My experience learning Korean has been going well, but I have noticed that it is going slightly slower than priorly anticipated. With that said, I have truly been enjoying everything that I have been learning. I have realized that the most helpful and beneficial practice that I have been participating in is when I am with Emily. I feel like I have been getting the most benefit when I work with her on the alphabet and pronunciation. My lessons with Emily have also been the most enjoyable.
During my first lesson with Emily, we first focused on the basics of Hangeul. I became familiar with the basic vowels, progressed to the combined vowels, and then learned the consonants. During this lesson, I also learned the strong consonants that change the aggressiveness or the tenses of the basic consonants. Two of the basic vowels sound very similar to me, but other than that, the lesson was quite easy. She also taught me about the ending consonants and how some of them make different sounds when they are at the end of a word. After this lesson, it was up to me to practice what I had learned, to memorize it, and to improve my reading skills. There were a few words that were made from a vowel and a consonant, so we practiced some of those. A few examples are 키 (key), 자 (ruler), 혀 (tongue), and a few others. After this lesson, I created a deck of flashcards that included all the sounds that I had learned, and I practiced them over and over again to strengthen them in my memory.
During my following lessons, we worked on adding different symbols together to create words and phrases. We began with basic words such as time, today, school, and student. As I got better, she began having me work on different phrases, such as thank you, sorry, hello, to eat, to prepare, etc. I would sound out the word, repeat it back to her, and then we would go through all of the words again. This helped me with my reading skills, listening skills, and even my writing skills because I put every word into my notebook. It was really interesting to see the different fonts in Korean because sometimes Emily would write a symbol one way, but then on the computer it showed up another way, and sometimes this would confuse me. Overall, reading and memorizing the alphabet has taken a lot of repetition.
Over the past two lessons, we started to look a bit more into grammar. We first started with endings and knowing when to use eyo (에요) or ieyo (이에요). By adding this, it is a formal way of saying “to be”. When the noun ends in a vowel, you use eyo, but when it ends in a consonant, you use ieyo. Then, most recently, we briefly looked at Korean markers. There are three types of markers: subject, topic, and object. Emily walked me through each one to explain what it is used for.
- Subject Marker: Used to show who or what is doing something, it introduces something new or important.
- Topic Marker: Marks the topic of the sentence and what it is about.
- Object Marker: Marks the objects, shows what receives the action, used with action verbs.
Because we were only able to briefly go over these, I am still left with a few questions. I am not sure if they are added onto a noun or a verb, or where in the sentence they should be placed. We did not get to actually practice much with them, but hopefully in the future, I will get to add them to words to create proper sentences.
These are most of the things that I have practiced with Emily so far, and they have been able to fulfill multiple different parts of my weekly syllabus. When I have done my own practice, I have been doing a lot of listening practice. When I have a little bit of free time, I have been changing the audio into Korean on Disney movies and watching/listening to those to get better at my accent and pronunciation of different words. I have been listening to them in Korean with English subtitles, but this weekend I was talking to someone from Serbia who learned English through watching the TV show Friends, but he said that he both listened to and read the subtitles in English. I plan to now do that, but with Korean. I have also been utilizing the YouTube channel “Talk to me in Korean”. I like to watch the different videos that give examples of daily phrases or words used in actual scenarios. A lot of the time, they will say a word and then play a clip from a show or movie to see someone using it in real time. So far, my own personal practices have been primarily focused on listening and speaking.
As I continue to learn Korean, I am excited to work with Emily and also incorporate more activities from my syllabus. Recently, Emily was talking to me about possibly reading a passage, then she would read it, then I would read it again and do my best to comprehend it. This is something that I did in high school when I was learning Latin, and I thought it was really helpful. Although my main goals focus on speaking and listening, I think it is important to be well-rounded in my Korean skills and add in reading and comprehension. Along with that, I want to continue doing what I have already been doing, but I want to add in writing practice. This is something that I have in my syllabus and want to put more of a focus on. My original plan was to have a journal where I would write simple sentences, but currently, I am not advanced enough to do this. As I continue learning the language, I can start doing that, but for now, I might start writing down random words that I use in my daily life and practice the pronunciation. My flashcards were very helpful in memorizing Hangeul, so I will create another deck for my vocabulary words. I have seen a lot of progress, but I know I have so much more to learn.
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