In Korean classes over the past two weeks, Ms. Kim has brought word cards to reinforce our learning of Korean characters. The contents of the word cards are all things we use everyday, or familiar animals like lions(사자), cats(고양이) and dogs(개). During the practice, I can consolidate my memory of Korean letters and learn some new words.
Grammar is an essential part of learning a language. Because we are still students, when we study or travel to South Korea in the future, we will meet many people who are older than us, so it is very important for us to learn and use polite and formal style of Korean. So the first thing we're learned is final polite & formal style verb ending, “십니다”, which is used with a verb stem to formally explain or declare something to a listener. In view of the composition of Korean words, there are two situations, one ends with a vowel sound and the other ends with a consonant sound. When the verb stem ends in a consonant, we will use “십니다”. When the verb stem ends in a vowel, we will use “ㅂ니다”. Because “ㅂ” is a consonant sound, words that end in a vowel sound can be combined with this sound very well, whereas consonants and consonants can't be fused, they need to exist separately. To get a better understanding, Ms. Kim gives us a few examples. “가다” means “to go” and its main part “가” is end with “ㅏ”, which is a vowel, so by the definition we need to use “ㅂ니다” and write as “갑니다”. However, when we look at “있나”, which means “to exist” or “to have”, we can see its main part “있” is end with “ㅅ”, and since it’s a consonant, by adding “십니다” we get formal word “있십니다”. Although there are many rules in Korean, most of them follow the rules for classifying vowels and consonants, which are easy to do with practice.
We continued to watch Korean drama, “Crash landing on you”, in class and after class. We all enjoyed this, not only because we were familiar with the actors and actresses but also because of the unique plot and their excellent performance. I like the hero very much and I just watched his another Korean drama not long ago, which called “Memories of the Alhambra”. Before I started watching the show, I always thought it was a love story, but it was actually a science fiction theme and it’s about a VR game. He used guns in the drama, and I suspect that his good acting and good looks, which fit the image of a soldier, helped him get the part in “Crash landing on you”. We will continue to talk about the show in the next class and learn some words and daily expressions. Although there are some differences between the north Korean language and the south Korean language, the grammatical structure and most of the vocabulary are the same, and we can learn a lot from them.
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