For this semester, I planned to learn Korean Alphabets (Hangul), to ask simple questions, and to introduce my family and myself. In general, I am pleased with my learning result, as I met most of my learning goals and the learning sessions with language partner were very effective and fun. I also found useful resources for me to continue my self-learning of Korean. Through the meetings with Minkyung, I was practicing my spoken Korean in a real room setting, which helped with my listening and pronunciation. I also learned many useful sets of words including vegetables, directions, number, family members, and animals. Because of my interest in Korean culture, I can also learn from listening to k-pop and watch k-drama once I have laid a foundation this semester. I wrote a more detailed reflection in my reflection paper if you are interested in knowing more about my learning experience.
Ziwei Liao's Posts (34)
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Summary of Cultural presentation:
My cultural presentation focused on the gender inequality issue in Korea. Even though South Korea is the 11th largest economy and a developed country, gender inequality still exists in many aspects of society. It is ranked 117th out of 142 countries in gender equality. In workforce, employers fear that women are more likely to quit working certain stages of her life. Therefore, they prefer to hire men than women. There is also society’s expectation on women’s physical appearance. It is especially true in the entertainment industry. Cultural reason is still the main reason for gender inequality. Confucius culture assumes different roles for each gender. However, Korea is changing and more women attend higher education and hold higher job positions than ever.
Sources: a reference slide is included in the powerpoint.
It has been a great semester in terms of my self-directed Korean learning experience. During the process, I developed better skills of self-learning, time management, study planning. This class is different from any other classes I’ve taken at UR because it requires me to make a study plan myself and design my learning goals. In that way, I have to take charge of making progress instead of others pushing me for progress. In this paper, I will first talk about the weekly daily routine and how it helped with my learning of Korean. Next, I will reflect on the problems I encountered and how I deal with them. Finally, I will talk about my learning result and what I can improve in the future.
Every week, I met with my language partner twice, and each session last fifty minutes. In addition to the learning sessions, we complete homework outside of class. I really enjoyed these classes. There are four beginners in our learning session. I felt more involved when learning with peers. Our language partner combined visual tools and traditional learning techniques. In addition, we practiced conversion with each other in every meeting. At the same of learning speaking and dialogues, we also learn the Korean alphabets. Combining the two elements laid a solid foundation for us beginners. Through the meetings, I was practicing my spoken Korean in a real room setting, which helped with my listening and pronunciation. The most fundamental material is, however, Korean alphabets. By mastering all the alphabets, we are able to pronounce all words in Korean. To help with the learning of Korean alphabets, we had competition almost every class to pronounce Korean words by combining the syllables. We also watched various videos. Some were k-pops that contained the words we learned that class, and some were learning videos to help with our understanding of grammar. Overall, all the techniques helped me with my listening, writing, speaking. Outside of class, I have been watch Youtube Videos that teach Korean through some popular culture. The YouTuber I often watch is called “Alice Wonderland”. She can fluently speak Korean, English, and Cantonese. She often teaches grammar, sets of words, or phrases under k-pop context. In that way, one can learn words and phrases from song lyrics. I found it to be really fun and helpful to watch. Overall, I think practicing dialogues with my peers to be a very effective method of learning.
There are also some difficulties I encountered during my study of Korean. The first is the pronunciation. While alphabets themselves are easy to pronounce, once they combine to become a word, it is hard for me to imagine the combined sound of the word. In the future, I will spend more time in practicing speaking words by imaging how to combine the alphabets more. It will require lots of practices to master it. Also, grammar is particularly hard to learn because the sentence structures of Korean are very different from English. One word has many forms depending on the place it is in a sentence. Even if I know the word, it changes form in a sentence and I no longer recognizes it. I will need to learn more grammar to know how to use single words into sentences.
I also learned a lot from the cultural presentations. I learned from my cultural presentation that there is still huge gender gap in Korea. Women get more than 30% less pay than men in average and have fewer opportunities at work. However, the situation is changing as more women get higher education. For the presentation on Turkey's gender equality issue, even though women's status is still low, it has progressed a lot and the percentage of women holding leadership positions are even higher than many developed nations. I learned from Yuchi's cultural presentation about the trainee system in Korea. The entertainment industry is one of the largest industries in Korea and its popular culture spreads around the world. It has a very systemic way of training future k-pop stars. I learned that trainees start at a very young age, and their daily lives are controlled by their companies and they are usually not allow to rest during their promotion period even if they are sick. It is a cruel system but still very competitive.
In conclusion, I am pleased with my learning result, as I met most of my learning goals and the learning sessions with language partner were very effective and fun. Once knowing the alphabets, it is easier to learn new words and write them. The classes laid a solid foundation for me to continue my self-study in Korean after graduation.
With the experiences of Chinese and English learning, I found it kind of interesting to learn Korean because it feels like the combination of my past experiences. Korean obtains word pronunciations that do not exist in Chinese, so it is fun to learn them. It is similar to an English speaker learning the pronunciation of “rr” in Spanish. Another interesting fact about Korean reading is its similarity with English. Korean words are formed by alphabets, so I am able to read them without knowing their meanings. However, those letters look complicated, and they look like Chinese in a way. Chinese requires a Romanization system to read the characters. Thus, for me, reading Korean feels like reading out Chinese characters directly without a Romanization system. On the other hand, writing might be a bit easier for me than for English-speaking learners.
My learning goal is to know how to invite someone to do something with me because it is a very common sentence structure to use in daily life.
For my fourth artifact, I watched a YouTube video to use a k-pop song to teach my grammar. It taught me how to ask for someone's intention, such as "do you want to ... with me?". It appeared couple times in the song.
To ask for someone's intention, "rae yo" (want to) is added to the end of the sentence. She also talked about how "rae you" is applied in the song. She explained the usage of "rae yo" very clear. She explained that when the verb in front of "rae yo" has no ending sound, it has to change form.
For example, to ask someone if he/she wants to have coffee with you is “coffee ma sil rae yo?”
In Matter’s article “Why bilinguals Are Smarter”, he talks about there are fundamental benefits for bilingualism – being smart. Being bilingual has positive effect on the brain, and can improve cognitive skills even not related to speak language. The reason is that bilingual’s brain has both languages active. When two languages are working at the same time in the brain, it helped the brain to resolve internal conflict, just like a workout for the brain. The experiment of asking bilingual and monolingual children to sort blue circles and red squares showed that bilingual children are faster and more accurate in performing the task. I agree all the benefits for being a bilingual. However, there were also concerns over training kids to be bilingual at very young age. Because they are receiving double the information, they might be slower than monolingual in learning the one particular language because other kids put all attention into learning one language and can practice more.
This past week, I learned about basic color words: red, green, blue, yellow, purple, black, and white. In class, we used two activities to practice. At first, one would say a color, and the other person would find an object that matches the color. Through this process, the combination of vision and listening allowed me to memorize those words. Afterwards, one would point at a random object and ask “what is the color of this”. The other just responded to the questions. In this case, we know how to say those words besides just knowing them. From my learning experiences, it was kind of interesting to notice that the word “color” in Korean actually sounds like that in Chinese.
For now, I know basic Korean words, and I learned them in several steps. At first, I try to memorize them through writing and through various apps. Writing out the words helps me remember the spelling. Plus, word app has become a popular tool in language learning because it is more convenient to carry a phone instead of a dictionary and because the combination of pictures and words realize easier memorization. After memorizing the words, I always take quizzes or play games to deepen my memory. Then, I watch Korean drama and movies, trying to recognize from conversations those words I memorized. Next, I find chances to say those words so that I do not forget them. For instance, I can learn tongue twisters that include those words. In order to build my vocabulary, I try to make connections between new and acquired words. In the future, I hope to know around 2000 Korean words for daily communication.
I created a learning activity to teach my friends about how to tell time in Korea, and I created a powerpoint to help me with the illustration.
I will first explain the difference between English and Korean ways of telling time. Korean uses the native numbers for hours and Chinese style numbers for minutes. I attached the powerpoint below. I taught them how to say native and Chinese based numbers. I gave them examples of telling time during the day.
I think the powerpoint is an effective way to show them how to tell time because it listed 1-12 o'clock with pronunciation and corresponding arabic numbers.
For this week, I learned basic Korean food vocabularies, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My language partner and I practiced the words by asking “did you eat breakfast/lunch/dinner”. Also, I learned how to say several common foods and drinks such as water, milk, and bread. At the same time, I also studied several traditional Korean foods such as Kimchi and Bibimbap, which are familiar to me because I often eat Korean food. In order to memorize these many words, my language partner and I repeat them by asking “do you like…” Next time I go to a Korean restaurant, I might be able to read the menu in Korean characters. In addition, I learned to say “delicious” and “awful” so that I can make comments on the foods I learned.
For this week, I reviewed Korean alphabets agains in class through pronouncing a set of Korean dishes. Most of the time I am able to fully say the words and felt more confident at saying them. When I watch some Korean TV shows, I sometimes can identify single words that they spoke, which I feel happy about. I focused on a set of words for my cultural presentation on South Korean's gender equality issue. They are: society -사회, men - 남자, women -여자들, economy -경제, equality - 평등, inequality-불평등. I also learned about K-pop's trainee system and Turkey's women's rights from the cultural presentations. I realized how competitive South Korea's entertainment industry is and the progress Turkey made on women's rights over the decades.
For this week, I focused on learning how to introduce my family and hometown. Minkyung prepared a worksheet for us that has the basic sentence structure for present tense. We practiced the dialogue together and made notes on the pronunciation. Next, we wrote the conversation with our own family situations. We learned a set of words about family members. It's interesting that women and men address brothers and sisters differently. 형 = older brother (if you're male), 오빠 = older brother (if you're female),누나 = older sister (if you're male), 언니 = older sister (if you're female)
The conversation includes how many family members in my family and where they live. In this case, we also learned to talk in past and present tenses. I recorded all the conversations in my notebook with detailed translation and pronunciation notes. This topic is truly useful. I also watched videos about introducing family to reinforce my memory.
Since language is more than a tool for communication, the death of language can mean the loss of culture, history, and even an ethnicity. The language always ties to the culture, and it might be the most stable element of the culture. For instance, Korean food can adapt to American taste, but the language cannot blend with English. Also, languages represent history and might be the only source to delve into history. Many tribes do not have their own texts. In this case, word of mouth becomes the only way to tell history; therefore, the death of a tribe language can mean the loss of historical records. Most importantly, the disappearance of a language can lead to the “extinction” of an ethnicity or a tribe. According to the article, years ago, Siletz prevailed over other tribes; however, currently, there are only a few people speaking the language. As the article states that school is the enemy of tribal languages, I noticed that this fact is especially true in China. The government encourages mandarin, so there is decreasing number of people speaking dialects or tribal languages. Ethnic minorities in cities speak mandarin most of the time, thus they have already “become” Han people with an ethnic minority title rather than true ethnic minorities.
For this week, I learned the sentence of asking "do you like xxx?" and to answer yes/no. We practiced a dialogue during learning sessions where we insert the words we learned previously to the question and fully answered them. Minkyung helped to correct our pronunciations. We also learned a set of words about vegetables, including eggplant, tomato, potato, celery, lettuce and more. There are some words that sound very similar in English, for example, tomato. This is because some of the vegetables were not orginally from South Korea and were introduced to Korea later. Some other vegitables have simlilar sound as Chinese words.
I also watched a video regarding how to ask for price in Korean. The video created a scene so audience can feel involved in learning the conversations. I am still not familiarize with numbers but I learned how to ask for price.
Knowing the history can improve the language learning in several ways. At first, history creates words, especially those proverbs, idioms, and analogy. For instance, an idiom might come from a historical story. In this case, knowing the story helps to better understand and memorize the idiom. Plus, for Korean, the history of the language ties to the history of the country. Hence, figuring out how the language has changed over centuries helps knowing the structure of the language. In addition, history promotes the culture formation, and culture deeply influences the language. Thus, knowing the history helps me learn the language from the cultural perspective. For example, in all ages, Confucius has been playing an important role in the Korean culture. Therefore, knowing this fact allows me to understand the use of honorific and the implicit way of talking. Furthermore, history is fun, and it is like telling stories. Knowing the history can increase my interest in learning Korean. Also, I can talk about Korean history and culture with Koreans to practice the language.
Learning Journal 8
For this week, I reviewed all the words I learned so far and I checked my pronunciations with my Korean friend. Also, I continued to watch a video teaching Korean grammar. In that video, the girl used a trendy k-pop lyrics to illustrate how future tense is expressed. In this case, further tense is applied by adding "ye yo" at the end of the sentence. In addition, we continued to learn dialogue during my meeting with language partner. We learned about asking people if they have time, including "do you have time today", "do you have time tomorrow" , and "when do you have time" and how to answer these questions. We also reviewed Hangul and had contest on quickly pronouncing words. From all of the learning activities, I find words review to be the most effective.
Journal 7: Reflect upon your progress to date, consider the effectiveness of your learning plan and activities, and discuss what changes--if any--you will make to finish the semester.
So far, I have learned all Korean Alphabets/ Hangul, the technique of pronuncing words, accumulated some commonly used words/phrases, and some dialogues. I am pretty happy with my progress since I have no previous exposure to any Korean. I would say that the most effective time I spent learning Korean is the time I spent with my language partner and classmates, as well as watching some Korean-teaching videos that related grammar/words with popular culture. I found my pace of learning new words is little very fast so that I moved to the next set of words before did not fully get the previous set. In the future, I need to devote more time to review what I have learned. Also, I need to understand the grammar and sentence structure of the sentences in the dialogue.
My third artifact is about asking about my family. It includes questions and answers.
The conversation goes like this:
Q: How many people are there in your family?
A: Three. My dad, mom, and me.
Q: Where do your parents live?
A: They live in China.
Q: Where do your siblings live?
A: I do not have any sibling.
Yuchi’s presentation on Kimchi was very interesting. Kimchi is the most well-known Korean dish and people eat it daily. It is made of cabbage. A typical Korean will eat 60 pounds of it each year. It tastes spicy and crunchy, and it’s very rich in flavor. Winter is long and cold in Korea. During ancient time, there was no access to fresh vegetables during wintertime in Korea. Therefore, they made lots of Kimchi before winter so that they would have vegetables to eat during winter. Each family even has designed refrigerator to store it. The presentation on Turkish coffee tells the difference between Turkish and American coffee. For Turkish coffee, people leave the coffee grounds in the cup while people filter the grounds in American coffee. People also use Turkish coffee fortune telling. It was very interesting to see that food has huge impact on culture.
Learning Journal 6: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
For this week, I practiced dialogue with my classmates regarding family members. We first write the English translation for the conversation so we understand the meaning. For every learning session, we have handout that we can fill out the sentences and create conversations. The conversation goes like the following:
How many family members do you have?
Where do your parents live?
Where do your siblings live right now?
and we will answer depending on our own circumstances.
I found conversation practices to be effective way to learn basic spoken Korean. I also looked at videos that reproduce scenes and teach conversations but they are not as effective as talking to my peers. In addition, we learned a set of words on directions, including right/left, south/north/east/west, and other positional words.
