Bi-Weekly Learning Journal #2

[Hyeon Jun Jo]

After learning slangs, my tutor and I have moved on to learning Korean four-character idioms called 사자성어. A lot of these idioms are basically abbreviation of long phrases, taking the first character of each words and combining them. I first looked at new idioms and tried to guess its meaning by thinking of what words start with each character. These are a bit harder to incorporate into actual sentences and confusing to figure out when to use the idiom as each one is related to one specific situation. I had to try multiple example sentences to realize when to use an idiom and practice definitely helped me learn the application. The harder part of learning idioms is that it uses high level vocabulary. In order to learn the idioms, I had to learn each words that are used in the idiom first which doubled the time to learn idioms.