This semester, I worked on a range of topics from writing diary entries to reading Korean myths to applying to jobs. Even though the things i worked on are disconnected, at first glance, they proved to truly build off of one another. The grammar structures I learned along the way could be applied to all of the activities I worked on from reading to writing. Furthermore, I learned a lot of useful vocab along the way, especially vocab related with work. Learning this vocab was essential for reading job opening posts and understanding requirements for applications. Furthermore, learning job related vocab made writing my resume and cover letter much easier. 

I wish my semester was not so hectic so I could have devoted more time to daily Korean study. Often, I found myself cramming my study in when I had a few open time blocks on the weekend or evening but I wish I could have studied in a more relaxed way. 

Regardless, I feel that I made a lot of progress. I am able to read job listings now with ease and read most things much faster than before. I feel that my reading and pronunciation practice with my language partner has really made it easier for me to put more difficult sounds and sentence structures together. Also, I feel that working my language partner has helped me better identify my weaknesses and problem areas. 

Of course, I experienced many difficulties. Being in an intermediate level can feel very frustrating because beginner feels far away but advanced seems impossible. I still required a lot of help in terms of editing my cover letter, resume, and other documents. While I was able to get across my main points, I still need help to come across professional or stylistic in my writing. However, those goals seem far out of my reach. Another problem is that in this level I start to learn grammar points that have the same meaning yet a very nuanced difference. As in, one sounds more "natural" than the other in some situation but the situations are conflicting and hard to really understand. At this level, some grammar stop having an answer to "why" and just become "because." Future learning should revolve around speaking situations and learning what is "natural" in which situation. 

Reflect on your learning experiences this semester. 
(a) What insights have you gained about yourself as a language learner and cultural explorer?  What did you find difficult?  What have you enjoyed?  How will you continue your learning?

I have learned a few things about myself and my learning style over this past semester. One thing I learned is that I work better when I have a textbook or complete language learning resource. Using an online service was often too little for me and left me having questions and wishing I could cross-reference things but that is often not possible online. Furthermore, using online resources can be distracting due to the ease of accessing a different website and just procrastinating. Also, I can retain information much better when I make time daily to study Korean, however, my schedule this semester has rarely permitted that so I have found that to be frustrating. In the future, I would set aside 30-1 hour a day to just focus on studying. However, I’m not sure how possible that will be once entering the workforce. I would say that this time restrain was the most difficult part of my learning process because I would often have to spend a lot of time refreshing the last lesson before moving forward with a new element. Also, I have felt my speaking get much worse since leaving Korea simply because I don’t use it as often as I used to. In Korea, I would have to practice speaking prompts often so that I could prepare myself for ordering food, asking for something at a store, etc. In terms of culture, this semester I spent a lot of time listening to Korean news and reading Korean cultural articles. I think that this has really helped me understanding Korean life better because these topics simply aren’t discussed in English. I listen to the daily Korean news every evening while doing homework so it has been nice to see the daily progress of new events and be able to discuss these events with my Korean friends. I hope to continue studying this so that I can understand Korean daily life and culture better.

I will continue my learning by continuing with the books I ordered and reading articles in Korean. I often use the app HelloTalk to find new people to practice Korean with, especially people whose English is not so good. It’s nice to speak with a range of people and get exposure to different style of Korean texting and casual speech. Since, I have accepted a job in Korea recently, I hope that will further push me to learn more and I hope to take some night classes while living in Korea.

(b) Which readings and learning activities did you find most useful?  What would you like to learn more about?

I found the cultural presentations the most interesting just because they push us to fully flesh out our interests but also because you can learn about things you didn’t consider before. For example, I never really considered the lower school system in Korea but it was nice to learn about it. These types of projects are nice because it is nice to learn about other people’s interests. Furthermore, I enjoyed the readings about dying languages and how to save them. I have never really considered the concept of language preservation and what that entails.

WorkinKorea.pptx

For my presentation, I discussed the goal of my semester which was to find a job. The goal of my presentation was the highlight the differences between the job hunt in Korea and America. Also, I wanted to make people aware of the challenges that native Korean applicants and foreign applicants face when applying for positions in Korea. Often, foreigners have a perception that finding jobs in Korea is easy simply because finding teaching jobs in Korea is easy, however, it is anything but. 

I didn't rely heavily on outside sources for this presentation. The presentation highlights a lot of my own experiences while job hunting. These experiences range from attending interviews in Korea to applying to and replying to positions via email.

For my final artifact, I am submitting the document that I worked on to prepare for my interview. This artifact shows my thoughts both in English and Korean and reflects a lot about myself and my ability to express myself in Korean. I ended up passing the interview and receiving the job thanks to my preparations. 

 Possible%20Interview%20Questions.docx

This week, I had an unexpected interview come up with a Korean advertising agency. The interview was the final step of my review process and if I passed the interview, then I would be able to join the company first as an intern and then segway into a full-time position. Because of this interview, I refocused my language goal for the week so that I would just focus on preparation for the interview. The interview took place on Wednesday night (Thursday morning KST). 

Since I wasn't sure whether this interview would be in Korean or English, I decided to prepare interview answers in both languages. Therefore, I first created a document of possible questions which I came up by asking my Korean friends about the interview questions they typically experience. The purpose of including the questions themselves was to make sure I could recognize the question that should trigger my answer. For example, "Explain your career goals? And how this company relates to your goals?" is roughly "경력 목표를 설명하십시오. 그리고 이 회사는 당신의 목표와 어떻게 관련이 있습니까?" in Korean. From there, I created my English responses and began translating some responses to Korean. I met with my language partner to translate more difficult passages and go over grammar points.

This turned out to be a challenging assignment because I had to imagine the full course of a conversation, the needed formality level, and how to keep the conversation conversational yet still professional.

Learning to read and write in Korean has definitely been challenging. I attribute the challenge to the grammar itself. Often in Korean, you have to read, write, and think backwards (from English). Since sentence structure is SOV, I can go through an entire chain of modifying verbs and adjectives before ever reaching the object of the sentence. One of the activities I've been focusing on with my language partner has been reading texts about 1-2 levels above my current ability to challenge myself. While reading, I look up unfamiliar words and grammar patterns and then discuss my "translation" or my comprehension with my language partner. From this, I've learning new reading techniques where I group words by grammatical function in order to streamline the comprehension process.

Writing and speaking are the two biggest components of my twice weekly Korean group lessons. However, the same issues with reading arise. Often I will write down a few words that I want to use and then rearrange them so they can fit in the grammatical structure correctly. In some cases I can write the sentence down correctly the first time but the rearrangement method is useful when using new grammar points where a reference is not available. Overall, it has been difficult to learn to read and write in Korean because it requires me to do some mental acrobatics. However, I do feel a great improvement compared to my ability at the beginning of the semester. 

This week, I adjusted my learning goal to include writing a Korean cover letter. Lately, my job applications have been required a cover letter in Korean rather than English. Therefore, I spent most of this week learning how to write one and then writing one. This process has actually been a culmination of all my efforts this semester since it has required me to talk about myself in great detail (in past, present, and future tense), with great use of form and style, and attention to cultural norms and standards. The process has been, in a way, emblematic of my whole Korean learning journey. I have had to combine a lot of disparate knowledge together to make a cover letter. A task that would take easily 20-30 minutes to do in English.

Once I finished writing my cover letter, I sent it to two Korean friends to edit and provide feedback. Currently I am waiting to receive my feedback but I am proud that I was able to write my cover letter in any way shape or form.

I found the readings this week especially interesting because I am bilingual. It felt like these readings offered a little speak at my own brain. I mostly consider my bilingualism between English and Croatian since I speak in those languages more than I speak in German or Korean. While I agreed with many of the points that the articles brought up, especially the points regarding focus, there were many that I disagreed with. For example, one researcher stated that bilingual speakers can completely block one language when speaking in another. I think this is pretty incorrect. Of course, there is the basic ability to suppress the other language but I still slip and use the wrong language. This is especially true when I am just starting speaking after being stopped for a while. In the flow of a conversation, my brain is able to "warm up" in the same way a car does so that I can easily flow in one language. But often in the beginning or when having sudden bursts of speech, the ability to suppress is much lower. 

I think the greatest benefits for speaking two (or more) languages are increased focus and a framework for other languages. Since bilingual people have to constantly make a choice between languages, there is a much higher level of focus. I have seen these in between my friends. I feel that my bilingual friends tend to pay more attention and engage more than my monolingual friends. Furthermore, all the languages I've learned have made it easier to experience and learn new languages. My biggest benefit has not be in grammar but in pronunciation. Since I usually use a wide variety of sounds, my accent tends to not be strong when learning new languages because I am more accustomed to the sounds they may use.

SCAN0117.PDF

SCAN0116.PDF

For my third artifact, I am including a reading exercise I did with my language partner. Basically, I read a story in Korean, annotated the story as went along, reviewed my understanding with my language partner, and then wrote down the unfamiliar words and sentences in my notebook. This exercise has been effective for me and I now repeat it weekly.

This week, my goal was to have a conversation with one of my friends in Korean. To prepare for my conversations, I wrote down a few things I wanted to talk to her about and a few terms I wanted to try using. While talking to my friend on the phone, I could easily understand her but I felt that my responses were shaky, messy, and a bit too slow. It was definitley not a smooth conversation on my end. I think this activity was good because it showed me that I do need more practice in speaking and that my writing ability does not translate perfectly into my speaking ability. Overall, the conversation lasted about 5 minutes until I ran out of things I wanted to talk to her about. At the end, my friend said that she felt I made progress since when she watched me learning Korean at Yonsei.

Within the past week, I purchased a vocabulary building supplement from Yonsei so I changed my goal for the week so that it would include this supplement. Since lately I have been focusing on grammar only, I feel as if I have not done much to improve my vocabulary. This supplement from Yonsei introduces vocabulary by themes, shows how they can be used, and then offers practice materials per chapter. So my goal for this week was to complete the first chapter within the book and use it to create new sentences with the grammar points I've been learning over the past few weeks.

So far, I have learned maybe around 500-700 words in my language. Maybe more, I'm not quite sure. However, I have reached the level where I can usually contextualize unfamiliar words with the words around them, which was quite a big step for me. I learned them mostly by learning first through themes (weather, food, sports, etc.) and then by reading. Reading was a big step because it takes constant reading to feel an impact but the impact can be seen after a few reading. Furthermore, reading is helpful because it shows you what verbs are typically used with which nouns and vice versa. Similar to English, Korean has it's own patterns and rhythms, which are not revealed to you by studying just basic vocabulary lists. Furthermore, I have studied by learning phrases and complete sentences. I feel that my acquisition of vocab is far behind my understanding of grammar so I still have room for improvement. The most important part of vocabulary is memorization and utilization but lately I have been slacking on both by simply compiling lists of words without reviewing them or using them. 

In my opinion, the greatest loss is the loss of culture. Not only do you lose a form of expression in a culture, but you lose the ability to engage with that culture in the future. For example, you can't contextualize artifacts from that culture or understand remaining texts. Furthermore, this loss impacts direct descendants from that culture more than others. By losing their culture and their ability to engage with it, descendants can feel as if they lost a piece of themselves. This is exactly why many people learn languages because they have family members or descendants who speak those languages. People often learn languages in order to feel closer to family members and closer to their own backgrounds. I can say that was the motivation for me to improve my Croatian and German.

This week my goal is to improve my listening skills or to at least test my listening comprehension. I will be going about that by watching a TV show or podcast in Korean, writing down my thoughts about the show, and then watching/listening to it again with English subtitles and then comparing the differences. 

I'm just now starting on this goal. So far, I have selected the TV show that I plan to watch. I'll be listening to a 15 minute segment of it so that I can make the assignment more manageable. I chose a variety show since it's in a talk show format and people will use natural expressions, unlike dramas or cartoons where the expressions tend to be abstract and written specifically for that purpose. The show comes with English subtitles so I'll be referring to those during my second portion. I will be keeping a list of vocabulary as I go about the exercise.

For my learning activity I decided to teach a friend how to make their family tree in Korean. Korean offers a wider variety of familial terms than English. For example, there are terms to differentiate the age or "ranking" of uncles within your family, different terms for mother's side of the family than father's and so on.

To teach this activity I first showed my friend my family tree and went through the different terminology and then I had them make their own family tree, first in English. Once the tree was set up, we worked on translating the different titles so they could better connect the concepts. After, they were done making the family tree, I used it to quiz them and see how many terms they retained. For example, "what would you call your uncle bob?" and so on. 

Within the moment, it seemed like my friend was grasping the activity well and could piece together answers while I was quizzing them. However, I'm not sure I could say they retained the knowledge. If you don't have much interest in a language or you won't ever use it, it really becomes an "in one ear, out the other" type of situation. If anything, the activity was most useful for me because I had to be able to answer my friends questions and compile the information beforehand.

My learning goal for this week was originally to write Korean entries in my diary, however, since I completed that during the first week, I decided to change my goal. I recently joined the app "hellotalk" in which native speakers and learners communicate together to strengthen each other's language skills. My goal for this past week was to post daily on the app in a diary style and also chat daily in Korean. I felt that putting the language in use would be a more effective goal. So far, I have done well on keeping my goal. I only missed my daily posting once and I've been chatting with 3-4 people daily. It has been helpful to see their messages and see how they create call and response patterns. Furthermore, it's been very exciting to see people use grammar points that I've been studying lately. It feels somewhat rewarding to be able to notice the grammar points and understand the intentions behind the messages.

I think knowing the history of a language can be helpful during the language learning process. For example, the Korean language heavily relies on "loanwords" which are words from other languages, typically from former ruling powers of Korea such as China and Japan. Chinese has such a large influence on the Korean language that Chinese words are called "Sino-Korean" rather than being categorized as loanwords. According to the book "The Korean Language" by Ho-Min Sohn, Sino-Korean words make up 60% of the total Korean vocabulary while native words make up 30% and loanwords make up 5%. Written Korean utilizes actual Chinese characters, called Hanja, and Korean children are taught how to read and utilize these characters throughout their schooling. Chinese numbers are also used for counting most things in Korean ranging from time to prices to the number of classes you have in a day. Native Korean numbers are not used as often as the Chinese number set is. Understanding the history of Chinese and Korean is truly vital for learning Korean. I would think the same can be said of many languages. Languages can be impacted by religion, ruling powers, and social structures.

So far, my language learning has been going well. I have been able to explore topics with more freedom than when I was in Korea because my learning isn’t as regimented. I have also really enjoyed being able to blend resources together for my lessons such as using Naver Webtoons or my poetry books as learning tools. It’s made learning feel more natural and interesting for me. I have really enjoyed learning through tasks. That has allowed me to really focus my language learning on topics of interest and then directly apply my new knowledge. For example, writing my Korean resume was a lengthy process but from it I learned a lot about work related vocabulary and verb endings used exclusively for writing. Along the way, I had to learn how to read job descriptions and find job openings because what good is a resume that is never used? One task can naturally lead to another.

Since Korean is a high context language and Korea is a high context culture, an understanding of both can be very helpful. One example of that would be my presentation from earlier in the semester where I discussed the diversified use of the pronoun “우리” in Korean language and how that term reflects cultural values of inclusiveness and togetherness. Another example of that would be the lack of the use of the pronoun “you” in Korean. Koreans feel that using the pronoun “you” creates distance between the speaker and the listener and can show disrespect. Often you refer to someone by their name or title which shows that you acknowledge them and their status within your relationship. Often, between friends, the word is completely omitted. For example, 밥 먹었어? means “have you eaten?” but it literally translates to “food eaten?” This same pattern persists for a variety of phrases. If a foreigner were to include the pronoun “you” in these phrases, it would show their poor understanding of Korean and Korean culture. Furthermore, if you understand the culture around the grammar points or word choices, it makes them easier to remember. It can be hard to remember that you should use “our” in some instances and “mine” in others but if you consider the Korean cultural aspect around it, it becomes much more obvious on when you should use “our” or “mine” when referring to something.

I think improving my pragmatics would be a huge improvement to my Korean and it would let me sound much more natural. Often, Korean speakers drop particles and condense verb endings to make speaking easier and quicker, however that can cause for a loss of meaning for foreigner listeners. It can be much more difficult to discern between the subject and object of a sentence if particles are missing that denote that. Also, I would like to be able to find ways to reword my sentences so they sound as natural as possible. However, I think that level is many months away from me and I will need to learn the extended, proper, form first before I can imagine using the condensed forms. 

My progress so far has been on pace with my learning plan so I have finished all the lessons I listed. However, I feel that I may have made my pace too quick. I feel that I spend all of my time learning the lesson that I don't have a chance to practice and memorize it before moving on to the next one. So now, I have decided to slow down a bit and go back and review and truly practice around the sessions. I feel that I'm currently walking on a road and paving it as I walk over it. I'm not giving myself enough time to truly build the foundation before I move to next lesson.

This could also be because the time I have blocked off for learning and review is much less than it should be. For example, I try to spend 30 minutes to 1 hour on Korean daily. However, when I was in Korea, I had a 2 hour daily Korean class and roughly 30 minutes to 1 hour's worth of homework every day. So I would end up studying 2.5-3 hours a day along with the luxury of being immersed in Korean. My other classes were not very demanding so I was easily able to meet the demands of my korean class but it's much harder to do that at Richmond where almost all of my classes require daily homework. On top of that I have my part-time job. 

I plan to slow down a bit on the learning I do and focus on reviewing instead. I will also try to find ways to make my daily Korean practice more of a priority and more of a fun, relaxing time for myself. Lately, it's been hard to find the motivation to get through the lessons and exercises but I hope to turn that around. 

For my second artifact I will be submitting my Korean resume and Korean inquiry email. This email roughly explains my credentials as a candidate along with my questions for the responder: what requirements do you have for foreigner applicants? do you accept foreigner applications? do you have any openings I qualify for?

Inquiry%20Email.pdf

dalila_resume.pdf