At our last class, we reviewed the “useful expressions” worksheet and started practicing having conversations based on the worksheet. Ms. Kim selected a couple of phrases she thinks would be useful when visiting Korea. When purchasing goods, I could ask 얼마예요? (How much is it) and 한 개 주세요? (Give me one please). When finding directions, it should be 지하철 어디에 있어요, which means “where is the subway.” And if I’m riding buses, I should ask 어디에서 내려요 (which stop can I get off). We practiced each phase several times to help me with getting the right pronunciation. After that, we started on the Hangul reading practice. I still struggled with pronouncing words that formed by more than two symbols, but I was able to get the easier ones correct, such as the child (아이), women (여자), baby (야자), mother (어머니), teeth (이빨), etc. We memorized the list of words together. I found the pronunciation for words such as “빨” to be the hardest since it involved combined symbols.
We also learned verbal endings in Korean grammar. 습니다/ -ㅂ니다 is used to end a sentence when speaking in a formal setting and would be more polite. And ㅂ니다 fits when the verb stem ends in a vowel, while -습니다 works when the verb stem ends in a consonant. Korean honorifics have been a vital part of our language learning. To not be confused by the differences, Ms. Kim suggested I learn every phrase in the “formal” way to begin with. We discussed honorific words, honorific subject particles, and when to use them.
We took some words and analyzed their parts. The verbs I learned are formed with a verb stem and a verb ending. In the verb “살다” which means “to live,” 살 is the verb stem and 다 is the verb ending. And in the verb, “하다” (to do), “하” is the verb stem and “다” is the verb ending. Using examples from “useful expressions,” I also learned about the past/future tense ending. During the class before we discussed the differences between “I’ll eat well” (잘 먹겠습니다) and “I ate well” 잘 먹었습니다. This time I learned that I should identify the verb tense from the verb endings. For example, 습니다 is the present tense verb ending, 았어요 would be a form of the past tense verb ending, and 겠어요 is the future tense ending. This reminds me of the verb ending in English -- “ed” and “ing.” I’m glad that from there I can begin to understand the sentence structure of the phrases I learned by learning grammars. I also plan to memorize the verbal endings and start to learn how to apply them next class.
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For languages that are written in characters, such as Korean, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to begin learning without any emphasis on literacy. Historically, literacy would have come much later if at all to speakers. Characters, as I have come to understand them, do not represent individual sounds, but rather syllables. Perhaps once one learns the language orally it would be easier to associate sounds to characters later.