For the past roughly month of SDLAP 113 lecture, I met with my language partner Somyung and over Zoom. We started off our lessons and returned to the same concept of speaking in only Korean with occasional English only for words that we do not know with the intention of increasing our vocabulary and comprehension skills as well as helping to retain the language and practice our Korean language skills. For our first class we practiced in Korean things like introducing ourselves, describing our majors and interests, conversation starters, and deciding what movies we would like to watch to improve our Korean skills this semester. One other thing that I have consistently done is write one diary entry a week in Korean and then I send it to my language partner who corrects it and adds comments afterwards. This helps me to think and apply more of my Korean and practice my writing which helps improve my Korean as a whole I think.
In order to get an idea of what we would be watching we also watched the trailers after I suggested that we watch “영화 예고편” which romanized is young-hwa yeo-guh-pyeon. This translates to movie trailers in the English language. This helped as come up with five movies that we would like to watch called 7번방의 선물, 바람과 함께 사라지다, 타워, 웰컴투 동막골, 이웃사촌, and Minari. These movies are a mix of funny, historical, action, and slice-of-life and in all Korean to help us understand and see ways people relate to each other and talk in Korean.
The first movie that we watched was 7번방의 선물 which translates to Miracle in Cell No. 7 which had funny parts at the beginning but was also a sad movie as it tugged on heart strings. The movie followed the story (I will not spoilt the movie if anyone is interested in watching) of a mentally challenged man who was wrongfully imprisoned for murder, who builds friendships with the prisonmates in his cell who in return help smuggle in his daughter so that he can see her again. This movie was also based on the real life true story of a man which made this film even sadder in retrospect because of how the story played out.
One thing that we started in addition to identifying movies to watch is writing reflections on a scene or the movie as a whole in Korean which ensures that we took something back from the movie and learned something from the movies we watched.
One of our lessons was also learning proverbs and idioms which is 속담 and 관용어 respectively in Korean. One example of an idiom we learned was 사촌이 땅을 사면 배가 아프다. This in Korean translates to literally when my cousin buys the land, my stomach hurts. However, the proper interpretation is 가까운 사람이 잘 되는 것을 기뻐해 주지는 않고 오히려 질투하고 시기하는 경우를 비유적으로 이르는 말 in Korean. This translated to English is actually a metaphor for a case of jealousy/envy that you may have instead of being happy/pleased that someone that you are close to is doing something well. One idiom is 눈이 맞다 which translates literally to the eyes are right. The correct definition in Korean is 두 사람의 마음이나 눈치가 서로 통하다 or the two people’s hearts and minds fit well together which is similar.
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