This last week, Jenna and I did not meet since it was Thanksgiving break. We didn’t have time to meet up because we were both leaving on Tuesday. Jenna did email me some work to do over Thanksgiving break. It was a conversation in Korean between two people. Conversation in Korean is Conversation (대화). Jenna provided different conversations between two people. The first scenario is about a person going to a movie with another person, then getting dinner together. The conversation starts with a person asking another person if they are free that weekend. They decide to go watch Joker. One person asks if they are free Wednesday night, and the other says no because they have to study for a test on Thursday. So they decide to meet up on Friday night to watch the movie. They decide to meet up at 6pm. Jenna also provided me with three other situations related to eating and the movie.
The week before, Jenna and I went over my goals for the semester and talked about my progress so far in the semester. I talked to her about what I aim to do next semester and talked about what I have learned this semester. We also went over some of the vocabulary for counting, numbers, time, and the days of the week. I am still having trouble pronouncing the days of the week clearly and with good articulation. I will continue to practice that because I know I will use that a lot in daily conversations in Korean. I also practiced self introductions with Jenna. I talked about my major, what school I go to, my hobbies, and what I want to become in the future. Some key words we went over were college, chemistry, medical school, and study.
On my own time, I have continued to listen to radio garden, but now I have also begun to listen to a lot Korean music. I have especially listened to K-hip hop and rap—Epik High and Big Bang. They were popular boy bands back in the early 2000s, but I enjoyed listening to many of their songs. I used some of their songs for my final cultural presentation about Korean music. If I didn’t know what some of the words were in the song, I simply googled the Korean lyrics and searched up what they meant. Most of the words and lyrics in Korean, I was able to understand when I read the transcription. I noticed that the hard part was listening to the fast speaking Korean in the music. They speak really fast to match the beat and the flow of the song. Furthermore, many of the artists use English words and phrases in their songs, which I thought was really interesting. I also have begun watching some Korean YouTube videos and channels about comedy and news. I try and read every phrase that pops up on the screen of the YouTube video, and I think it has helped me become more efficient in reading Korean faster and correctly. From an emotion standpoint, I am still excited to be progressing in reading and writing in Korean so fast. The thing that I am getting worried about and scared about is correctly spelling words correctly and knowing some more sophisticated words in Korean. There are still many many phrases in Korean that I don’t understand at all because of the level of sophistication. I hope to further expand my Korean vocabulary and be able to understand phrases that I don’t know now, either on the radio or on the YouTube videos I watch.
Comments
Practicing listening skills using music really helps me too! I think that listening to Korean music also really helped me with my reading because I could listen to the songs while reading the Korean lyrics. Normally, my Korean reading skills are super slow but because I had an audio guide it helped me read way faster.
Learning with music really helps a lot. I think the Korean TV show "놀라운 토요일 (amazing Saturday)" would also help if you like to practice Korean using Korean music. The guests in this program play games of dictating lyrics to win Korean traditional food. It is fun to dictate those lyrics with those MCs.
Good job practicing using music! I think it is really useful to use music to study a language because you just remember better when the words are part of a song you like. In addition to music, I think watching Korean TV shows with subtitles helped me a lot as well.