Biweekly Journal 5

[Elliott Lee]

Elliott LeeDr. Soloway11/3/19Biweekly Journal 7These past two weeks have been a stressful time for me. I was faced with three exams so I wasn’t able to focus on learning Korean as much as I would have liked to. However, I was able to focus on speaking Korean in little increments throughout these two weeks.This week, the main form of practice I was able to do was speaking and calling my family back home. I called my grandma, and I talked about how I miss her. I also told her how I miss home cooking and she told me that she would make me all the food I want to eat when I see her during winter break. I also called my parents. We talked about how I miss them and how classes are difficult, but they helped encourage me and gave me the strength to not give up in my studies. We also talked about my brother. As a senior in high school, he is now focusing on college applications and where he wants to go for the next part of his life. We discussed what he wants to study, where he wants to stay, and how hard he is working to do well. Hopefully, he does well and he gets into a school that he can be happy at.Once my exams had finished I was able to catch up on the Korean programs I was watching. I was able to watch the new season of 신서유기, which is a show that my family has been also consistently watching since I was younger. I also was able to catch up on the most recent running man video, which was one of the funniest episodes I have watched in a while. I’m also excited because there is a new episode that comes out every Sunday, so I am excited to be able to watch another episode later tonight one I finish my homework.On top of that, the club that I am a part of, kasa, was holding a Halloween event, so it was really fun to have a bunch of classmates come over and spend time together. We are able to talk and eat together. Though we didn’t spend the whole time speaking Korean, I was able to practice with some of the Korean members who were not able to speak English as fluently. Therefore, it was nice to be able to practice and be able to communicate with native Korean speakers, which is something I am not able to do all the time.For the future, I hope to be able to focus more on my lessons with Jimin and look into more ways to practice and expand my Korean learning. I have been thinking, but as a suggestion from Dr. Soloway, I was told to look into the root breakdown of words in Korean so that I can be able to expand my vocabulary but also be able to learn more grammatical rules that I may have not yet learned.

[Sreya Aluri]

I find it super cool that your family has consistently been keeping up with a show since you were young! Also, I just wanted to mention that I absolutely love running man! I am neither up to date with all it’s episodes nor do I intend to follow it, but every time I need a break I love going onto youtube and watching random running man video because they make me laugh a LOT, and that’s the perfect way to get a break.

[Gavin Foo]

Wow Elliott! Reading your post was very interesting. I respect that you’ve been practicing korean with grandma. I think speaking with family members is a great way to practice. When I was learning Chinese, I tried practicing with my mom and grandma and it helped me solidify the things I learn in class. Keep up the great work!