110 Learning Journal #14

Going according to my learning goals I have accomplished: 

Introductions, myself, my family

Body parts, how to say I'm in pain

Basic items in a Korean menu, some fruits and vegetables, how to order something

Numbers sino-korean and Korean version

Basic clothing vocabulary, ask how much something is, say something is cute, ugly, pretty

Describe today's weather

Days of the week

Basic vocabulary for the transportation: bus, taxi, how to ask where is something.

I don't think I hit the extent of what I wanted to learn, but just the basics for each goal and that made it more feasible to accomplish. For example, I wanted to be able to go shopping and be able to list everything in the store, but I really just know the basic words for shirts, pants, skirts, etc. I think what was more useful in the end was just to use topic lists that had key phrases and vocabulary. For example, the Korean restaurant word list had how to say I want bulgogi, and then the name of different menu items. I wanted to go by the whole book of Korean from Zero, but at my own pace I was getting stuck in the nitty gritty bits of grammar and I wanted to focus on how to structure sentences when it wasn't even on my learning goals. But learning by the book, I realized how hard Korean grammar becomes after a certain level. I did not really practice actually speaking, except when I occasionally talked to my Korean friend and I would insert phrases that I knew and were relevant to our conversation. I started using egg bun recently because it just became available on the iPhone. The downside go learning by topic as I did is that I would only feel comfortable discussing things in the realm of what I listed above. Moving on from here, I am not sure if I am the best at self-teaching a language. I think for basic survival terms like I learned it is feasible, but to be able to have longer conversations I need the structure of the classroom, where there are in class activities and I am forced to use it in the class conversations. It would have been nice to have an actual language partner to kind of have that structure to practice. But I think I did alright on my own. Watching Korean dramas has become more interesting for me because I can actually pick up more words now and recognize the context they are using it in. 

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of The SDLAP Ning to add comments!

Join The SDLAP Ning

Blog Topics by Tags

Monthly Archives