As I work on my ethnography project I find that not only am I busy and a little stressed/pressed for time, I find that I am actually learning more than I thought I would. I entered this endevor with a lot of pre-concieved notions and I am actually happy to realize that I am wrong in many aspects.
I chose to immerse myself in the homeless culture and had the idea that since many of them are uneducated, their language skills would be very poor. As I spent more and more time with different groups I realized that I was jumping to conclusions both that they were all uneducated and that their language skills would reflect that.
This led me to what I believe is the ultimate lesson to be learned from the project. Which is: Language has the power to teach regaurdless of what language it is or what subculture it comes from. I think that all to often we disregaurd languages and words or styles that we don't understand, instead of taking the time to learn from it. I certainly learned a lot from the languages that I studied and there is, I'm sure, infinite numbers of language groups still to be studied.
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