Looking back to my PanOpto video, I had created a goal for each of the 4 language skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The majority of what I wanted to accomplish was met except learning about vocabulary related to medicine and the human body. Instead, our group thought it would be more beneficial to learn terms used in weather reports. While reading the article, I was surprised by how many expressions I didn’t recognize. I could describe the weather as sunny, windy, or cloudy, but the advanced terminology used in the articles confused me. Luckily, I was told that the expressions were commonly used in each report, so I just needed to understand those vocabulary terms to interpret the readings. Even though I didn’t learn about it in class, I still was interested in learning some of the organs in Korean, so I used multiple websites to look them up. I never knew that the words for heart (심장) and kidney (신장) were so similar and many of the other parts sounded alike.
In class, we discussed about derivational and inflectional morphemes. Before, having that lesson, I didn’t think about how a word might change by adding on a morpheme, but now I am more aware and am able to recognize them in my target language. Discussions regarding language structures helped me distinguish the differences between English and Korean such as how sentences are structured.
Language and culture go hand in hand. Language brings those alike together and create a unique culture apart from different languages. An example I can think of is around friend groups. In Korea where it is a collectivist culture, the people that make up a friend group are usually very similar when it comes to personality, interests, and how they dress. In the U.S., I find that the people that make up a friend group are unique from each other and might have different personalities and traits but are bonded with a common thing (whatever that might be).
To further improve my communicative competence, I think I need to challenge myself outside of my comfort zone and immerse myself more into the culture. Instead of texting short Korean phrases, attempting to have a full conversation in my target language would help. I would say that I have more than basic interpersonal communicative skills because I can communicate beyond basic exchanges, but I am not at the level of cognitive academic language proficiency.
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