Reflection%20paper%232%20Ruofan%20Jiang.docx

In Week 13, because all three of us really want to travel to Korea, we decided to discuss the top tourist attractions to visit in Korea. So when later we do have a chance to visit there, this would be really helpful. One of the place I want to go the most is N Seoul Tower. I've been to there once but I could not have a chance to enter into the tower. I heard of that no trip to Seoul is complete without a trip to the famous N Seoul Tower. I want to check out the observation decks, which might give me an unbeatable panoramic view of Seoul, which might help me to take perfectly amazing pictures. Also, couples always visit the N Seoul Tower, so this must be so romantic. There’s a restaurant that is technically an observation deck in and of itself. This is a great place for a last meal in Seoul or for a date. 

In Week 14, we discussed the age system in Korea. It is really different than in China and in U.S. In the United States, people's age is due to their birthday. For example, I was born in 1998 Sep30th. So I am 20 years old. WHile inKorea, age is calculated by the first day of the year. And as you were born, you are 1 year old. So I am 21 years old in Korea.  

In Week 11, we watched a really famous and popular Korean film, called Along with the Gods: The two worlds. It is about a story of the death of an ordinary fireman named Kim Ja-hong and three grim reapers, who escorts Ja-hong to the afterlife, where he will be assign a public defender to represent him in 7 trials in 49 days to find out how he lived his life and where he ought to spend the rest of eternity. Although we watched it with subtitles, I still tried to watch it without looking at the subtitles. Different from the beginning of the semester, I found out that I was able to understand part of what they were saying. And I have to say, this is a really great film. I was moved a lot. 

Therefore, in next week's break, I watched its series 2 as well with my friends together. 

In week 9, we learned different major holidays in Korea. Such as Lunar New Year, Korean Thanksgiving (spring festival) and Hansik (eating cold food day). I was pretty interested in Hansik because it derives from an ancient Chinese practice in which people ate cold food while not using fire for a period of time. On this day, like other major holidays, people perform ancestral rituals and Seongmyo.

In week 10, we learnt about the numbering system again. But this time, we were doing this more systematically. For the China system, it sounds really similar to Chinese Cantonese.  

At the beginning of the week, we continued doing the complex vowels and consonants. And then we moved to learning how to order food in a Korean restaurant. We firstly learnt several basic questions, such as "what food do you recommend the most" "please give me more side dishes" etc. We also did role play, one of us pretended to be the waitor and the rest of us ordered.  

We started to learn more vocabs on fifth week. First, our language partner started to tell that there are two different systems of numbers in Korea. One is Sino-Korean(china system), and another is Korean system. We were actually so confused at first because the numbers, depending on different occasions, are used differently. After several practice, we were able to memorize them form 1 to 10. Also, we learned a bunch of emotions vocabularies. 

On Week six, we had a quiz on alphabet. Our language partner gave us the phonetic translation in English and we would write it down in Korean. 

We continued learning the Korean alphabet in the third week. We learning the alphabet by playing games, using boards and textbooks. We also watched an episode in a Korean Talk Show with English subtitles. I firstly tried to catch the meaning without looking at the subtitles. I failed... The episode invited people from all over the world, who have learned Korean. (Actually they are master in Korean) They are from China, France, Singapore, etc. And they are asked to talk about one or two hard time during their Korean learning period. For the forth week, we still kept learning the alphabet and started to use consonants and vowels to form characters. Like our names.  

The first week of our class, we are asked to set up our goals for this semester. And these goals should be realistic. We needed to list 10 goals, which is our learning plan for this semester. Moreover, we have our own long term goals. For me, mine is to traveling to Korean without a guide. And later on second week, after setting up the goals, we started to learn the alphabet. According to our language partner, reading and writing are the easiest to learn in Korean, once we learnt the Korean alphabet, we could be able to read and write!

This is my favorite Korean band, which is CNBLUE. It is a screenshot when they were at the Music Bank(a TV show) in Korean), performing a song called "you're so fine". I could say that CNBLUE is one of the main reasons that I decided to learn Korean. I have been their fan for almost 6 years. 

This is a screenshot of a really famous Korean youtuber. Her name is Pony and she is a genius of doing make-up. Now she has her own brand and more than 3000000 followers in youtube. People loves her because her make-up teaching video is really helpful. (at least I think so). 

In our weekly Korean course, our language partner taught us how to do daily conversation when we go a Korean restaurant and how to order food there. 

몇 명이세요? ___명이요.

예약했어요/예약 안 했어요

제일 맛있는 걸로 추천해주세요

이것/저것 주세요

반찬 더 주세요

잘 먹겠습니다/잘 먹었습니다

맛있어요!

또 올께요!

I did this in a Korean restaurant. Hahaha but I guess I have to practice more on my pronouncation . 

This is a screenshot of my favorite Korean TV program, which is called Running man. The MCs and guests were to complete missions at a landmark to win the race. The show has since shifted to a more familiar reality-vatiety show concept focused on games. I started to watch when I was in middle school, about 7 years. I just love it so much!!!

This is a picture shoot by me when I was in Boston. I wen to eat this Korean BBQ with my friends in Boston. Actually, I think it looks really like Japanese BBQ...Or maybe because they just look the same? But anyway, it was delicious! 

This is a screenshot from Wechat, which is a chatting app used in Chinese. It was Devin saying hi to me and introducing his name. I replied with "how was your day". And he answered "it was good". 

During our language class, our language partner helped us translate our Chinese name into Korean Name. My name (Jiang Ruofan) is translated to Jang yakbeum. (sounds really weird)...And the image below is from my instagram story. 

I went to new grand mart with my friends. I ordered a combination of Jjampong (짬뽕) and Fried rice. It was so good. 또 올께요! 

If I was granted a research funding to study Korean linguistics, I would go with the culture. The reason why I choose culture is that personally, learning a language is because of the interest of that culture. Just take myself as an example, I am learning Japanese is because I have interest on Japanese food and animations. I am learning Korean is because I like Korean music and dramas. First of all, we gonna start from the history of Korean because history is a part of the culture, too. Also, learning from the origins helps learning a language more structured. After researching on the history and origins, I think we then can go to the interesting part. Students could research on whatever they are interested in, such as food, music, drama, etc. From my perspective, Interest is the best tool to learn a language.

Actually, when we were learning the alphabet, we learnt a little bit of writing under the instructions from our language partner. We also did a little bit of writing recently. For Korean, if I have to choose between typing and writing free hand, I will definitely go with writing free hand because it is hard to use a new keyboard that I have never seen before. Moreover, when writing Korean on paper, you need to arrange the letters (consonants and vowels) into square-shaped clusters (syllables). But on a computer keyboard, you can simply type the letters in a linear sequence. The computer will automatically assemble them into syllabic clusters. It does help typing to be easier but as a language beginner, I would want to practice more on arranging the letters especially I am weak in this part. Well after discussing with my classmates, we agreed that the very subtle nuances that make two completely different words. Thus, it is very hard to listen and write the words. Also, when doing more complex sentences, the grammar needs more attention.

The history of the world's languages is largely a story of loss and decline. it is quite realistic to expect that half of these languages will be gone, their last speakers dead, their words perhaps recorded in a dusty archive somewhere, but more likely undocumented entirely. What causes this? How do languages come to be spoken only by elders and not children? There are a number of bad answers to these questions. One is globalization. Because when globalization starts to appear, people are more likely to choose to learn the international language, for example, English and then abandon their own language for convenience. For instance, nowadays in China, there are a lot of kids, when they were born, their parents sent them to the called “international school”, which actually is a English school. They will be taught by English and they also talk in English, too. This makes these children are unfamiliar to their mother tongue, Chinese. As a Chinese speaker, I think this is really pathetic. We should be proud of our own language, at this base, we should learn other language.

Korean is one of the world's oldest living languages. Originally written using “Hanja” (Chinese characters), Korean is now mainly spelled in “Hangul”, the Korean alphabet. “Hangul” consists of 24 letters – 14 consonants and 10 vowels – that are written in blocks of 2 to 5 characters. Unlike the Chinese writing system (including Japanese “Kanji”), “Hangul” is not an ideographic system. The shapes of the individual “Hangul” letters were designed to model the physical morphology of the tongue, palate and teeth. The Korean language may be written using a mixture of Chinese ideograms (“Hanja”) and a native Korean alphabet known as “Hangul”, or in “Hangul” alone, much as in a more limited way Indo-European languages sometimes write numbers using Arabic symbols and at other times spell numbers out in their own alphabets or in some combination of the two forms. Because of its greater variety of sounds, Korean does not have the problem of the Japanese written language, which some experts have argued needs to retain a sizable inventory of Chinese characters to distinguish a large number of potentially ambiguous sounds.