This month has been busy for both of us, me and Rachel, so we did not organize any cultural experiences but focused on Korean language learning. As I planned to re-learn the Korean language in order to bring my personal learning experience as a native speaker and this new learning experience from a foreign language speaker’s perspective, I have found various topics and issues in Korean, which could possibly confuse learners. Also, I found out that not only practical knowledge that I can provide but also grammatical and academic knowledge based on linguistics that I learned in SDLC105 would be an efficient way to approach learning a new language.
One of the examples of helpful knowledge of linguistics that I found this month is the concepts of inflectional and derivational morphemes. A morpheme is “the smallest unit of meaning in a language”, so it becomes a gibberish, simply some syllables, when divided into a smaller unit. Morphemes come together to make a word while they could also stand alone to have meaning. For example, “stars” is a word combined with two morphemes: “star”, a inflectional morpheme that has the meaning of the word, and “-s”, a derivational morpheme that does not change the very meaning of the word but adds a grammatical meaning, in this case, plurality. This also applies to Korean. “별들” consists of “별”, a star, and “-들”, a derivational morpheme corresponding to “-s”. However, compared to the English language, Korean has much fewer derivational morphemes. As I learn more about morphology related to Korean, I came to the conclusion that it would be a better approach that one can relate one word to others that have a similar meaning, which is because they have the same root as Chinese characters. For example, “학교(school)” and “학생(student)” are words that are morphemes by themselves, but as they are made of Chinese characters, they could be divided into smaller units, which is the reason they both have “학(學)”, a Chinese character meaning “education”, “of education”, “study of”, etc. Some say that a single Chinese character (in the Chinese language) is a morpheme by itself, but in the Korean language, it is not particularly true because Korean people do not often use single Chinese characters to make a new word these days but rather words that are already made in the past, which I would rather call morphemes.
Koreans tend to not learn Chinese characters to learn Korean, and it is more likely that they naturally happen to know the meaning of each syllable while they do not necessarily learn the original Chinese characters. It is also true that if not for Eastern Asians, it would be overwhelming for learners to study Chinese characters in order to learn Korean words. Therefore, the best strategy for me to let learners learn faster is to mention the relevance of a word with other words that use the same Chinese character so that learners can memorize words faster and even guess the meaning of new similar words by etymology.
Replies