This week I tried a new learning strategy by making a playlist with songs in Korean, that I had listened to prior and wanted to learn more about. I started by listening to them daily and oftentimes leaving the playlist on repeat in the background while I studied and did homework. I found that It was really effective at having me practice reading, speaking, and especially writing skills. However, it is really time-consuming and it takes me a while to read and understand the lyrics. I liked to break down each sentence and figure out the vocabulary I knew, and then search on Naver Dictionary for definitions and practice sentences. My hangul character writing is currently pretty awful and elementary school students and I have the same handwriting skills. It is really to just write down the characters and understand the deeper meaning and cultural context of a song. I had to reduce the number of songs I deeply dived into and dissected because of my time constraints. I could only get to Seoul- by RM and Jasmine by DPR-Live, because of the intricate vocabulary and idioms used. In the future, I would like to increase the number of songs to 5 and also rewrite the lyrics and vocabulary into my iPad. My handwriting is a lot more clear and prettier than in regular pen and paper and I can also add pictures with GoodNote.
I also went to New Grand Market this past Friday with friends to get ramen and other snacks we can't get on campus. I tried the "authentic" Korean food at the Noodles restaurant inside, it was mediocre in comparison to the dishes I've eaten while in Korea. I had the 짜장면 (black bean noodles) and 탕수육( sweet and sour fried pork). The 탕수육 was too sweet for my taste and they poured the sauce instead of letting us dip it. Which is very similar to the "how do you pour cereal debate", I prefer to dip or 찍먹 because it maintains the crunchiness instead of getting soggy. But the 짜장면 was really solid and filling, I want to visit again and get the 비빔밥. It's sad that Richmond doesn't have outstanding Korean food like Miami, New York, or Nova does but at least there is some selection available. New Grand does have a wide variety of ramen and Korean snacks, I found myself stopping to try and read everything I saw. I bought two types of ice cream I craved, one which was the Samanco which is a red bean stuffed fish-shaped ice cream sandwich. The other was a Power Cap, which is soda Slurpee flavored frozen ice cream, that was one of my favorites from visiting Korea. I also saw the corn ice cream which my host dad designed while he was working as an ice cream engineer at Lotte.
My goals for this week are to practice my writing and speaking through the playlist immersion method and by studying with the "Talk to me in Korean" workbook. I also found Eggbun to be a useful resource since they create scenarios for you to respond by texting in Korean.
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