This semester, I focused on learning about Korean culture and learning basic Korean words and phrases. Before this class, I was particularly interested in contemporary Korean cultures, such as Korean films, TV shows and K-pop music. But after a semester of exploring Korean culture and Korean history, I found myself to be intrigued by Korean history, Korean social structure, and the evolvement of its language as well. Therefore, now I tend to connect what I saw in contemporary cultures to the broader Korean culture and history. It was great to have classmates who are learning the same language, as we got to share our thoughts and understanding of Korean in class. It was also helpful to learn about other’s learning process even when we were learning different languages. I will continue my Korean learning by enrolling in the Self-Directed Korean class next semester. And in the meantime, I will continue exploring Korean culture on my own.
I believed that I learn best through listening and speaking. I found Korean to be easy in that aspect as I could basically slowly spell out the pronunciation and read after mastering the Korean alphabet. But at the same time, Korean is hard since it has a very different grammatical structure from any language I learned before. I believe this class has been really helpful since it made me actually look into grammar, which is fundamental but not something I would focus on first when studying a new language. I also found the phonetics to be challenging, since at first, I had a hard time to identify the sounds and connect it to the correct terms.
I really enjoyed learning about the language family, and seeing the relationships between different languages fascinate me. This course also taught me the importance of preserving languages. I used to think it wouldn’t hurt if the world only uses a couple of major languages as our ways of communication since it connects people better. But by reading and watching linguists’ effort to preserve and save dead languages, I realized that losing a language also means we would lose precious knowledge about the world. I remembered in class we were taught that losing a language means we are also losing a way of looking at the world. This was particularly true as languages encompassed much deeper meaning than we thought, like science, arts and much more. A class exercise I enjoyed was the presentations. I think sharing our understanding and interest in language and culture also helped us to grow as language learners.
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I definitely also enjoyed learning about language families. I think I learned a lot of basic things in linguistics that help me a lot when learning Korean. This class also reminded me of how much I love my culture and my mother language.
I totally agree with how interesting it was learning about the importance of language preservation. I never really thought of the significance of the impact of losing a language. Watching that interview really showed me all the other human achievements that we are losing at the same time.