Reflecting my learning experience this semester, I learned a lot about what I wanted to achieve, but I could have done a better job on being efficient and utilizing the learning materials. In the beginning, I decided to sign up for Self Directed Language Class to further develop my skills on Korean as I believed my language level has not improved since I moved to America. I wanted to focus especially on reading and writing on the topics of business and politics.

As a language learner who did not start with a new language like other students in class, it was hard for me to get more in depth with the language skills that I achieved already as a native speaker. Some of the goals that I set up in the beginning of the semester were hard to achieve since I could not practice writing skills as much as I wanted to. On the other hand, I strongly believe that my reading skill has improved a lot over the course of reading the articles and journals. Reading them with the dictionary helped me to understand the sentence structure and their relationship in context as well as it gave me a better sense of comprehension. Having a discussion with Evelyn after the reading also helped to organize my thoughts. Conversation assisted to clearly comprehend on topics of the articles and let myself to express my thoughts in organized and clear manner. I enjoyed getting to know the political aspect of my country as I did not know much about it before taking this class. Evelyn explained very passionately and I decided to research further on this topic of political culture for my final cultural presentation.

I eager to continue the learning process in my level of language achievement in the future by reading more articles by myself and watching the news more often. I noticed that I could get better at it as I expose myself more often to political news and business professional articles. Moreover, I will strive to enhance my writing skills by practicing the grammar rules and structures in real life examples as I hope to become a better written communicator in the future.

The most useful language learning tool were my language partner, dictionaries, and news articles. Having a language partner guided me in a way to achieve my learning goals more efficiently. I was able to learn new vocabulary words by utilizing the dictionary well as well as it taught me to use the words in right context. Lastly, practicing reading with articles challenged me to learn more professional and intermediate stage of language, which contains a totally different content from daily conversation I am used to.

At last, I would definitely like to take this class again if I get a chance in order to develop my language skills further. Furthermore, I am interested in taking a language other than Korean as I watched my classmates enjoying it. It was a great opportunity for me to know my level of language skills and to be motivated to strive for further development.

Capture of a Korean drama 미생, that is related to a business professional topics that I learned. Evelyn and I had a discussion after watching a 30 minutes clips from this drama.

http://www.koreatimes.com/article/1091879

https://search.naver.com/p/crd/rd?m=1&px=364&py=872&sx=364&sy=580&p=TAXkMdpVuEwsscuwNXhsssssstC-301628&q=%BE%C6%B8%F0%B7%B9%C6%DB%BD%C3%C7%C8&ssc=tab.news.all&f=news&w=news&s=KHxiC9C5cHhHvItHKu5Gyw==&time=1512807298448&a=nws*y.outtit&r=24&i=880000C2_000000000000000003976186&g=008.0003976186&u=http%3A//www.mt.co.kr/view/mtview.php%3Ftype%3D1%26no%3D2017120816164998416%26outlink%3D1

Link to an article that talks about the struggles of Korean cosmetic companies and how foreigners are a huge fan of this. It also talks about the decline of stock market price and the cause and effects of it.

Impeachment of President Park and the issue within

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0dGwW3sxT0

SAAD problem between China and South Korea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ1IMRvSf-0

These are the links that I watched for in class discussion regarding the political issues in Korea. 

Screenshot of a powerpoint that Evelyn and I went over in order to learn about business professional way of communication in process reporting, marketing, and researching.

As i was interested in learning more deeply into Korean politics, I would like to share a political culture in Korea. According to Gabriel A. Almond, he stated that "It is a set of attitudes, beliefs, and orientations of the people towards the political system" in his thesis. He was also the first person to brought up an idea about political culture. The characteristics of political culture are that every political system has distinct political culture, that it is a part of general culture and that it influences political system. It also falls into four different categories which are parochial, subject and participant. I see four problematic characteristics from Korea's political culture which are alienation, resistance, formalism and regionalism.

One of the strongest characteristics of Korean people is collectivism. Korean people think in a way that "we" move together, we "do" together, and "we" live together. Therefore, the idea of community is very important to Korean people. Which also links to a matter of family. As English speakers say its "my mom", Korean people usually say its "our mom" or "our wife" rather than "my wife". These phrases are probably formed by culture in the past, and it affects our way of thinking and acting by affecting us. Moreover, the hierarchical system in family is treated very importantly. 

It was very interesting to learn about how time expression in Korean relates to a nature, in particular, the universe. For example, a year is expressed in a notion of sun whereas a month is expressed in moon. Article explains that this is originated from looking at the sky when figuring out the time in the past. Traditionally, Koreans tend to divide up a day into five sections which are dawn, morning,  lunchtime, late afternoon, and evening. Moreover, Koreans do not have separate words for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The word for morning and breakfast is the same, the word for lunch and afternoon is the same, and the word for dinner and evening is the same. Likewise, it is interesting to learn about time expression in Korean.

The writing system of my target language, Korean, is complicated. The order of subject verb is always the opposite from English and there are some particles that does not even exist in English. It will be very hard for a foreigner, especially English speaker, to master the writing style of Korean. There are some complicated grammar rules and sentence structures that are necessary to be kept in order to make sense out of sentences. Context wise, I think Korean language is less direct than English as it uses a lot of analogies and idiomatic phrases. Therefore, knowing them is also important.

I focused on the idea of community and "jeong," of Korean people. Jeong can be explained as a heart or love, but there simply isn't an equivalent in English since its part of a culture. Jeong contains affection, compassion, sympathy, community and attachment. Often, this might be the reason why Korean people are very sensitive at trends as they are less likely to be individualistic. It is not hard to find people with the same styles of clothes on in Korea. This idea of following trend might make one as a "cool" person, but I believe that following too much of a trend ruins one's individuality and creativity.

Since I am a native speaker and wanting to learn deeper into my first language, I don't recall learning a sentence structure or grammar structure of a language. However, I definitely think that learning a structure of language would improve my comprehension skill when I read and to think in more logical ways. Encountering dense articles or news, I always use to break up one sentence into multiple parts and read them again. I would break up the sentence into parts and try to understand separately at first. Then, I would put the sentence together to make sense as a whole.

There is a definite line between formality and informality in Korean language. Formal style of saying things are usually used when the other is older than you are, or someone you respected while informal style is used in daily languages between friends and people who consider themselves to be in a similar age range. 

Korean people traditionally thought that having an appropriate courtesy towards elders is very important matter. From the culture that elders are respected, the language has formed to have polite word. For example, there are different words for meal, sickness, asking and dying. These are not used in every situation where one is older than the other, but it should be used appropriately in Korean culture.

This semester, my biggest goal is to read news articles and to listen to news freely. Therefore I would like to work on this with Evelyn by reading and discussing about particular news topics. I expect that my experience of trying to read news articles to get gradually better as I gain more confidence and speed in reading. As I moved to the states, I was still able to have a daily conversation in Korean with friends, but I was not exposed to any Korean books or articles. Some of the phrases and wordings are still difficult for me to understand, but I will learn to make sense out of it by looking the relationship of sentence before and after.

I took a final exam!! It was a summation of everything we learned so far in this class. I think I did well on reading and listening part as I got relatively easy topics of news articles. However, I had to think a lot for writing sections as I had to pay attention on both context and grammar structures. I also realized that I am not familiar with writing in Korean at all. Moreover, speaking section required me to talk in business professional way, and I had to prepare a lot for this section also. Overall, I think I achieved what I planned for this semester and therefore I'm glad with my learning plans and outcomes.

As we are wrapping up the semester, we reviewed the whole thing that we learned throughout the semester. We talked about business professional way of conversation as well as the political issues that Korea is facing. It was mainly focused on reviewing for finals, so I didn't get to learn new materials. I will be tested on reading, listening, speaking and writing and I thought I should study for the parts that I am not too familiar with.

This week, we decided to watch a movie that is called "the classic." It is an old movie from 15 years ago, but I could still relate many of my experiences and emotions to the movie characters. It was mainly about the love story, and the point of view shifts from a daughter's life to her mom's early age life. The class was little different from other normal classes, but I still learned more about Korean cultures and the way they talk in dialects.

As we talked about the after effect of the SAAD in a negative way, we looked at some positive things that are likely to happen in near future. South Korea will be hosting the winter Olympics for 2018 season. As the Olympics is a worldly festival, we are expecting more travelers to come visit our country. Travelers usually spend more money on food, transportation and lodges; therefore, there is an expectation that economy will be boosted up again as it stimulates the economy. As more travelers come, the cosmetics companies won't have to struggle too much as they used to.

Today, we talked about the effect of SAAD problem in South Korea. As Chinese people traveled a lot to South Korea, there were some shops and merchandisers that are rely on the Chinese people; however, as soon as they are gone, these shops do not know what to do. There also is a trend that Chinese people tend to like Korean cosmetic, music and food. As there was a boycott law from the government, they had to stop demanding for the Korean products. As a result, one of the biggest cosmetic company is struggling and its stock has been decreasing since then.

As we shifted our gears to news articles, I wanted to talk about the SAAD problem that Korea is facing. SAAD is a program that United States army established in South Korea in order to supervise the North Korea's missiles. However, China doesn't like that idea as they claim that their national security is in risk. Therefore, China stopped being supportive to South Korea as they boycotted all Korean made manufactures in their land. Furthermore, they banned their citizens from traveling to Korea. This could lead to a economic problem in Korea, but it seems like it will ease off in a near future.

Starting this week, we are going to talk more about politics in news articles. Today, we talked about how President Park got impeached. We discussed about the causes and effects of the problem as well as the newly elected president. President Park got into a scandal where she abused the power of president. She ended up going to a jail, but the after effects are still bothering Korean society. Some people argue that there was no righteousness for her to go to jail, but only several of the citizens truly think so. Samsung and a women named Sunsil Choi is also part of this huge scandal.