This Wednesday is my first Korean class. Since neither I nor another student had studied Korean, we started with the most basic Korean alphabets. Before the class began, Ms. Kim asked about our major and told us how to say it in Korean. Because I am a double major in mathematics and business, the word that I learned is “경여학과”, next class I will learn how to say mathematics major. The word “경여” means “business” and “학과” means “major”. Therefore, as long as I learn Korean words of other subjects later, I can figure out what to say in that major by combining words, for example, another student in my class majored in journalism, which in Korean is “신윤학과”. And then we learned how to introduce ourselves through a simple sentence, by learning this sentence pattern, I can introduce myself with many words. In English, the sentence is made up of subject-predicate-object form, while in Korean, the predicate should be put at the end. At the same time, because we are learning honorific, we also have specific requirements for what we call ourselves. In the sentence “저는 에즈메 입니다.” “저는” mean “I”, “입니다” means “am” and ”에즈메” is my English name “Esme”, it is clear that this sentence structure translate to English will be “I Esme am”, so Ms. Kim told us it is hard for Korean to learn English. “I” in Korean can be said in another version as “나”, but since we are learning honorific, it is impolite to call ourselves “나” when talking to others. With this sentence pattern “저는 ___ 입니다”, we can put other words that can introduce ourselves in the blank to form a sentence, such as “Chinese” in Korean is “중국사람”, “저는 중국사람 입니다” means “I am Chinese.” We also learned some words in class, such as cosmetics and so on.
For the focus of this semester, our plan is to learn through interest. Since we all like Korean TV dramas very much, we decided to choose a TV drama as the learning material of this semester. Among the choices given by Ms. King, I prefer a TV series called “Crash Landing on You”. The TV series tells the love story of a daughter of south Korean chaebol and an army officer of north Korea. The daughter had to make an emergency landing in north Korea after being hit by a hurricane, the officer found her accidentally and decided to help her, the whole TV series romantic and interesting. Although there will be a lot of north Korean language in the TV series because the officer is from north Korea, Ms. Kim believes that it will not make our study more difficult, but make our classes more interesting and we can learn more knowledge about this two countries. When watching the TV series, what we should do is to write down the words we hear while watching the plot, even if we don't know the meaning, then we will share them in class. Next class we will have a small word test and continue with Korean alphabet.
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