This past couple of weeks, I have been focusing on my reading and vocabulary skills. My language partner printed out a couple of news articles about practical and current issues including weather reports and a story on the Coronavirus outbreak. We then read it together out loud and go over all the vocabulary words in the sentence before we translate each sentence. It is interesting because these are complex and compound sentences in which the order of the phrases and figuring out the subject relationships are difficult to understand, even after translating most of the words on their own. This is a good practice for learning the structure of a specific but widely used part of the Korean language. The news articles are written in a very formal and official manner that almost sounds like a different language from conversational Korean when listening to it.
My language partner included a list of important vocabulary words related to each article for us to study on our own and practice with. Reading the sentences takes quite a long time because our reading rate is rather slow at the moment. I hope that the more we read, the faster we will be able to go through the articles and the better we will understand them. After we focus on reading for a while, we will then switch to conversation skill development. Although the difference between the extreme ends of Korean (formal and informal) I think that going from more complicated to simpler terms is one effective strategy in learning Korean. It allows us to understand the grander structures of words and phrases and focus on being diligent with our grammar. Then, when we learn more about how to converse, we can note the grammar points that change and the particles that are no longer existent. It’s easier to see what is missing than what should be there.
Although learning Korean through reading the articles is difficult and there is a lot I don’t know in terms of vocabulary, I am happy with this setup of learning. I think that fully immersing myself in something that is practical will lead me to be able to understand more in the long run. Additionally, my language partner stated that the vocabulary and sentence structure in these news articles are fairly repetitive. Although it is a bit difficult to grasp at the beginning, once we get a hang of it, we will be able to understand similar articles a lot more easily. The repetition of the vocabulary is also helpful when trying to remember the terms. I think that I am taking full advantage of my time with my language partner and I look forward to seeing progress as the weeks go on.
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