In this week’s class, we started on learning “useful expressions.” This includes greetings, self-introduction, simple questions and more. With this worksheet, I plan to learn how to start some basic daily conversation and learn more words through practices. For example, 안녕하세요 means “how do you do?”, 만나서 반갑습니다 means “nice to meet you,” and 천만에요 means “you’re welcome.” I also learned that there are two ways of saying goodbye in Korean. If the other person is leaving and I’m staying, I should say 안녕히 가세요 (annyeonghi gaseyo). But if the other person is staying and I’m leaving, I should instead use 안녕히 계세요 (annyeonghi gyeseyo). There are also several ways to say “thank you.” I learned two of them “감사합니다” and “고맙습니다.”
I also learned about two phrases with different tenses. Ms. Kim told me that if I visited someone’s place and had a meal with them, I should say 잘 먹었습니다 (I ate well) after finish the meal. And before I start the meal, it would be polite to say 잘 먹겠습니다 (I’ll eat well). 었 is the past tense and 겠 is the future tense here. I found it to be difficult to pronounce 잘 correctly at first. But after we practiced each phrase through basic conversations, I was able to improve many words’ pronunciation. Through conversation, we practiced Q&As that can be answered with 좋아해요/안 좋아해요 (I like.../I don’t like…) and 알아요/ 몰라요 (I know/I don’t know). This is a nice way to practice. Because Korean follows the SUBJECT (S) + OBJECT (O) + VERB (V) structure, I can use these phrases to end my answer and start with what I heard in the question.
Another challenge I faced was reading Hangul. Although I can pronounce each individual vowel and consonant, I’m having a hard time pronouncing them when the symbols were combined together. Ms. Kim helped me to practice through Google translator, where we can combine symbols into different words and practice reading them. I plan to use a similar way to practice on my own after class. I also received links of Korean alphabet consonant songs on Youtube, which are fun ways to remember the sounds. I think both the google translator and the videos are very good tools for me to learn how to pronounce the words correctly. Since I will be able to repeatedly listen to their sounds, it helps me to follow. After this class, I would practice with the “useful expression” worksheet and try to memorize each phrase and its meanings. We plan to have simple conversations about each other’s day next class using the expressions I learned this time.
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