While learning Korean these past weeks, I have found that I feel like I am translating things twice. It is interesting because Hangul was foreign to me so first I would have to translate the symbols of Hangul into their respective letters/sound in Korean romanization, and then slowly work to pronounce words. So, I am able to now translate written into its respective English letters to form the sound of the word. For instance 학생 is student so it translates to hag-saeng. However, if I were to say hag-saeng, that is still foreign to me so then I have to learn what that means then itself. I wonder if eventually it will be more natural to automatically go from seeing the hangul and knowing what it means without going through this process. Besides this realization, these weeks we focused on reviewing material and expanding on things we touched upon weeks before. We also worked on listening to the language and learning about the culture.
One of the things we reviewed was the verb “to be” which can be 이에요[iaeyo] or 예요[yeyo]. We went over these and their usage difference when if last word of the sentence ends in a consonant, you add 이에요 (ieyo) and if the last word ends in a vowel, you add 예요 (yeyo). I learned how to use them to answer questions. For example if you want to ask “Is it juice or water?” If its water, you say 물이에요 since water is 물[mul] and ㄹ is a constant so we add 이에요 (ieyo). If it’s juice, you say 주스예요 since juice is 주스[jeuseu] and — is a vowel. This makes a lot of sense. I think listening to a lot of Korean music has helped me have an ear for it so has been easier to understand.
Last time, my language partner Jannette introduced 는/은 and how 는 is used when the last letter of the last syllable of the subject is a vowel and 은 is used when the last letter is a consonant. In the past weeks, we learned how to actually use these topic particles in sentences which was super cool to finally form sentences. First to say “I am” it’s written 나는 while to say “a person is” it is written 사람은. This is because of vowel versus constant endings. So then so say “I am a student”, we say 나는 학생이다 where 학생 is student. The interesting part of Korean is that there aren’t any articles like “a” or “the” in Korean grammar. This is very different from English so I plan to work on this a lot for it to understand it better.
During the last week before Spring break, my language partner Jannette, Mallory, and I watched a Korean movie called “200 Pounds Beauty”. This movie illustrated the predominant beauty standards in Korea which is built on an extremely slim body figure appeal, small face, v-shaped jaw, small lips, straight eyebrows, flawless skin, and larger eyes. The film shows how an overweight girl changes herself into a beautiful and thin women with the help of plastic surgery in order to be accepted. It illustrates that an overweight girl deserves bad treatment, while a slender girl with has every right to be treated as a princess. If you are beautiful, you can even get away with causing a car accident as seen in the movie.
Jannette was telling us how plastic surgery is very common in Korea and parents will ask their kids for graduation if they want plastic surgery. This reminds me of a friend in high school who was an international student from Korea. She was a trainee for a K-pop group and they eventually told her that she needed to get plastic surgery on her nose. However, my friend didn’t want to so she ended up leaving instead. This breaks my heart to hear how extreme the standards can be in some instances.
The week before we watched this, we learned that to say goodbye, it depends on who’s leaving. So 안녕히 가세요 [Annyeonghi gaseyo] is used when you are the one staying and someone else is leaving while 안녕히 계세요 [Annyeonghi gyeseyo] is used when you are leaving. During the movie, it was cool to hear these differences along with some other basic words such as yes(어), no(아니), and really(진짜).
Further, during the movie Jannette was so awesome and ordered Bonchon Chicken to introduce us to Korean cuisine. We got Korean friend chicken which in Korean is 치킨(chikin),a loanword from the English word chicken. Bonchon is a Korean word meaning “My hometown.” Jannette was telling us how it is common to eat fried chicken along with beer or soju as a combination. I actually see this in Korean dramas all the time but this was my first time trying Korean fried chicken and it was so different compared to American fried chicken which I didn’t expect. It was very sweet, crunchy, tender but also spicy. If you get the chance, you should definitely try it! Further, I am really enjoying learning Korean during the break and have started watching a drama called Itaewon Class to work on hearing more Korean as it’s grammar and sentence order is quite different from English in some aspects.
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