Towards the end of the semester, I have gotten busier with finals and haven’t been dedicating as much time to my language studies as I would like. I recently recorded the final podcast with my language partner, and thought it was fun to reflect on all the things we did throughout the semester. In class, I also presented my cultural research project on the Plastic Surgery Economy in South Korea. Although I didn’t get to pitch my idea before I did my research, this was a topic I found very interesting and genuinely enjoyed working on. Although it was hard to find reputable and academic sources on the topic, the ones I found were very informational and provided a good explanation of the cultural nuances behind this practice. Between the podcast and my final cultural presentation, it was also nice to see that I could speak Korean somewhat naturally, as in without having to practice beforehand. Considering my goal was to improve my conversational skills, being able to naturally form sentences with minimal hesitation was a big goal for me. In the future, I need to find another way to continue having conversations in Korean, such as through pen pals.
In my most recent grammar lesson, I learned how to say one hopes or wishes something to happen. While using the actual word for hope, 바라, is uncommon in speech, I learned different phrases that have somewhat the same meaning. One was “~해 주기 바랍니다” which is similar to “I hope this action is given/done”. My personal favorite was “~았/었으면 좋겠다” which translates like “If this is done, it would be good”. They all have different usages, and it was amusing to see how each phrase differs in formality and authoritativeness. The emphasis on formality in Korean in general is humorous to me, and even changes as small as a syllable or two differ depending on who you are speaking to. I mention this lesson on hope because I was also reflecting about my own wishes and hopes. Specifically, how I wish to use Korean in the future and my hope to continue studying and improving on my own knowledge of the language. My long-term goal is to be able to to be fluent in 5 languages. But even currently being able to speak four languages is very tedious work, especially in a monolingual environment. I find myself trying to speak in Spanish and French to anyone who understands the language, just for the sake of practicing. Since I spoke Spanish at home, I noticed that my Spanish has worsened after I came to college. Since I rarely encounter native Korean speakers in my day to day interactions, I need to figure out how I will continue speaking in Korean in the future. I think my best bet would be finding a pen pal, as I mentioned before. Especially since Korean has such a different grammatical structure than the other languages I speak, practicing is important for me to continue “thinking in Korean”, or producing thoughts or ideas in Korean rather than translating them in my head.
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