Due to everything we’ve been working on, we finally built up to working on conversational skills. In the past couple of lessons, we started to try having conversations between us, without a script, in which she would ask me a couple of questions and I would have to try and answer. Though it did help with the fact that she gave me a list of phrases that I always wanted to know such as “do you need help with that?”, “is there anything I can help with?”, and other phrases used when you’re trying to offer assistance. This is because I always found myself in situations with Korean adults where they’re cooking or working on something that could require assistance, and I never knew how to respectfully ask if they needed help or how to offer my help—which is something that has always bothered me about. That sheet and all our prior scripts have helped me when it comes to figuring out how to say certain things when asked, since the sentence structure for Korean is backwards compared to the English language. It was also funny because when we were working on sentence structuring, I found myself to start structuring my sentences in English backwards because my brain was so fried in trying to think backwards for Korean.
During the conversations, though I did have all this information that we’ve been working on the past couple of months, it was still very difficult in forming sentences and trying to translate what I was trying to say in my head into Korean. I asked her several questions, in Korean, how to say certain words. But even then, it was difficult on figuring out how to phrase certain sentences because the sentence structure is still something I’m trying to get used to. It’s also difficult because I still don’t have an expansive Korean vocabulary bank, so I find that there’s a lot of missing gaps when I’m trying to talk about something or explain something. We didn’t really know how to go about which vocabulary words to study because I’m unsure of that myself, so the plan was to just ask when I didn’t know a word. However, I found myself not knowing many words, so we’ve been creating a list for every word I ask to look back on when I need to—what’s also nice is, there’s sentence examples below each word so I can see how it’s used in a sentence.
The conversations have been slow and grueling on my brain, in which I have a long way to go before achieving my goal of becoming proficient in Korean. But I have high hopes in being able to do so due to how far I’ve come already with my Korean skills. Even my parents were surprised at how much I’ve improved with the fact that I can read at an average speed and also text in Korean—I’ve been texting them in Korean to continue working on my skills. Overall, I’m really proud of myself and definitely will continue to find ways on improving my skills during post-graduation.
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