For this week’s SDLAP 111 lecture, I met with my language partner Somyung over Zoom. We started off our lesson by talking about how our weeks were in Korean. This was in an effort to start practicing one of our goals for this semester which is to speak in only Korean to help retain the language and keep practicing our skills. In addition, many studies actually show that one of the best ways to improve one’s Korean language skills is to practice using the language itself. I also thought it was pretty useful because it allows for as much cultural immersion as possible and it helps me to be more comfortable with the Korean language in a class setting once more.
In this lecture, we translated the song 여러분 which means Everyone which was a song originally made in the early to mid 20th century. This specific rendition was done by the artist 소향 (Sohyang). To begin, we (Seok Joon and I) switched reading every two lines of the lyrics (가사 in korean). Next, we started to translate the lyrics from Korean back to English and Somyung adding helpful comments to steer us in the right direction if we were wrong in our translations. One interesting thing that I noticed from practicing this exercise with translating the lyrics was that not all of them were meant to be taken literally yet they had different meanings kind of like Korean idioms. It was neat because it ties into Korean culture and shows how interconnected the language is even in music. A specific example of this is the lyrics 네가 만약 괴로울 때면, 내가 위로해줄게. These two lines literally translate when you might be lonely, I will lift you up. Although similar, the real intent of the lyrics were if you are lonely, I will comfort you and be there for you. Another example was the lyrics 내가 눈물이 되리. These translate to ``I will be your tears”; however, in the context of this song it is supposed to be taken as “I will cry with you.” These two examples provide some context into the song, which is meant to be an uplifting ballad that provides comfort to the listener that may be going through hard times. To finish this exercise, we also listened to the song afterwards so that we could better understand the singer’s intent behind her technique and better appreciate the music.
One other skill that we practice which was beneficial to us would be reading the lyrics in Korean because it helps with reading comprehension. For the last remaining time of our class, we looked at a sample STAMP test online and tried out one of the reading sections. To my surprise, the level of difficulty of the section we tried was not as hard as I thought it would be. And I was able to get all 5 of the correct answers for the 5 questions in a matter of minutes. I think this is great news because it means I am in a potentially good spot to be able to take the test and get a good score in the future.
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