It is really unfortunate to be under quarantine now, but my language learning journey still continues on. With April approaching, Jimin and I was able to talk about 만우절, which is the April fools’ day in Korea. It is exactly same as it is in United States, but I found something very interesting in an article we read. Korea had a similar day in its history during the Joseon dynasty. On the first day of snow every year, the subjects of the King would be allowed to say a light lie to the King without any punishment. We also talked about how Korean BJs (Korean streamers) and celebrities use April fools’ day to present fake news to pull attention from the media. Besides reading articles, Jimin taught me more Chinese characters used in Korean. This also gets me frustrated as well but less than the spelling rules. Each Chinese character has its own meaning and they are combined to make a word. By knowing what each character means, you can expect the meaning of a word that you don’t know. For example, the character”인” means manpower and the character “력” means power. By combining the two characters, the word “인력” is formed which means man power. However, these are relatively easy to learn, and the four-character words are a lot more difficult to learn and harder to guess its meaning. Part of the learning is simply getting familiar to the characters and recognizing them in different words. I did a lot of exercises which a word is given, and I would have to write the correct meaning of the word. The four-character words are more difficult to simply guess as it usually means a whole phrase, so I practice them similar to learning other normal vocabulary. These characters also make up most of the professional language used in Korean, so it opens up a way to learn these professional languages as well.
With the COVID-19 situation, I listen to the radio very often with my parents, trying to keep up with the current news both in United States and Korea. There’s been many cases in Daegu where many of my relatives live and I hope the situation in Korea gets better. Using radio and podcast is really a good way to practice listening as it doesn’t have any visual support. I’m really getting used to listening Korean even though I lack the knowledge in professional language. However, I continue to expand my professional language with the help of my parents. Whenever an unfamiliar word come up, I would ask my parents and add it to my vocabulary list to review it later. With the quarantine, my parents have been a good source of learning and they allow me to practice speaking so much because I am forced to use it all the time. Although I am not able to meet with Jimin physically, a lot of my learning has been coming from watching videos and reading articles. As I stay at home, I think I will have a great learning experience as I get more exposure to the language at home and culturally integrate myself.
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