My Korean class has been really good on track of my language learning plan presented at the start of the semester. We have worked through self-introduction, weather (my Task 1), description of my room, and also the menu items I like from South Korea (my Task 2), etc. I also learned about a traditional festival – 개천절 (Korean National Foundation Day), the myth behind it, and history it’s related to. We’ve also talked about Sejong the Great who created hangul so that people from lower and middle class could also read and use it, which are part of my Task 2 as well. For every topic, we would have a list of vocabs we need to learn and also phrases or sentences that we can use in such a context. This helps me builds up my vocabulary and also makes me more familiar with the words. As a result, when we were watching a YouTube video, we would identify the vocabs or phrases we just learned with Korean subtitles. The YouTube videos are all from native Koreans so that we could also learn more about different aspects of South Korean culture. After that, we would discuss a lot around the topic we just learned, and Jenna would share her experience in Korea or what she observed there. I’ve learned a lot about Korean culture by communication with my language partner Jenna, such as the Korean high school uniforms, dishes with Kimchi and various sauces, and the traditions of festivals.
For my language learning so far, I found that language is largely influenced by culture. For example, the word “반찬” in Korean means side dishes. However, in Chinese, there is not such a word that directly related to this, because we don’t have side dishes at a meal. Also, nowadays, there are a lot of Korean words that are derived from English and German, as the world entered the Internet decade and thus the popular words or phrases can be easily spread out. To be honest, before I take the class, I didn’t expect to learn a lot about South Korean culture besides food and festivals, but now I realize that it is unpreventable, and unrealistic, to not encounter much Korean culture when learning Korean. It was a really interesting change of mind for me.
After 7 weeks of classes, I have definitely built up my vocabulary and use of phrases. My listening has improved by trying to listen to the Korean YouTube videos, and I feel more comfortable speaking Korean to my language partner too. My reading has improved a little bit as well since now I’m comfortable with reading short sentences in recipes or weather forecasts, but I’m still trying to improve my speed in reading. I’m planning to work on that by doing reviews on all the contents we have done so far and also reading more simple Korean posts on Naver.com to practice my reading.
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