I think my work throughout this semester has been reasonable. Although I wasn’t able to follow my learning plan completely, I’ve gotten through about two-thirds of it and then started the Eggbun app because I wanted to work outside of my textbook and try something new. The Eggbun app is basically a Korean language learning application that covers the following topics: Hangeul, names of the Korean letters in Hangeul, borrowed words from other languages, the different number systems, pronunciation, classroom expressions, greeting expressions, self-introduction expressions, and topic and subject markers. As I mentioned in a previous post, Vivian had recommended Eggbun in her presentation, and I downloaded it as soon as it was available for iPhones. So far, I like it because it’s interactive whereas learning from the textbook can get a little dreary sometimes.
In addition to the Eggbun lessons, this semester I’ve studied the following topics: saying hello and farewell, using like/dislike and want (to)/don’t want (to) in sentences, creating simple sentences, verbs, telling time, and relationships. If I have time during finals week, I hope I can also learn the last bits of my lesson plans, which includes negative sentences, the past tense, and informal Korean.
Now, I can somewhat confidently do the following in Korean:
- read Hangeul
NOTE: the following tasks are all spoken
- do greetings and farewells
- introduce myself
- introduce my family
- answer questions about identity
- talk about what I like/dislike and want/don’t want
- order food at a Korean restaurant
- use numbers for phone numbers, money, counting, ordinal counting, age, dates, time
- tell time
- talk about the weather
- use classroom expressions from both teacher and student perspectives
Since my goals were relatively reasonable, I don’t think I encountered too much difficultly as I studied Korean this past semester. Maybe time management was a bit tricky, but when I’m studying I usually catch on pretty quickly. But now that I think about it, Korean pronunciation can be a bit hard sometimes. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the pronunciation of hard consonants and double consonants. I also still have to work on memorizing the sound changes in Hangeul. I think the best thing I can do to improve my pronunciation is just to look up tutorials specialized in Hangeul teaching and practice saying those types of words a lot or maybe ask a Korean friend about the differences, which brings up another point. I didn’t really consult any of my Korean friends about my work this semester and I wasn't assigned a language partner, so I ended up working independently on pretty much everything. Part of the reason was because I didn’t run into problems that I couldn’t solve myself, but even when I do run into them, I like to try to solve them myself first before consulting someone else because it helps me learn. But, in the future, I’d like to be more open with my language study and regularly consult native speakers, because I think the immediate feedback would be an efficient way to practice conversational skills and pronunciation since being able to speak Korean fluently is one of my long-term goals.
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