During winter break, I continued practicing reading in Korean and watching Korean variety shows to keep up with what I learned during the fall semester. Though I could read—albeit, at a very slow pace—I didn’t completely understand what I was reading. So, to start of the spring semester, my language instructor gave me two pages worth of vocabulary words on school topics. For example, some of the lists included grade levels, subjects, years, names, and school-related terms—i.e., “homework”, “tests”, “textbook”. When we were going over the vocabulary words, my instructor would have me read out the word and we also created sentence examples for each word in which I wrote out to also work on my writing skills. On another note, my language instructor is also my roommate so since our lessons were in person, it was a lot easier in terms of writing. She was able to help me out a lot in aspects of correcting my writing or, per my request, be able to exemplify how the word is written by writing it herself. Since Korean can involve several characters, unlike English, I like to see how the words are properly written so I can practice on writing it in the correct format as well as not have my writing look so much like a preschooler—I know that doesn’t matter, but it’s just a personal preference.
In the next week, she gave me another two paged vocabulary list on family because I always got confused on the different family member terms. For example, I always wondered why the name for the aunts on my dad’s side was different than my that of my mom’s. Furthermore, there are different names for those that marry into the family, so they wouldn’t be called the same name for aunt or uncle. There’s also distinction with age in which the names address if the family member is younger or older, emphasizing the importance of age in Korea. After both vocabulary lists, my instructor would give me a quiz on the terms and have me create sentences using the vocabulary words. In terms of conversation skills, we would incorporate that a little bit as well during our vocabulary work as I would try to ask her questions in Korean or attempt to have a small conversation on the topic of the vocabulary words. For the family members unit, I also drew a family tree map for my family and labelled what the names for each one. I found this vocabulary topic to be highly interesting because I was able to finally understand why the names differed and what they mean. Although I am already familiar with the terms, I only said them because I was told to do so or from memory, so it’s nice to be able to say the words and know what I’m saying—it feels more intentional and also makes me feel nice because I realized how far I came from when I first started the SDLC lessons.
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