Yewon Son's Posts (41)
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The process of moving or travelling for the holidays, is already an established facet in the culture and modern history in Korea. Just as Thanksgiving time is famous for people traveling to go see their families, Chuseok (Korea’s thanksgiving) is famous for this phenomenon. People travel from all over the country to be with their families and it is a national holiday. For this cultural artifact post, I chose to post a screenshot of a text message conversation I had with my parents. I was coming back home for Thanksgiving break, and they had not seen me all semester until then, so they were very anxious to see me. They were also really worried because the bus I was on kept running into traffic.
The first text in the conversation is my mom responding “okay~” to something I had said earlier. The next text was me saying “I should have about two hours left” to my parents to let them know when the bus was going to get to my destination. The next text was my mom sending the letters o and k in korean (literally meaning ok). This is a common abbreviation and slang used in texting in Korean. I then said “looking at google maps, I have about an hour and a half left” to my parents to let them know my estimated arrival time. I then said complained to my parents saying “I think there is actually a surprising amount of traffic” because I had not expected to be so late. My mom then responded saying “even at this time?” because I had left fairly late and had expected to avoid the traffic. She then sent a sad face emoji. The letters ㅠㅠ are often used as sad face emojis in Korea because they look like someone crying. My mom “alright…” after her sad face emoji because she was sad about the traffic and how late I was going to get home. About an hour and a half later, I texted them saying “hi~ I’m arriving in about 47 minutes” with the 하이 in the beginning of the text literally being the phonetic spelling of how hi is pronounced in Korea (ha ee). I then complained saying “the bus is arriving almost an hour late..” with three more of the sad emoticons that my mom had used earlier because I was upset that the bus had been delayed and that there had been so much traffic on my way there. My mom then said “dad will leave the house to match your schedule” meaning he would time when he left the house to pick me up to my schedule. This was a fairly standard conversation that seems very commonplace that I would have with my parents around this time. Since my family and I have been living in the United States, we do not celebrate the Korean Thanksgiving of Chuseok as much as our other relatives do in Korea. Instead, we celebrate with the American Thanksgiving and so the normal feelings about traveling for Chuseok were put for the American Thanksgiving. It is interesting to consider how living in a different country can make a holiday like Chuseok, which is so central for most Koreans, so easily replaceable.
This is a picture of a popular Korean dish called 두부김치 which translates to tofu kimchi. It is a fairly self explanatory name because usually, the dish just comes with fried kimchi and large chunks of tofu. It is often eaten as a 술안주 which is the name for a drinking snack. Korea has a huge drinking culture: partially because of the lower drinking age and partially because of its easy availability, among many other factors. In Korea, the drinking age is 20 years old, which is roughly 18 or 19 depending on your birthday because your age in Korea is essentially one year above your age in the United States. Because Korea operated on the lunar calendar for a while, there are some complex situations where you could be two years older in Korea than in the United States, but it is usually a year older. In Korea, you become an adult at 20 years old, whereas in the United States the age is 18. The fact that the drinking age is the same as the age you become an adult, makes it a very common occurrence to start drinking once you turn 20. The extremely easy availability of alcohol is another reason why there is such a huge drinking culture in Korea. In Korea, the most popular form of alcohol is soju-- a clear liquor that is roughly 15%-20% alcohol content. In Korea, soju can be found at nearly every single convenience store, and it is usually around one dollar a bottle. Most restaurants in Korea that are meant for group settings (e.g. korean barbeque restaurants, traditional Korean food restaurants, etc) also serve alcohol. This widespread availability and the sheer cheapness of an alcohol that is one dollar per bottle contributed to the huge drinking culture in Korea. It is also very typical to get several dishes and eat while you drink in Korea, and these dishes are called 술안주. I personally really like this dish and always get it just as a meal. At this restaurant, they had fried spicy pork along with various vegetables like onions and scallions in the dish as well. It was delicious and I will probably visit again. I ordered and talked to the waitress in Korean. The experience of ordering food in your non-native language is always a little nerve-wracking but I was glad I got to try this new food and interact with a native speaker. Our conversation went something like this:
I said 안녕하세요 (hello) and the waitress said 네 안녕하세요 주문하시겠어요? (hello. Would you like to order?). I responded 네 저 두부김치 하나만 주세요 (yes, just one tofu kimchi please) and the waitress asked 음료수는 물로 괜찮으세요? (is just water fine to drink?). I said 네 괜찮아요 (yes that’s fine) and the waitress said 네 알겠습니다 (okay) to which I said 감사합니다 (thank you). After a while, the food came out and the waitress said 여기 두부김치 나왔습니다 (here is your tofu kimchi) and I said 와 맛있겠다! 감사합니다! (wow this looks great! Thank you!). The waitress said 네 맛있게 드세요 (enjoy your food).
For this cultural post, I decided to try and text my boss in Korean. I have worked at a korean cafe and bakery for the summer and winter breaks for the past couple of years, but all of my bosses were older than me. This difference in age made me a little nervous at first, but after the first couple of months of working there, I started to relax a bit. It also really helped that there is a kind of “take care of younger employees” culture at a lot of Korean restaurants and cafes near where I live. I know that this culture is not always the case, and that it can even be the opposite a lot of times in the workplace in Korea and in Korean owned businesses. All of the other employees are extremely nice and after working there for a couple years, they have become a kind of family to me. While I am still unable to use a completely informal form of speaking to them, I am not as absolutely formal in speaking with them like I used to be before. I also noticed that it is common for younger people to type with typos on purpose. This is somewhat similar to the abbreviations and slang used for texting in English (e.g. lol, omg). However, a lot of times they are not typos that have typos, they are just typos for the sake of having a typo. Apparently, having perfect spelling and grammar can give the impression of being boring or too strict, and that having one or two typos can give a nicer impression. These typos are also used for the purpose of cuteness. While one or two typos does not mean that you’re trying really hard to be cute in the sense that cuteness is interpreted here in the US, it is just another way of saying that typos give a softer impression through text.
In this text conversation, I was pretty much asking my boss if I could work during the upcoming winter break, but I said hello with a typo to soften the impression it would give. My boss replied that she would look at the schedule and let me know, but asked if I could work on the 24th. She also included a common typo people make of writing 잇어 instead of 있어. I replied that I was not sure if I could work the 24th but I could probably work the morning shift which we call 오픈 which is just the phonetic spelling of open (meaning opening shift). She replied that she needed someone for the closing shift not the opening shift and included this letter ㅜ as a sad face emoji. In Korean, people will use this letter or the ㅠ letter as a simple sad face because it kind of looks like tears. I then said I’m sorry but I can’t do the closing shift that day and included two sad face emojis. She said okie haha let me check the schedule first (to see if I could work) and I’ll let you know. I replied okay~ thank you, with another intentional typo on the okay.
For the past two weeks I continued watching the variety show but since finals week was coming up, I recently started watching some short Youtube videos of a comedy show that is apparently really popular in Korea called Comedy Big League (often called cobic for short because big would be pronounced like bic in Korea). While the variety show was definitely an introduction to comedy in Korea and the social norms in Korea, watching a comedy show really helped solidify my image of it. Not only did the comedy show feature common jokes and other common comedy tropes that most Koreans would know, it also acted as a kind of real-time update to the cultural moments going on in Korea at the time. It was also much more convenient because the clips were only 15 minutes each. Because comedy is often used as satire or as more easily digestible social commentary and critique, I was inadvertently able to learn a lot about what was currently an issue in Korea. I feel like I was able to learn a lot more about the current social and cultural moments occurring in Korea through SDLC. I was also able to improve my reading and writing skills significantly. Even though I have been wanting to improve my reading and writing in Korean for a while now, I never had the initiative to go out of my way to read a Korean book or write anything in Korean. However, I was able to get the motivation to try and improve my Korean reading and writing skills with the help of language partners, and was able to become more culturally and socially aware and educated through watching korean dramas and variety shows. By watching clips of comedy shows on Youtube, I was able to see just what exactly most Korean people right now think is really funny, and what they think is a problem. Along with these new developments in my language learning career, I’m really satisfied with the progress that I’ve made through this whole process. I’ve learned a lot more vocabulary, read and wrote in Korean significantly more than before, and my social interactions in Korea will be much more socially informed than before. I think that these new skills will really help me when I’m talking to my parents, or even when I need to talk to anyone in Korean in the future. I haven’t had much experience talking to people my age in Korean so it will be a really interesting and rewarding endeavor to try and approach younger Koreans with my newfound cultural knowledge. I also gained a new appreciation for Korean celebrities from watching the variety shows and comedy show. They endure so much pressure and scrutiny and I had no idea how intense it must be to have to be funny in front of so many people and so many cameras. Occasionally, both the variety show and the comedy show clips would show the amount of cameras facing the celebrities or the size of the audience.
During Thanksgiving break, I went back home and then went to a family friend’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving with them and my family. While I didn’t watch the tv shows while I was back at home during break, I did get to talk to my parents and their friends a lot in Korean. I usually speak in Korean at home, so it was not a big surprise that I would be doing so when I got back home from break, but it was really to be able to be back home with family and friends. I talked to my parents about everything that was going on at school, from my friends, to how my grades were doing, to whether I was eating enough food or not. It was really refreshing to be back home, and I was surprised at how constantly different it felt like to come home for Thanksgiving break every year. Unfortunately, I was only able to stay in the guest bedroom at my house for one day and then we just drove down five years and stayed with our family friends. During our stay there, I was also able to get another person to practice with me besides for my parents. The mom of the family friend whose house we stayed at was the perfect candidate to both increase my language comprehension and increase my own speaking and my vocabulary. One of the biggest reasons for this was because my family friend’s mom speaks extraordinarily fast. Even when she speaks in English it is relatively faster than most people, but when she speaks her native language Korean, she speaks extremely fast to the point of sometimes not being able to understand her. Especially when the family friend’s mom got excited, she would kind of slur her words together from speaking quickly as I noticed sometimes happened with some of the guests in the korean variety show. People would sometimes put two words together (I guess a similar concept in English would be like saying gonna instead of going to). Noticing a speech pattern that I had noticed in a tv show happen in real life was really interesting. I was also able to speak in semi-formal terms with her that I was not used to speaking in. Usually when I speak Korean it is either with family or friends where I speak in a completely informal way, or it is with complete strangers where I speak in a completely formal way. Because the family friend’s mom who I was speaking to was a kind of in between, the language that I used with her was a reflection of that. I would not have gotten the chance to notice this change if I had not tried talking to her in Korean first, since I have almost always only talked to her in English before. Overall, it was a really interesting experience to talk to an adult who I knew in Korean for one of the first times and I was happy that my language learning activities before this helped me.
These two weeks, I watched some different korean tv shows to try and widen my range of both cultural understanding and language comprehension. I sometimes watch korean variety shows on television if my mom is watching them at home, but I had never gone out of my way to watch one on my own. I thought it would be a great way to not only continue listening to native speakers for at least an extra hour or two a week, but also to finally understand why my mom thought they were so funny. I remember when I was most likely in elementary school, my family and I would all sit and watch some of these korean variety shows on television on the weekends, so watching them now in college was a really interesting and nostalgic experience. I started watching episodes from a very popular korean variety show called knowing brothers because they had a lot of episodes on Netflix. Knowing brothers is essentially a talk show, but the main theme of the show is to kind of emulate a korean high school. All the celebrity guests who come on the show wear school uniforms and the group of comedians who host the show also wear school uniforms. Each week, there is a new group of celebrity guests who range anywhere from actors, to kpop idols, to comedians--pretty much all entertainment industries were welcome. The show’s set was a classroom and the celebrity guests were introduced as transfer students. I thought the concept of the show was really new and unique, and added even more of a kind of fun informality to the typically relaxed atmosphere I remembered variety shows having from my childhood. I think watching the variety show helped my language comprehension skills because the speed at which people talk in variety shows is completely different from how people talk in korean dramas. While this may seem like an obvious point given that one is scripted while one is not, this difference in not only the speed but the speech patterns themselves was also really interesting and insightful. Because there would not be nearly as much need for suspense or a proper way of speaking, I was able to see different dynamics and different speech patterns in action (in fact, one of Knowing brothers’ unique characteristics is that they forbid everyone on the show from using the formal or respective form that is usually used when talking to elders). Watching the korean variety show was also really helpful in increasing my cultural awareness and understanding. Watching professional comedians and really clever celebrity guests joke around with each other and play games together, gave me a chance to see what slang is popular in Korea these days, what types of jokes are trending and more. Most importantly, I felt really confident after watching these shows (not only because I felt happy from laughing so much) but because I felt like I could understand the current culture in Korea just a little bit more.
I started watching a relatively recent korean drama during these two weeks called Hotel del Luna, which stars a very famous korean singer named IU. I remember listening to the singer’s top hits when I was much younger and watching her act in a kind of cheesy teen korean drama too. I had this image of her as a really young, peppy pop singer and was surprised to see her acting performance on the drama. During these two weeks, I watched one episode each week because each episode is an hour long. I tried watching without subtitles because I figured I could really challenge myself that way. Unfortunately, there were a couple of scenes in each episode where the actors and actresses spoke in a dialect (which is called 사투리 in korean) and it was really difficult to understand at some points. I think this issue is one of my biggest concerns in my language learning journey because although Korea is a fairly small country, it is divided into many different districts. A lot of those districts have very distinctive dialects that sound completely different from the standard korean dialect. These dialects not only sound different, but also have different vocabularies. Sometimes different words will be used only for slang, but a lot of times, commonplace words will have completely different pronunciations, spellings or just be completely different words altogether. Along with hearing a different dialect, I was also able to listen to native speakers talking in a variety of different situations about a variety of different topics that I normally would not have the chance to casually listen to. For example, I was able to listen to people talk about committing a crime, running a hotel and many other uncommon topics for conversation. I felt simultaneously proud of myself and kind of discouraged with language learning these two weeks. I could sense that my reading skills in Korean were improving from the newspaper articles my language partner gave me, but I was also a bit discouraged because I was having such a hard time understanding the dialects. I’m sure that is a goal I can tackle later on, since I probably will not have to talk to people with dialects so strong that they are incomprehensible. The family members I have on my mom’s side live in an area in Korea where the dialect is either not that strong, or does not exist at all. The family members I have on my dad’s side also live in an area in Korea where the dialect is either not that strong, or does not exist at all. I realized that this frustration and concern of mine will most likely be an aspect of my Korean language learning that will not be used very often. However, the practice I got through watching the korean drama in listening and understanding standard Korean was very useful. Since all the conversations I heard were done by actors, it helped to listen to people having conversations in clear, understandable sentences.
This past week, I decided to take on a really big challenge--cooking. It is a tradition when it gets colder out to cook certain foods in Korea, and one of them is a dessert called hoddok (spelled 호떡 in Korean). It’s essentially a fried pancake with brown sugar filling inside and is a classic street food in Korea and is apparently very easy to find and easy to make. I was encouraged by the seemingly simple steps to make the dessert and thought I would use this as a jumping off point for cooking Korean food. I invited a couple friends over to help make and eat the dessert, and I used a box mix that I found at this Korean marketplace and restaurant called New Grand Market.
This is the mix that I used. It had simple instructions on the back in both English and Korean, and since I was cooking a Korean dish I tried to read the instructions in Korean. I found that there were many words that I had never seen before, and ended up having to go back and forth between the English and Korean instructions to understand what the instructions meant. Not being able to even get through simple step by step instructions for cooking made me realize just how small of an area my Korean language skills extended into. I followed the instructions on the back and tried to struggle through what should have been (at least I think) a really easy process.
Step one: mix the pancake mix with water and yeast and mix the batter for around 5-10 minutes continuously. Step two: put rub vegetable oil on hands to prevent the dough from sticking and roll into a small ball. Then, it said to put the brown sugar mix inside the flattened dough ball and carefully wrap the surrounding dough on top of the brown sugar (to create a kind of dumpling shape. I had to look at the English instructions side for the translation of the Korean word for vegetable oil. The direct translation would have been 야채 기름 (yachae gireum) which is literally 야채/vegetable and 기름/oil but instead was 식용유 (shik yong yoo) and I was really surprised at how completely wrong my guess was. Apparently, the yoo in shik yong yoo is the chinese character for oil and is often used instead of the colloquial word gireum. I was surprised to see how integrated Chinese characters still were in Korean language even in modern day. Step three: place the dough on the pan and fry them until the bottom while golden brown and then to press down on the ball gently to create the pancake shape. It then said to flip a couple more times and the pancake would be complete. Overall, this experience was challenging for both my cooking skills and my grasp of Korean. I realized that a lot of words that would be commonplace, everyday language in Korea were completely foreign to me and I might not have realized this without trying to do something completely new like this.
One of the days that I met with my language partner this week, we watched a Korean film called “A Taxi Driver” that came out fairly recently. It was based on a true story about a Seoul taxi driver in 1980, who takes a foreign customer to a Korean town called Gwangju. He initially takes the job because he hears that the foreigner will pay an extremely high rate for the drive, but unknowingly (and unwillingly) becomes involved in the military government’s siege of Gwangju once he gets there. While at first extremely reluctant to help the Gwangju citizens fighting for freedom under the corrupt government, he eventually helps the foreigner (who turns out to be a reporter) get the truth of the crimes against humanity that were occurring in the city, out to global news networks. It was a really really good movie. I was surprised at how positive critic reviews for a foreign film were, and how well made and entertaining the film was. However, one of the most surprising elements of the film was the fact that I got so emotional watching it. There were several brutally violent scenes in the film, many of which were depicting innocent civilians being plowed through by the military during peaceful protest. While part of the grief and anger I felt from watching the movie could be attributed to the sense of injustice that the film incited, it felt like something more was happening. I think the emotions I felt were also from a sense of violated patriotism. The level of pride I felt about a country that I was not a citizen of, and the level of empathy I had for people who I was only really related to through my parents, was really surprising. I had watched historical movies about Korea before. I had watched Korean movies that were emotional before. But I had never felt this kind of wounded pride feeling before--it felt almost like a betrayal. I wondered why this feeling came about. While I’m sure part of it had to do with the sheer skill and craftsmanship of the film in portraying and conveying their message, I think this feeling of connection I had with the people and country in the film had some connection with my increased knowledge about Korea. By learning about Korea’s history and culture, and by learning more and more of the language, I had unknowingly grown more and more intimate with the country. With this newfound intimacy, I think I had also created some of my own expectations and preconceptions about Korea. While I had learned that there were military dictatorships throughout Korea’s history, I hadn’t expected such blatant corruption and abuse of power from a country that I had previously held in such high regard. I had unknowingly put Korea on a kind of pedestal as I learned more about it and became more connected to it. Because it was a country that I had really only learned about through vacations, my parents and through lessons here, I think I fashioned a very two-dimensional image of it. I assumed that Korea could only be a victim because I had heard so many stories of the injustices the people suffered under the Japanese colonization. Watching the film helped flesh out this flat picture I had of the country into one of a nation that was responsible for its own fair share of wrongs and injustices that it had committed to its people.
In one of my Korean classes in the past two weeks, my language partner brought in a surprisingly short newspaper article that I was surprised about. I thought that since I spoke Korean at home, I would be able to tackle much longer articles with ease. However, I quickly learned that speaking skills do not necessarily translate to reading/writing skills. While my limited vocabulary did not seem to affect my everyday conversations with my parents, it made a large impact when I tried to read that short newspaper article. In the narrow sphere of topics I talk about with my family (e.g. school, friends, health, etc) I essentially didn’t need anything past a middle school, or even elementary school level vocabulary. At first, when I skimmed the article I felt very disoriented and lost. I didn’t recognize almost a third of the words in the entire article and felt immediately frustrated. However, my language partner suggested we go through the article slowly, word-by-word. She also suggested that we stop at each word I did not recognize, and had me first try and figure out the definition by context clues and hints within the word itself (e.g. when a word had the root of another word that I knew). In this way, I found that I could figure out a surprising number of words and the initial feeling of dejection started to fade. My partner provided both the definition and context for the words that I could not figure out by deduction. She explained the context of the word within the article, along with its cultural context in Korean society.
I not only learned the boundaries of my Korean through reading this article, but also learned a lot about the Korean government’s influence in deciding national holidays. The article discussed the Korean public’s discontent about a national holiday being cancelled. In Korea, there are certain policies that allow the government to add a couple days or subtract a couple days for a holiday. For example, if a holiday like Chuseok happened to land on a weekend, when it usually lands on a weekday, the government has the power to suggest additional days off for the time employees “lost”. I learned that these extra days are commonly called Red Days because they are marked by red ink in calendars. Being assigned this article acted as a kind of wake up call to show me just how much I still had to learn about both the Korean language and the Korean culture.
While I am Korean-American, the American side of me is what dominates my idea of culture and society. While I do sometimes watch Korean dramas or variety tv shows, I still have a ways to go in order to understand what modern-day Korean society and culture are about. I will continue to read short, relatively simple articles as suggested by my language partner. I will also continue to use the method of slowly combing through the article and making sure not to skip over words I don’t recognize.
Imagine that you have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of your target language and culture. How would you get started, and what would you investigate? How would different structural components presented in class appear in your work?
If I received a research grant to study Korean linguistically, I would want to first start out with the Korean alphabet and its history. I think the origin of the Korean language is a fairly unique one, because it was created completely from scratch and while it did have some Chinese influences, it was a mostly independently created language. I also think the historical circumstances surrounding it are extraordinary. The language was created by the Korean king so the peasants who couldn't afford the time or money to learn Chinese could still read; knowing this backstory to the language gives an understanding about why its formatted the way it is and why it is written the way it is. I would also give special attention to the relationship between the way each letter is written and spoken in the Korean alphabet. When it was being created, Korean was given extreme attention from a linguistic standpoint. Each letter's shape tries to imitate the shape that the mouth or tongue or other parts of the body create when making this sound, and that is probably why it is such an easy language to learn.
In my ninth class, Jimin and I went over what we had learned throughout the semester, reviewing everything from the proverbs and slang from the very beginning of the semester to the history we had recently learned. This review session was really valuable in kind of consolidating and organizing everything we had learned so far and it also helped me realize just how much I had been able to learn in a short semester. I felt really proud of the progress I had made in not only my comprehension and knowledge of the Korean language, but in Korean culture as well through activities like watching Along with the Gods, going to Grand Mart and learning the history of Korea.
In my tenth class, I took the final exam
In my seventh class, we finished the second half of the movie Along with the Gods, and wrote a paragraph in Korean about what we liked, disliked or thought important about the movie. Jimin reviewed the paragraphs and helped fix certain grammar mistakes and we talked about what we thought about the movie in relation to Korean culture, history, etc.
In my eighth class, Jimin gave us a lecture of a brief, broad overview of Korean history. She covered the entire history of Korea, going from origin stories that exist about how Korea was founded, all the way to present day. We wanted to learn more about the more modern history of Korea (so about Japanese colonization of Korea and the political upheavals that occurred even after Korea was liberated), so we spent a bit more time on that section of Korean history. We learned about the three-kingdom era of Korea and how it used to be split up into several different kingdoms that were constantly at war with each other until they eventually were conquered by one kingdom and became Joseon--the predecessor to modern South Korea. We then learned about how Japan colonized Korea during the Pacific War and we learned about the hardships that the Korean people faced at this time. We then learned about the dictator-like presidents that took over after the liberation and after the Korean War, and what actions they took to try and hold on to the presidency.
In my fifth class, we took a field trip to Grand Mart to eat some real Korean food. We had to order our food in Korean and read the korean descriptions of the food in order to figure out what we wanted which was interesting. Jimin then taught us about what ordering food is like in Korea, and talked about how much more advanced food delivery is there. We learned about the food delivery culture in Korea and how its much more of a norm to have food delivered regularly since it is so easy and usually much cheaper than it is in the U.S.
In my sixth class, Jimin gave a pop quiz to review everything we learned so far, including the slang we learned the second class and also the proverbs we went over in the third class. Jimin also quizzed us on commonly made mistakes in grammar or spelling and then we watched a movie called Along with the Gods. We watched it with English subtitles, just in case we weren't able to understand the plot of the movie because of the advanced vocabulary used in it. We decided to split the movie into two parts because of our quiz and to have a chance to review the part of the movie we watched.
In my third class we learned about proverbs or 속담, which are sayings that often have a traditional/historical origin and are used to convey a deeper meaning. They are used very often in everyday conversation, and I had a very limited knowledge of them, so learning about them was really useful. We went over a list of frequently used proverbs, and Jimin again gave the korean interpretation/meaning behind them and then the english translation. For example, we learned the proverb 병 주고 약 준다, and the literal english translation is to give a disease and then give medicine, which still seems a bit nonsensical. However, the korean meaning behind it was that someone will hurt you and then try to help you (e.g. insulting you and then complimenting you right after). I had often heard this proverb in korean variety shows but didn't know what it meant exactly, so it was really helpful. We also learned 사자성어, which are also proverbs, but are in a four letter format because they're derived from chinese characters; this means that each letter in the four letter combination comes from a chinese character and so each letter has a specific meaning that combines together with the meanings of the other three letters to create the message of the proverb. In this class, Jimin gave us the literal korean meaning of each of the four letters and taught us what the combination was supposed to mean, and what message it was supposed to send. We then wrote down our own English interpretation/translation.
The fourth week of class was thanksgiving break so we didn't have class, but I tried to practice Korean at home with my parents both in speaking conversation and through text.
