In all honesty, I am struggling with my language learning process. My original statement is that I hoped to accomplish stronger conversation skills. I feel frustrated with myself, and stuck on where to continue. Currently, I am trying to work on finding a method that can help me improve my listening skills. When I meet with my language partner, I feel as though I am not able to understand her as much as I would like, and I find myself getting lost very quickly. This has honestly discouraged me greatly, and I found myself not putting in as much effort as I used to. Especially considering how many years I have been studying the language, I don’t feel like I am at the level I would like to be at. The drops app is not what I had hoped, and they only allow 5-minute lessons every 10 hours for free. I try to listen to audios on YouTube and videos of conservation in hopes that it will help me improve, but I see no results. I wonder if this is a skill issue, or rather something else mentally that is setting me back. Especially with my other classes starting up, I find myself forgetting my language studies. I hope that I can pull myself out of this mental hole and continue to do my work, both for my grade and in order to be able to complete my personal goals.
I am still continuing to use the grammar lessons from howtostudykorean.com and find them very helpful. More specifically, I have started to learn how to quote phrases, which is really helpful in forming sentences. In conversation, it allows me to rephrase what someone else has said or ask for clarification about what someone else is talking about. With my language partner, I ask her questions about the grammar lessons, and I practice reading out loud the sample sentences provided. I find that this helps my pronunciation and helps me get used to the new grammar structure and be able to use them more naturally. I bought myself a mini notebook to dedicate solely on phrases and fun facts that I find during my learning. On the front I wrote “This year, I want to be able to have a conversation. This year, I want to learn more cultural traditions”. Because these goals are a little vague, I also want to work on specifying the kind of lessons I have with my language partner. Specifically, ones to help me understand her better and be able to mentally translate what she is saying. One idea I have is having her speak to me, and I write down what she is saying, either in english or in Korean. Ideally, this can be used to help me listen to the new grammatical structures I am learning. But I think that we can use this exercise for basic phrases, just to get my brain used to hearing the language. When I took French 200 last year, the drill exercises were similar.
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