Last week, I met with my language partner, Jason, for our first meeting. We introduced ourselves and shared about our backgrounds, majors, and interests. He asked me what types of media I have previously learned Korean from, what I would prefer going to the future, and we decided that songs, videos, shows were all good materials. I told Jason that my goal was to start speaking in Korean and have conversations with friends/roommates. Although I already knew a little bit of Korean, I still felt a bit nervous to actually speak it with someone else. After that, we decided the main focus would be on speaking practice, but starting from the beginning. Jason suggested that we start by reviewing vowels and consonants so we could have the pronunciation down.
I was able to recognize the characters, but I realized that saying them out loud and being able to pronounce them was still something I struggled with. But Jason listened to my pronunciation, corrected me when I made mistakes, and modeled the correct sounds for me to repeat. I repeated the sounds several times until they felt similar to Jason’s, and I asked him to repeat when I felt like I was a bit off from the pronunciation of sounds like a soft K versus a hard K. Hearing the sounds directly from a native speaker was much more helpful than just listening to audio recordings.
I plan to keep practicing the sounds that were the most difficult for me, and gradually start speaking basic sentences. I want to practice by listening to kpop songs and podcasts to reinforce the sounds and learn more words. I’m also doing a lot of self-studying in between meetings with Jason, so I can learn more effectively and not rely on him to teach me everything. In addition, I want to experiment more by speaking by myself or to an AI (just any online platform that allows me to have free conversations).
One success was that I realized I was able to pronounce hanguls and words pretty naturally and Jason said I already sounded so good, which gave me a relief because I was scared I was going to butcher the pronunciations, although it is a part of learning. A very minor not so successful moment in my learning process, which was when I learned on my own, I was getting confused with the words that people use to say goodbye when they are the one leaving versus when they are the one staying. That really confused me a bit because it looked very similar.
In the short term, I’ll keep focusing on improving my pronunciation and getting comfortable forming syllables and words smoothly. In the long term, I want to move toward using basic greetings and short conversational phrases with confidence. To do that, I’ll have to keep practicing every day on my own, but also push myself to make mistakes and actually speak more during our meetings.
Overall, I feel both excited and nervous. I feel excited because I could feel myself getting closer and closer to actually speaking Korean, and nervous because I’m speaking to a native speaker. But no matter what, I will keep practicing and improving.
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