If I get a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of my target language and culture, there are two major topics that I would want to investigate in. I would first love to investigate the Korean language itself and how it evolved or was created in history. Language is always changing as the society develops and this could be found in English how as the technology grew language has been simplified to abbreviations and text/emoji language. This always made me wonder if this was the same for the Korean language and instead of researching how it changed, I want to know the reason why it had to change the way it did in order to survive and meet the needs of society. When I am researching this topic, I could use different structural components learned in class such as phonemes, vowels, consonants, and morphemes to observe the changes and how the language is formatted.
Another topic I would research about is more related to the culture of the language. I want to know more about the media influence such as Kdrama. In my investigation I will try to find out how Kdrama first started to become popular and what kind of influence it has to people. I also want to know the benefits to kdrama and rather if foreigners can actually learn the korean language by just watching kdrama alone. This would be like one of the ted talks that we watched in school where they observed a baby learn the language by listening to the sounds that their parents make. In my research I could examine few foreigners and see how they start understanding the language over time.
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I agree that media can influence language learning a lot. My language partner and I often watch a lot of things together in Vietnamese. We would watch TV shows and documentaries and television broadcasts and then discuss what we watched later. It really helps me be more engaged in language without putting me on the spot. I learn to retain information in my target language and then reiterating it in my own words.
The culture of the language sounds like a really interesting topic to get into! Korean dramas, in my opinion, seem to be huge influences in the way people act. I have a suspicion that’s why Koreans can be somewhat dramatic when it comes to things, but who knows! There definitely has to be some correlation you can find between the two.
Rachel, I really like your topics! As someone who was born in Korea and has been speaking the language for a long time, I am a little ashamed of myself for not knowing a lot about the history and its development. I think it is so important to be aware of the culture and its background, not just the language. Thanks for sharing!
I like your research proposal of studying the benefits of watching kdrama to learn the language! I think it probably could help, though based on the article we read in the beginning of the semester about needing to speak the language to become fluent, I wonder if listening is enough?