I think the biggest insight I gained as a language learner I how my past language learning experience was able to help me to learn a new language. I took Japanese for 4 semesters and really enjoyed Suzuki Sensei’s class. I wanted to continue but I had too many other classes have to take, so I stopped taking Japanese. In my senior year, I wanted to try a different language and that is why I am taking Korean and this class. After a semester of studying Korean, I have learned a lot not only about Korean as a language but also learned a lot about Korean Culture. With my partner, we were able to go over the Korean alphabet, basic introductions, common vocabs, number system and grammar rules. Among these topics we have covered, I found out the grammar to be the easiest. Because I have studied Japanese in the past, and Korean has very similar grammar structure, subject, object, and verb, I was able to get used to the grammar very quickly. While I am taking Korean, I also experienced similar obstacles when I studied Japanese. One of the obstacles is that I have trouble to memorize the alphabet. It took me a long time to fully memorize the Japanese alphabet Katakana and Hiragana, and I had the same trouble when I was going through the Korean Alphabet. Korean has crazy Alphabet, there are 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and there are also double vowels and double consonants, which is very confusing. I had a lot more trouble when I tried to put the consonants and vowels together to form words in Korean. One of the most enjoyable thing for me during this course was having discussion about Korean culture and politics with my partner. I learned a lot about Korean culture from the movie parasite and many current events. We had very interesting discussion about the cult involved with pervious president and shin chun ji cult right now. We also talked a lot about the Nth room case and feminist movement in Korea. We also found a lot of similarity between Chinese culture and Korean culture. I am going to continue my learning from watching more Korean movies and TV shows. There are a lot of good Korean movies that reflect Korea’s social problem which I can use to continue my learning about Korean culture. One of the most interesting and useful readings we have read this semester is the international phonetic alphabet. The international phonetic alphabet and the mechanism under different phonetic really helped me to understand the Korean pronunciation. Korean is a very different from what I have studied, there are a lot of different phonetic sound in Korean does not exist in Chinese, English, Japanese, or French. After the International Phonetic lesson, I had understood the mechanism of Korean and helped me to have to different approach to Korean.
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