Esther Kwon
SDLAP 110
105 Reflection Paper 1
Since both my parents are Korean, I grew up in a household where Korean and English were constantly mixed together. As a Korean American, my dominant and native language is English while Korean is a language I am partially fluent in. In total, I have had exposure to four different languages: English, Korean, Spanish, and Japanese. When I was very little, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, I attended a Korean language learning school that was connected to the church my family attended at that time. My mother also taught me during a few of my elementary years using Korean work books, story books, and flashcards. She also made me write in a journal every day to help me learn the Korean alphabet and understand how to create simple sentences. As I grew older however, my mother gradually stopped teaching me and thus, I am left only knowing the basic skills of how to read, write, and speak. The strongest skill I obtained over the years living in a Korean family is the ability to understand for the most part, what others say to me.
As for Spanish, I learned the language for a couple years as an elementary student and went on to study the language three more years during high school. While I did take a decent amount of time learning this language, my Spanish classes were never rigorous enough for me to learn adequately nor consistently and thus, I have forgotten nearly all of the Spanish I learned. As I entered college this past semester, I decided to begin a new language and took Japanese 101, which was my very first experience with Japanese. Thankfully, Korean and Japanese have some similarities based on grammar and some vocabulary so I believe I had somewhat of an easier time learning this new language. I am also continuing with Japanese this semester and am currently enrolled in the Japanese 102 class. Though I have only taken one Japanese class, I feel like I learned much more of that language than I ever did throughout my years of Spanish. I believe that this is not only because my Japanese class was much more rigorous, but also because I had the passion to learn Japanese. Despite the many years of taking Spanish, I was never very interested and thus, I believe this is why I lost almost all the knowledge I had previously of this language.
Although I do have a good basis for Korean to say and do simple and minimal things, I am determined to improve my skills in speaking, reading, and writing. Improving my interpersonal communication is my primary goal because I would like to achieve a level of proficiency in which I can talk to my parents much more easily and fluently in order to better our communication and understanding of one another. However, I would very much like to improve my other skills in reading and writing so that one day; I can become proficient in all three aspects and hopefully use this to my advantage in my future career.
I am excited to be a part of this class since I have ultimate control over what I want to focus on improving and how I want to improve my skills. Not only can I narrow my focus on my weaknesses but also come up with creative and fun ways to develop them, which I think are key incentives to stir greater passion in learning the language. I believe I will learn the best by continuously conversing with my language partner, because in this way I not only learn how to structure sentences but also how to obtain the right tone of voice and pronunciation (since I have an obvious American accent). I can understand a majority of casual, everyday speech and therefore, I would like to be able to converse back to others with ease than simply listening to him/her speaking to me. I also memorize words more quickly by saying them aloud, so once I remember the word audibly I can extend my knowledge by learning the spelling of the word on paper.
Comments