In the past two weeks in Korean class, we have learned more phrases and words. We first learned three question words, what, where, and who. Then Ms. Kim asks questions around these three question words to make us familiarize with those words. While asking questions, we learned several kinds of words according to different questions and situations. First we learn the words for the four seasons, spring (봄), summer (여름에), autumn (가을) and winter (겨울). Ms. Kim says there is an old Korean movie called spring, summer, autumn and winter, although I haven't seen it. I know that the first name of a female Korean singer is봄, so I am familiar with the word of spring.
We also learned some Korean food names, such as tofu soup (순두부찌개), barbecue (불고기), bibimbap (비빔밥) and many more. I often go to Korean restaurant with my friends in Richmond, and one of my favorite dishes is seafood noodles (해물 짬뽕). Ms. Kim told me that although I ate the seafood noodles at a Korean restaurant, it was a Chinese dish for Koreans. Because China and Korea have a close relationship historically, a lot of Chinese food was brought to Korea. Because people in different places like different tastes, Korean people have improved Chinese food, and that's why I didn't find out it was Chinese food. The most popular dishes are noodles with Fried soy sauce (짜장면), seafood noodles (해물 짬뽕) and sweet and sour pork (탕수육). In China, the noodles with Fried soy sauce (짜장면) are salty and contain minced meat, but in Korea the noodles are sweeter and have lots of sweet onions and have no meat. When learning words, I found an interesting combination of Korean words. Take the word seafood for an example, sea in Korean is 해 and things in Korean is 물, as we combine this two words together we’ll get해물. We can understand it as something in the sea, which is seafood.
Since we are college students, Ms. Kim also taught us some common words used in college, such as professor in Korean is교수님. Korean people value age and seniority, even if two people are only one year apart. I'm a sophomore, and my fellow student is a junior. When addressing each other in Korean, I would call her "senior" (선배), while I would refer to her as "junior" (후배).
In addition to vocabulary, Ms. Kim also briefly introduced the Korean suffix. In the Korean greeting sentence “안녕하세요” consists of a noun plus a suffix to form a verb, “안녕” is the noun and “하세요” is a distortion of the original suffix. The original suffix is “하다”, because greeting is a polite expression, the suffix should be changed when greeting the elder, we use “하” plus “시” plus “어요/아요”, which is “하시어요”instead of하다”, so we add “안녕” to the front of suffix and get “안녕하시어요”. Although the principle of suffix deformation is such, but because people pronunciation habits, over time it become “안녕하세요”. This is a very simple suffix, and we will learn more about suffixes and grammar in the future
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