I believe that when learning a language, sometimes “getting the gist” of things is more productive than trying to memorize and understand every rule and word. In my experience, no matter how long you study a language and how much you may know, you are always constantly learning new ways to communicate. While actively engaging yourself in a language is intimidating and a struggle at first, it is the best way to see how the things you have learned are applied in real life. It is something I experienced both when learning French and when reteaching myself Spanish. But during this semester with Korean I had seemed to forget that language learning is not as straightforward as other kinds of learning. But I pride myself on being able to get past that fear and gaining more process in my learning as a result of that. After completing a sub-unit of lessons from the website I have been using, I decided to take the quiz. In the past, I would memorize vocabulary and study extremely hard for these quizzes and tests. But this time I decided to take the quiz without any studying, as it was based on understanding grammatical tenses I had been using and seeing throughout the semester. I ended up doing pretty well on the quiz, and was pretty satisfied to see how I essentially found another way to learn that is equally as effective.
I mention this because my latest couple of lessons have been on “difficult” words that either don’t have a direct translation, have multiple usages, or are added to a sentence in order to add a mood or feeling. These are my favorite things to learn in a new language, as it shows the different nuances in a language that often need further explanation in a translation. Also, being able to properly use these kinds of words makes one sound more like a native speaker, and also makes conversation more interesting. I also love being able to see where these seemingly obscure words get their meaning from through morphological and synthetic patterns. One example is the word 왠지, which is used when the speaker is unsure about why something is occurring. Essentially, the word is a combination of the question word for “why” (왜), the grammar to say “in that way” (그러다 to 그런), and the grammatical structure to say something is unknown (~어/아 지). Another interesting connection I saw was the different usages of the verb “찍다”. Some examples of where it is used are when “taking” a picture, when “stamping” something, when “writing a period or dot” on paper, or when “dipping” food into a sauce. While these situations all use different verbs in English, the umbrella usage of this verb in Korean is “when touching two objects together”. This reminds me of an article I read in my Anthropology class theorizing that language changes how people think, specifically how people think about concepts like time or color. But I think this can also be applied to the verbs used to describe an action or event. An English speaker sees someone dot a piece of paper and associates it with writing, while a Korean speaker associates the actions with touching two things together.
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