For this week, I met with my language partner and worked on setting study goals for the whole semester. First of all, the main goal is to be able to speak instead of focusing more on grammar and language structures and so on. By speaking I mean being able to hold conversations with Korean people when I travel to Korea without any hardship. What's more, learning to speak means that I will have to learn both formal and informal Korean (eg. 안녕하세요 | 안녕 Annyeonghaseyo | annyeong Hello) so that whenever I encounter with people of different ages, I can communicate with all of them courteously without making any errors.
What's more, I want to be capable of writing conversations as well, meaning that I want to write daily conversations to improve my writing skills. To achieve this, we decided to learn the alphabet in the first place since this is the backbone of both spelling and writing. Also, we wanted to watch some Korean movies and dramas to familiarize myself with not only Korean pronunciation, but also Korean slangs (eg. 남친 | 여친 namchin | yeochin Boyfriend | Girlfriend).
Therefore, for this week we learned the alphabet, including 10 vowels and 14 consonants. The 24 letters are combined together into syllable blocks. The shapes of the consonants g/k, n, s, m, and ng are graphical representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them. Other consonants were created by adding extra lines to the basic shapes. The sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. Korean can be written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and right to left, or in horizontal lines running from left to right. Also, I learned how to spell and write my Korean name according to its pronunciation and some other Korean names with the same method. We also discussed the basic introduction in Korean. Things like 안녕하세요. 만나서 반갑습니다. (Annyeonghaseyo. Mannaseo bangapsseumnida. Hello, it's nice to meet you). And we are going to learn more about it in the following weeks.
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