In the past two weeks, I had two sessions of my target language once with Jimin (because I couldn’t make it to my regular session) and the second time with Jenna. On February 6th, I joined a group that Jimin taught and we watched a clip of a Korean reality show along with a lesson on Korean proverbs. In the show, the celebrities were working together at a restaurant, so most of the terminology in that setting was familiar to me. Some of them used different dialects than what I had learned so understanding the comical jokes was occasionally difficult. I tried to avoid the subtitles as best as I could unless I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I don’t normally watch Korean shows by myself but while I was watching this, I thought of the alarming difference between Korean and American reality shows. It’s interesting how the stereotype for American reality shows is that they’re over the top dramatic while Korean shows tend to entertain through humor.
When I heard we were moving on to learning proverbs, I wasn’t looking forward to it because I assumed that it wouldn’t be useful. We ended up going over 47 different proverbs. After we read it together, one of us would directly translate it then each of us would get a chance to guess what it meant. Since they were old sayings, I didn’t know all the terms because some of them referred to objects that are not used in this century. In those cases, we did a quick search and found pictures to match the items so we could better relate to the proverbs. While going through these sayings, I realized that I had heard my parents say a couple of them and that there were some that overlap with English proverbs. I would never have imagined that I would enjoy learning proverbs as much as I did. Although there weren’t many proverbs that had positive, optimistic meanings, the direct translations were funny and were nonsense, so we frequently made jokes about them throughout the session.
On February 11th, I had my normal group session with Jenna and we learned bachims in writing. It was difficult to get the bachims right at first because how we write Korean is different than how we say it when communicating with others. A rule we learned was that if the next syllable block was a fake consonant, the bachim would also connect to the following word block. There were examples given and I was mostly familiar with them already. Then came the exceptions where specific bachims would actually create a different sound than what they would normally do if they were beginning consonants. When I learned Korean at a young age, we didn’t go through the specific rules about how some bachim combinations make sounds stronger. It was interesting to see the rules on paper and how I knew the rules without actually learning them. It kind of felt like I was working backwards but I’m glad that I can understand these specific guidelines of Korean. The continuous problem that bothers me is the countless amount of exceptions that come with any language. It’s frustrating to learn a rule then something that breaks the rule I just learned. I figured that I would have to just memorize these.
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