5/10 (the course is a mumba jumba a bit because of insufficient period and inappropriate venues - classroom too small and such)

Negotiation Communication

OH YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY my favorite subject! In this subject we got to learn about negotiation, and surprise, surprise, it's not the same as bargaining! We always use the term 'nego' for business macam jual beli kat pasar malam or beli kain ke apa ke, but actually it's a wrongly used term because negotiation doesn't mean bargaining. Okay, wait for it...


Negotiation is a process between two or more parties to achieve a mutually beneficial agreement. There are two types of negotiation: 1) Distributive and 2) Integrative. Simply putting it, distributive negotiation is gonna result in win-lose situation whereas integrative negotiation is the win-win situation for all parties involved.

Negotiation is not strictly for business deals. We go through it every day, like deciding where to eat with our friends.

"Makan mana?"

"Mulut la!"

-_-

"Serious la makan mana ni?"

"Nasi Kandar Pak Abu?"

"Jauhnya. Makan dekat-dekat sini sudah."

"Sushi King? Tapi poket kering dowhhhhh"

"Hahaha makan warung tepi sekolah tu jelah"

"Ok cun!"

or can be

"Nak tengok cerita apa ni? Cite hantu?"

"Taknak ah nanti malam takleh tido"

"Cite Kimchi untuk Awak?"

"Omg no. Aku tak minat cerita cinta Melayu klisyé gitu la!"

"Hahahahah ok sorry, kita tengok Power Rangers la nak?"

"Ok cunz!"

The assignments given were fun, too! The pair work assignment, we had to choose a movie from a selected list of movies (by our lecturer) and my partner and I chose The Maze Runner! From the movie, we needed to choose a specific scene to describe the negotiation process that is involved in it.

An obvious scene is when Thomas and Gally were fighting at the opening of the Maze (where Gally had taken over the Glade after Alby's death by the Grievers' attack the night before), so we had to describe the negotiation process, state the type of negotiation and everything.

An illustration of how we described the scene teehee

For the group assignment, we had to do a case study on an issue (any issue related to negotiation). My group and I chose the case of Ben Nathan for our assignment. One group chose the North Korea - Malaysia issue as their case study. From the assignment, I got to know who Ben Nathan is (he was an old veteran singer who went to live on the streets because of a fraud in Jakarta, one of his famous songs is Stanza Sepi Sekeping Hati, you can hear it on Youtube).

The parties involved were of course, Ben Nathan, and Yayasan Artis 1Malaysia (YA1M - during the presentation I pronounced it as YA-IM and people were like, "Hah? Was dat fi?" fine) It was about Ben Nathan finally agreeing to stop living on the streets and seek medical treatment. That's all. It's such a simple case but we can see the negotiation going on there ;)

Difficulty: 4/10 (actually I don't know how much to put since I enjoyed the subject so much I didn't think it was that hard)
Interesting level: 100/10
Overall rating: 9.5/10

Media Integrative

Initially I was soooo excited for this subject, because, duh, it's multimedia and in Semester 3 we had Media, Technology and Society and it was super duper fun because I got to design a magazine! But Media Integrative... It's supposed to be fun, but... it wasn't.

Anyway, apart from the not-fun part, we got to learn a few things lah, like how to capture a video (which I had been dying to do since forever). Our lecturer introduced us to Jing (for image and video capture). I already know how to capture image (in our daily life term, it's screenshot), so I was quite excited for the video capture part.

Sadly my old laptop crashed the moment we started doing lessons with Jing, so I couldn't do a video capture instantly. Later on, I went to purchase a new Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 Gaming lol my bro said it would last longer so yeah why not), and the sound system and all are very good (compared to my old Lenovo).

We used this book, but uh, idk

But since I got this new laptop, I don't have to use Jing anymore to capture anything. Previous laptop was using Windows 8 and this new one uses Windows 10, so it already has the image/video capture thing installed on the Windows settings, yay!

Apart from Jing, we also used Powtoon (okay noob I know) and iSpring (this is for our main Project). Honestly, we were clueless a bit with the iSpring and we were left to discover it on our own. It's very disappointing because our lecturer *mostly* left everything to us since we are the millennials and we're supposed to know everything about multimedia *sighs*

I was so disappointed in the lessons that I hated myself for not doing very well with the iSpring at the end of the semester.

Difficulty: 4/10
Interesting level: 9/10 for the subject itself but to class teaching/environment and stuff 4/10
Overall rating: 3/10

Ilmu Wahyu & Kemasyarakatan

We already took Ilmu Wahyu & Sains in Semester 1, so for this subject it goes a bit deeper towards Islam and society. Mostly we learned about Islamic philosophy, muamalat - nikah, hudud and so on. No class activity much since it's a university subject and ustaz had to teach more than 200 students. Ustaz is a mudah terhibur guy and his class was on Wednesdays at 8am.... so.... we sleepy a bit lol

Difficulty: 3.5/10 (most of it dah belajar kat sekolah dulu)
Interesting level: 6.5/10
Overall rating: 6/10

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I didn't take the last subject so I can't explain into details about it. Heh. The fourth semester is quite havoc with my classmates BEN 4B *shout out to them for being awesome* During our study week, we had BBQ together at Pantai Teluk Ketapang. YA ALLAH SEDAPNYA AYAM BBQ

Sem 4 collage

Some time during the semester, I became the Harry Potter T-shirt agent lol! My friend from UM, Akmal Ali (fellow classmate in PASUM) promoted to me the Harry Potter T-shirts, and I asked a few of my classmates if they were interested..... It turned out, a bunch of them were! Thus, the last picture with us wearing the shirts! #Potterhead4lyf

I'd like to rate this second year a solid 8 because of ZE UHHHH-MAYYYYZING PEOPLE INNIT! Really glad to meet and get to know them better because zey are funneh pipol :3 Hopefully we'd be classmates again next semester but, oh well y'know what they say, let's break friends apart because we're fun liddat at parties *rolls eyes*

Til next time, guys!