My language partner is Jimin, who I met on Friday, February 14, for the first time. I was not in school for a week, and there had also been some scheduling conflicts since I was behind in all my other classes, so this is the first opportunity that we had to meet. During our first meeting, Jimin and I got to know each other since we had never met before, and I shared my background and past education in Korean. She explained to me what she had done during her first meeting with her other students, which was to create goals for the semester, so that she could get a sense of where I currently was and plan my language learning to meet said goals.
Through my language learning partnership, my general aim is to become a fluent speaker. Within this overarching goal, I specifically want to be able to improve my communication skills in order to be able to hold relatively fluid conversations with native speakers. My grandmother and mother both communicate with me in Korean and although I am generally able to converse with them, I sometimes have to rely on English or informal language to get all my words across. I am mostly interested in developing my skills for everyday application, and am not planning on incorporating my future career interests yet. Although I would eventually like to learn Korean that I could use in my future career, I wanted to take this semester to ease back into my language learning, since it has been almost two years since I last studied Korean.
We decided to create 10 goals to focus on for this semester. They are the following: (1) general writing and speaking; (2) grammar; (3) sentence structure in writing and speaking; (4) vocabulary; (5) common expressions; (6) everyday phrases; (7) watch the movie Parasite, which recently won four Academy Awards; (8) learn about Korean news topics; (9) watch a variety of Korean shows; (10) slang. While I knew that I wanted to improve on my Korean in general, Jimin was really helpful because she took what I said about why I was participating in the Self-Directed Language Acquisition Program and made suggestions for tangible goals that are challenging yet still attainable.
At the school I attended before I transferred, Korean was my favorite class and I am very excited to get back into learning this language. I am also really excited to work with Jimin and I am glad that I finally got to meet with her, because I think that we were matched well as language learning partners. I know that it will make my family happy, especially my mother and grandmother, to improve my skills in Korean, and I cannot wait to go home after the semester ends and demonstrate what I learn. In high school, I had a lot of Korean friends and also just knew a lot of Koreans that lived in Hawaii since the community is pretty tight-knit, but I have not gotten the opportunity to meet many Koreans at UR. I am hoping that I will be able to do so, because I would enjoy getting to connect with students which whom I share a similar ethnic and cultural background. I also like to listen to Korean music and eat Korean food, so it would be great to make friends who share similar interests as I do, since my current friends do not.
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