On February 28th, I had my first official Korean lesson with Jimin at 815. We began by going over a list of terms that she had prepared for me in advance, so that she could gauge my level of Korean. I was able to read all the terms but did not understand a number of them. However, when she read them out loud and used them in the context of a sentence, I was able to identify all the terms. I explained to Jimin that although I had been taught Korean in formal settings in the past, these were brief and did not account for a majority of my skills in Korean. I grew up speaking Korean at home, so I best understand the language when it is spoken out loud to me. I thought this was really interesting because in English, I prefer visually reading words over auditory comprehension. Actually, when I have to listen to podcasts or other types of verbal lessons, I find it extremely difficult to retain the information that is being relayed, and I often have to listen to the material several times before I understand everything that I am hearing. This is probably due to the fact that I grew up as an avid reader, so I have a stronger connection with written rather than spoken words. But with Korean, I can say or understand words better when they are spoken, and even though I am mentally aware of the words, I usually do not know how to properly spell or write them. It does not help that my mother uses informal language with me, also known as banmal 반말. I remember when I had my first Korean class in college, I was so surprised to see the proper forms of words and their different tenses. After discussing this with Jimin, we decided that we would make it a goal to focus on formal language since I do not have a good foundation in that area.
After going through the list, we then moved onto learning about some Korean history. Jimin told me that there was a national holiday coming up on March 1st, which celebrates the Samil Movement 삼일 운동, translating literally to the March 1st Movement. This event was one of the earliest public displays of resistance against Japanese colonial rule of Korea in the early 1900s. It also served as a catalyst for Korea’s eventual independence. To teach me about this event, we looked at a comic which described its importance. Although I could read everything and generally understand the pictures, there were a lot of terms that were more advanced than my level of reading comprehension, so Jimin explained the story as we went through the pages. One of the prominent organizers of the movement was Yu Gwan Sun 유관순. She was recognized for her peaceful demonstrations of protest, starkly contrasting against the extremely violent forces imposed by Japanese military personnel. She is commonly acknowledged as Korea’s “Joan of Arc,” and she devoted her entire life to fighting for Korea’s independence, dying in jail at the age of 17. I do not know much about Korean history and this event was really interesting to learn about, especially since it is relevant to the upcoming date.
To close our lesson, Jimin went over a few slang terms that Koreans use when texting. I thought that a lot of them were pretty clever, although some were really silly and made me laugh. All in all, I thought that this was a very successful lesson. I learned a lot and a variety of different topics, all of which were really interesting.
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