110: Bi-Weekly Journal #6

[Ellie Yoon]

This biweekly journal is different from the rest of all biweekly journals for it covers my SDLAP experience during the beginning of my experience of social distancing caused by COVID-19. Upon nationwide confusion, I was unable to coordinate a meeting with my learning partner Tommy and language partner Jimin. On the bright side, being home meant a more frequent usage of Korean, and inevitably Konglish. The majority of my entire family speaks both English and Korean quite comfortably and sometimes interchangeably. Both sets of grandparents hold nominal to fluent knowledge in English (one couple are immigrants while the other experienced American living for a temporary time working abroad) and long-story-short, both of my parents speak two languages. But, it is important to note that it is pretty obvious that my dad is more comfortable with English and that my mom prefers Korean a little more. This difference is nonetheless caused by their childhood. My personal relationship with the two languages is, alike to my parents’–especially my mom’s–experience, a little confusing. My first language is undoubtedly Korean as it was the language I spoke in first and the language of the country I was born and raised in. Yet, with the beginning of school taught in the English language (both British and American English), I began to develop far more advanced English skills than Korean. Since then, I have been more practically comfortable speaking in English while feeling emotionally close to the Korean language. I like to watch videos and forms of entertainment in Korean all the while writing papers and reading the news in English. I also continued to improve English through school while Korean remained by the rudimentary level (though, I was quite the talker at a young age). The inconsistency of my relationship with learning Korean as English became my dominant, academic language is what I think caused a setback in my improvement of Korean. At this point in my second semester of college, I had begun to pursue the Korean language again in a more serious matter. Being home following this pursuit, unfortunate to the typical college experience, has helped me more as I find myself in a household that can help me with my Korean practice. It also helps that I have been spending my extra time binge-watching Korean dramas. The one thing I find frustrating, and a need for improvement, is being able to verbalize words at the same speed as my thinking with correctness. To explain, I sometimes find myself tripping over a couple of words in a sentence I wish to say. Usually, I know what I would like to express in my head, but once I begin to verbalize it, I find myself stuttering over a specific form of a word to find the correct expression or tense. This is a little irksome because I know what it is that I want to say. Even so, I struggle to say it as quickly as I think it as I’m stuck between two grammatically different ways of expression. Being home, I realized I did this on numerous occasions. I hope that as we all practice safe social distancing that I will be able to pinpoint the issue and work to fix this small error in my Korean think-and-speak system.