In these past two weeks I have moved forward in both my conversational Korean and my cultural learning. I have worked with my language partner on simple phrases such as “I want to eat Korean food” or “I have to study” that are very important, yet easy to learn and apply to daily conversation. We also covered the different tenses of how to use those phrases and the negative version of each phrase. For example, the particle ‘안’ is placed in front of the verb ‘want’ or ‘have’ to act as the “do not” in the sentence. This activity was useful in practicing my verb conjugation for present and past tense. In later sessions, I would like to extend each of these phrases to learn a more complicated grammatical structure.
In my lessons with Kim Sumi, we have focused on vocabulary and cultural topics. I have been able to work with two other people in the class, so it is interesting to learn about what they are wanting to learn as well. Every class begins with each of us talking to the professor and telling her how we are doing and what we did over the past week. Through this exercise, we can solidify some key conversational phrases and learn some determiners such as ‘many’ or ‘only’. Then we talk about each of our cultural topics for our presentation. This week, our professor gave us a vocabulary list that correlates with our topics. We go around saying the words to practice reading and pronunciation and write the definition next to each term. This is our new list to study for the next class in which we will have a quiz. It is very helpful having the vocabulary to study, not only to increase the number of words we can understand, but also to give us terms to incorporate into our presentation.
Something that I have failed to do on my part is the consistency of reviewing the material. I feel like I have little time to dedicate to actually internalizing the words, grammar, and phrases instead of just memorizing them. I will make an extra effort to study the terms every day and practice incorporating the new sentence structures I’m learning into normal, daily activities. I have noticed my frustration in classes because there is still so much that I do not understand that is being presented to me. Sometimes this makes me feel overwhelmed and I need to take a step back. It is more helpful for me to learn vocabulary and grammar in small chunks and build off of it instead of learning one example of one concept and another example of a completely different concept. I think this is why I have been having a hard time dedicating part of my day to studying the material because it seems like too much. Moving forward, I will try my best to learn smaller bits of information more frequently than a lot of information at a time.
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