For the past few weeks, I have been working on telling time in Korean, telling what I did during different days or time and using conversational phrases in daily life. My main goal was to feel more confident in speaking and responding to questions. I hoped to reach a point where speaking out words and phrases feels natural to me, almost like I won’t think about whether what I’m saying might sound right or wrong. Working with my language partner Jason has helped me a lot with my confidence in speaking. I would repeat everything that he says in Korean and then speak on my own. Over time, I started noticing that I hesitated less, especially when using time expressions or simple daily-life phrases.
Jason also talked a lot about the daily life things in Korea, such as the PC방 (computer room\cafe), coin machine karaokes, and the popular food combinations like 치맥 (chicken and beer), which made our meeting more interesting and we were able to compare these places in Korea with different countries like U.S., China and Japan. To build on what I’ve learned about Korean so far, I plan to just keep on learning new vocabularies and right now I’ve mainly learned how to say a sentence in past tense and present tense but I will start to learn the future tense too. For these strategies, I’m thinking that I could try to use flashcards or hand write the words, although in the past, I never believed that using flashcards would work for me. And I’m starting to experiment with speaking to AI bots in Korean, although I can’t really hold a really long conversation.
Emotionally, I am currently feeling enthusiasm, not really a lot of frustration, mainly because I wouldn’t want myself to lose motivation if I end up being frustrated over little things, like mixing up the sino and pure number systems when I’m talking about time. Working on language alongside cultural topics, like learning about the PC방, 치맥, Karaoke, the subways lines, has helped me understand Korean daily life beyond just the vocabulary. I realized that knowing the language lets me engage more deeply with Korean media, like K-dramas, or appreciate why certain foods and activities are so popular. Comparing Korean life to those in the U.S., China, and Japan made me see how these cultural elements are shared between so many places. A successful experience, I would say is whenever Jason introduced a Korean phrase or word and I understood it immediately and responded in Korean without needing to translate in my head. This made me realize my thinking is starting to shift more naturally into Korean, at least for basic ideas. A not so successful experience, I would say is typing Korean using a PC keyboard. Because the keyboard is all in english, I don’t remember where all the vowels or consonants are located, so I end up pressing every single key, which can be very time consuming. So based on these experiences, I revised my long-term goal to focus on outputting rather than inputting, keep building a daily vocabulary routine, read more audio books, and learn to at least build a muscle memory of where all the Hangul letters are on the computer.
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