This past month has gone by very quickly in regard to my Korean learning. It is crazy that it is already so close to the end of the semester. My lessons with Emily have been going very well, and the homework that I have been assigned has been helpful. I am now getting the hang of the sentence structure and where words should go when I am trying to formulate a sentence. I do need a lot more practice with it all, but that is something I know I can work on over the summer. Emily has given me a beginner level of knowledge that I can continue working on and practicing in order to meet proficiency and become bilingual.
Our lessons have been very grammar and writing-heavy, but I actually prefer that because that feels easier to translate into speaking/listening than going from speaking/listening to reading/writing. I have done some practice with making short sentences and knowing how to follow the subject, object, verb pattern. One of the most interesting things is that they add (ayoh) to the end of sentences, but there is no direct translation of that. Emily said it basically just means that the thing is just existing; it is just something you always add.
Another important grammar piece we went over was the Korean verb tense and conjugation. I had shown Emily some words from my Korean dictionary, but she explained to me that the endings on most of them are not ones that you would use to talk to people; they are just there because they are the dictionary form ending. After looking at my dictionary, we went over what endings should be added to a verb stem. There is an easy pattern to it. I learned that when you are informally speaking in the present tense, you remove 다 and you add 아 when the verb stem ends with ㅏ or ㅗ. When you have a verb stem that ends with anything else, you add 어. Once again, once you memorize this, it is easy to pick up on and be able to read and write.
This session was helpful because Emily would give me a verb and then ask me what the ending was. The additional part of difficulty was that she would say the verb in Korean out loud, and then I had to sound it out and spell it out. Then, on top of that, I would add the ending to it to make it present tense. For example, one of the verbs was “to laugh”. That looks like this in dictionary form, 웃다. I would change this by taking off the ending and turning it into 웃어. This is just one example, but we went through many different ones.
I know that there are so many more things that I need to learn, with both vocab and grammar, but I think that even since my last reflection, I have learned so much. My time with Emily is soon coming to an end, but I am looking forward to our last couple of sessions together and what else I can learn.
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