2023 Monthly Language Learning Journal #3

[Joseph Lee]

In this past month, my partner and I spent far more time on focusing on writing proficiency, and less on my other goals. Whereas before it had been a biweekly cycle of writing on a topic and reviewing the writing together, now it is a topic per week, with a soft review on the first week and a hard review of both topics on the second week. In order to make sure I am challenging myself, I have been writing on Korean news, and less on media + other niche topics. This forces me to write with a more formal tone, as well as learning and practicing niche and technical terms. The speed of my writing has improved, far more than the beginning of the semester, but it has already plateaued. It will surely improve slowly, but most of the time I cannot think of the exact word to write, so I believe my Korean comprehension proficiency is acting as a bottleneck. Once I feel fully used to writing in Korean, I will probably go back to improving my Korean comprehension and vocabulary skills via reading. However, this will probably not be any time soon.My mistakes in writing have also lessened as well, but another issue I saw was that I had trouble connecting the sentences together. My conversational flow is fine, but as written language and conversational languages often differ in flow, I find that some parts of my writing seem too blocky. This is something else I also have to improve on.