110- Learning Journal #14

[Carlos Diaz]

Overall, this semester was a success in learning Korean because of the help from my Korean language partner, Alvin Yang, and the resources available to me such as the Mango app, vocaroo, and other Korean students. My personal reason for learning the Korean language was to be able to understand and communicate with my Korean friends and their parents. I can proudly say I am able to initiate conversation and respond to certain situations. A brief overview of what I have learned this semester are simple greetings, farewells, introductions, expression of emotions, counting, months, days in the week, description of time, explanation of identity, asking questions, terms for personal use, and general survival language. To see a list of the words and phrases that I have learned, one can view them in previous learning journals. To hear me speak, one can hear the four artifacts which contain vocaroos that facilitated practice of pronunciation and enunciation while reinforcing my learning. The progress I made in Korean this semester sets the ground works for further study and practice of Korean language. My next goal for the following months is to learn to read and write. The difficulties in learning Korean, particularly speech, were the pronunciation due to contrast of Korean to my background languages (Spanish, French, and English), as well as the discipline to learning a language. At times, it can be challenging to practice Korean due to the work load of a senior but having a language partner as a roommate and many Korean friends allows for practice to take place at any moment of the day or day in the week. Both my language partner and I are very proud of the amount of words and phrases I was able to learn in this semester. The words and phrases are really applicable to the day to day life of Koreans and people in general.