In this week’s korean lesson, we watched a little bit of 예능, a korean variety show, with the title kang’s restaurant (강식당) season 2. And in the past two weeks, I was able to not only watch parasite but also able to learn (관용구) or idioms in Korean. This is an important concept to learn because it provides a way to converse better and more comfortably in real life conversation and is something that native speakers generally have a strong grasp of. In addition to learning how to speak, I was also able to improve my listening and writing ability by writing down all the idioms and writing their definitions with some notes in both Korean and English. I have also started to write flashcards for each of my words and phrases learned so that I can refresh my memory on all these words and concepts and to constantly grow in my Korean ability.
As stated before I figured out that I am an active learner, and that it is best for my learning and knowledge to be actively engaged and participating. Each lesson I constantly contribute my ideas and try to decipher the meanings with Korean words and concepts I know and also do not know at the same time based on roots which strengthen my connection and memory of the language. This helps speed up how fast my grammar, enunciation, and overall comfort with the korean language. For example, this idiom (눈이 높다) roughly translates to “eyes are high”. But the idiom actually is used to mean someone that has high or unrealistic expectations. It is generally used to represent a person who has unreasonable expectations for a potential significant other. The strategy I adopted three weeks ago has really helped. I am now rewriting the phrases or whatever topic we are learning and making personal notes to be able to make connections with has helped. Doing this also helps with enunciation because I can slow how I pronounce words and phrases to make my enunciation more clearer and authentic to that spoken in Korean without as many breaks or sounding broken which make me sound less like a foreigner. My goal of increasing my fluency as best as possible while developing my current skills has not changed as I still want to learn more and improve. Another thing I did this week was watch the Parasite movie in full amidst its recent success at the Oscars which would increase my understanding of Korean and help me appreciate a film that has been beloved in Korea the past year and I have also kept up with a Korean drama to watch and hear people speaking Korean so that I can pick up Korean more quickly and be able to apply it in the right contexts quickly. This helped me to look deeper and to think more about Korean culture, the social hierarchy, and see cultural norms in Korea. All these topics and ideas provided me a deeper understanding of Korea and see a part of society that is almost neglected because before this movie, those people were suffering a lot and not given much thought or attention but after the movie more people became aware of them and started to learn more about them. I will also soon be selecting an intermediate book from the link Dr. Marsh-Soloway shared.. I have already put this in my learning plan and am planning to start on this process in the upcoming week. I acknowledge that I must first do this if I would like to read some more advanced books like the Korean history which I also plan on doing to improve my Korean to the best of my ability as quickly as possible to be able to take the TOPIK exam one day hopefully within the upcoming year or two.
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