09/27/2020 Biweekly Journal

[Jiwon Kang]

I met with Jenna again two times the past two weeks. We continued to practice reading and writing in Korean. Before the two meetings, I hoped to master writing simple Korean words with ease. Jenna brought in a sheet with simple vocabulary words and phrases. We reviewed some words, and I took some time to memorize the words and the definitions/spelling. These words were fairly simple words that were easy to spell, such as name, me, boy, girl, mom, dad, brother, etc. There were also some simple phrases like nice to meet you and thank you very much. I had some trouble with some of the spelling, but Jenna helped me understand my mistakes and I learned from it. Jenna took some time to quiz me on the spelling and definitions after studying for it for ~15 minutes. We also continued to read Korean articles about the NBA Lakers. I continued to read about Lebron and Anthony Davis and how the Laker's hopes are at an all-time high with the upcoming NBA season. For homework, she assigned me a quiz on the new vocab words she told me about. During the meeting, she also helped me with my self-introduction. I practiced talking about myself and my hobbies and future aspirations. Jenna told me some pointers on what to exactly talk about during my self-introduction and how much information I should be saying. She told me a simple structure for my self-introduction: Name, school/year/major, hobbies, future goals, and dreams. Throughout the week, I practiced my self-introduction (what kind of things to talk about) and also practiced reading some articles about sports and weather from naver.com. I continued listening to the radio garden in Korea, tuning into different stations across Korea. It was hard to find a specific broadcast I would enjoy, but I eventually found a station that talked about current news and events. I understand some of the words and topics, but not all of them. I definitely think that I have gotten better at listening and understanding harder phrases. In the second session I met up with Jenna, she quizzed me on the new vocab I learned from last week, and I got every word and phrase correct which was a great improvement. Furthermore, Jenna gave me a new sheet of vocab. She gave me new basic vocab words such as name, family, school, friend, hobby, age, health, etc. She also gave me some basic conversational phrases that would be helpful in my self-introduction (Hello, no problem, thank you, sorry, nice to see you, you are correct, thank you for the food, etc.) I already knew most of these phrases but did not know how to spell them correctly, so it was helpful to finally learn how to spell them correctly. All of the vocab she gave me in the past two weeks are words that I would use in my self-introduction. She gave me an outline of what to say. I would first start with a hello, nice to meet you, and introduce myself. Then she gave me some topics I could cover in my self-introduction: age, school, major, hobby. I had dived into each topic with Jenna and she corrected any sentences that I said. For example, I said, "My major in school is science" instead of chemistry. Jenna taught me what chemistry was in Korean and I added it to my vocab list to study for.