Bi-weekly #1 (113)

[Jeffrey Choi]

For our first class, we had a discussion with Jimin, our language learning partner, what our class wanted to get out of this course. We gave her our learning plans and she created a cumulative schedule for what we would be going over throughout the semester to make sure our individual and aligning goals would be explored. Afterwards, she went over a topic that most of us had trouble with, which was learning about certain common spelling errors. She would write down two words that sounded the same, but only one was correctly spelled. We were given a blank sheet of paper and had to choose the correct word and use it in a sentence to make sure we knew how the word applied in the right context. She taught us a really helpful trick to use when applying these two vowels. "ㅐ"and "ㅔ" sound exactly the same, so it gets really difficult to figure out which one to use. I have been applying them based on gut feeling from all the years of Korean I have learned, which is not a method that helps me be confident in what I'm spelling. She taught us to extend the vowel for "ㅐ" into a full word and if it sounds good with the word we are trying to spell, it is correct. This has been immensely helpful as these two vowels are one of the most difficult ones to correctly apply for me. The following week, she gave us a quiz on the words we went over in the previous class and then reviewed over the ones where we failed to get right. Throughout the class, she continued to teach us more common vocabulary errors through videos she found online and from her own experience of being in Korea.