This semester, I’ve been able to establish a more solid foundation of basic Korean language. Thanks to my language partner, Jason, I was able to speak Korean more confidently, and I was able to learn about the basic building blocks that anyone learning Korean would have to keep in the back of their heads.
Some things I learned about myself as a language learner is that I would learn much more when I am able to create outputs by speaking and doing something like presentations than by taking in information passively. I tried a lot of language learning online through youtube videos, and reading audio books for kids online, but none of these seems to have made me improve more than the act of just speaking it with somebody. Not just in language learning, but also other classes where memorization plays a big part in how well you perform on tests or quizzes, etc. I really tried to memorize things but I eventually realized that it was not working for me.
Another thing I learned was that language learning really does take a lot of tries until you feel truly comfortable speaking the language. One of the challenges was that at first, when I spoke Korean, it felt very weird. I understood what I was saying, but it felt like the person speaking wasn’t me yet, and it was almost like I was just trying to imitate Korean speakers instead of it being a part of me. But then I saw a post that said we should think that every language that you learn is forming different parts of you and I found that very inspiring.
For activities that I liked from this class, I would say it is teaching my classmates something about the cultural aspects of the Korean language. The time we taught each other about something more general in our target language was fun too, but for the cultural presentation, I felt like I was able to learn more about not just the language, but also incorporate aspects of the people and history behind it, which are things I like to research about. And teaching others about these things helps me reinforce what I’ve learned too, so it's a win-win situation. I think this is something that I would like to continue doing when I’m learning or researching other languages in the future. I could possibly make a website or a blog on it or a podcast (which I tried before but only recorded two episodes) talking about how different areas of human geography, history, and language ties together.
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