Now looking back, I realized we went a little bit backwards, but if anything, I think it worked out because these past couple weeks we worked on particles—the unit I found the most challenging and struggled with the most during the fall semester. The reason for why I think it worked out for the best is because I was able to understand why some of the sentences—the examples I wrote down for each vocabulary word during our last “unit”—were written with certain endings. Throughout my journey with SDLC, I’ve realized I learn the best through examples because I can fill in all the missing gaps I had when learning about the earlier topic. I think that may be due to the fact that I’m too impatient to go learn the process of things, so I just want to skip to the end. But in this case, I’m able to do so—to some degree—because I already have prior knowledge attributable to my experience being a Korean American and growing up with parents that constantly spoke Korean to me. For each particle, we would go through the significance for each one and when it was used, then my instructor would have me write up to three different sentences for each one, so I fully understood how and when it’s used. Since the sentences took up some time, the particle work took up couple weeks of our time, but I still call that a success because this was a unit that I couldn’t even get through last semester. So, I’m glad that I kept up with practicing my Korean on my own during winter break because it definitely has paid off by allowing me to comprehend our lessons a lot easier and pick up on the new “units”.
Our lessons didn’t entirely consist of particles as we continued to work on the vocabulary words I’ve learned. With the vocabulary words, I worked on forming sentences using the particle endings to work on both topics at once which I found to be extremely helpful. Even though I had the vocabulary words down pretty well last week, I found myself to struggle when trying to recall on some of the words or I would mix up some of the words together—I didn’t keep up with studying the words after we moved onto particles. So, I finally understand the importance of repetition and reviewing previous concepts to help with retention and, overall, my Korean in general. I also didn’t have any newer vocabulary lists given because I didn’t really know exactly what terms I wanted to learn, and a lot of the basic terms I already knew, so we decided to move onto other topics, and I would just ask her what certain words meant if I ever was confused. Since my instructor is my roommate, this was really helpful, and I found myself to ask her a fair amount when we would watch Korean dramas or variety shows together which was really nice.
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