During these past two weeks, I have covered a lot of material. With my language partner, we have been focusing on time orientation and location. There is a particle (에) that has many uses, but its three main purposes are to indicate a location or time. For example, if you were to say, “We meet at 10 o’clock tomorrow”, you would say 내일 10시에 마나요. We’ve also been going over vocabulary for today, yesterday, every day/month/year, now, later, etc. This is a great place to start off because we can text each other saying where and when we are going to meet for our next lesson. I think this allows for good practice.
In my later lessons with my language partner, I want to learn some general sentence structures such as, “I want to do this” or “I have this”. These are very basic things I still do not know, yet I think they will be easy to understand. I know that I use these phrases a lot in English, so I would like to learn how to say them in Korean. Afterward, we can build on the structure to make it more and more complex and add in more vocabulary as we go.
During my meetings with Professor Kim, we have been talking about complicated topics such as political corruption and history in Korean and English and going over vocabulary as we go. This part can get pretty confusing for me because I don’t understand a lot of sentence structures. Most of them sound familiar to me, but I don’t know what they mean exactly. Because of this, I am easily lost. Professor Kim will stop and explain a lot of things though, but in this context, there is little repetition. This makes it harder for me to remember things. I think all of the vocabulary is useful and we go over concepts I need to know, but the information is not being portrayed in the style that is easiest for me. In later lessons, I will talk with her to try and reach an understanding of how I process and learn information.
We’ve also been talking about and preparing for our presentations due at the end of the semester. We’ve been going over topics and Professor Kim has been giving us some suggestions and information about our topics to incorporate in our presentation. She has been very helpful with that and helps us stay on time with it.
Something that was surprising during my sessions with Professor Kim is that she will talk to me in Korean at the beginning of class asking how I’ve been, what I did etc. and I can understand most of what she is saying. And if I don’t understand something, it's usually a word I don’t know the meaning of, but I am able to pick it out and specifically ask about that one thing instead of just being overall confused. I wasn’t expecting myself to understand basic conversation questions. The main thing is that I have to work on answering them. However, the practice every time we meet is a great opportunity to better that skill.
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