These past three weeks can be summed up essentially with one word, chaos. With the unbelievably rapid rate that the COVID-19 is spreading across the world, daily life for everyone is becoming affected. The University of Richmond has decided to transition into online classes. Thankfully, it is not just our school that has decided to transition to this form of teaching. As far as I know, every school in the United States has decided to either close or transition to online education for the rest of the semester. This is very concerning, since I have no idea how this will impact my education, but I am almost certain that having classes online will only make learning more difficult.
As far as this course goes, the professors have decided to essentially keep the curriculum exactly the same, which makes sense since this course is primarily a self-directed learning course. One major change is that we will no longer be able to meet our language learning partners face to face, but rather rely on communicating through webcam. Though this may be difficult to some, since I am primarily focusing on practicing communication and pronunciation this will make the online transition much smoother. But for this biweekly journal I want to talk about what I have done in the past weeks and what I am planning to focus on for the upcoming weeks.
During these past few weeks of spring break, I was able to come back home in California and be with my family. My family primarily speaks Korean, so I had the opportunity to really be immersed in an environment that only speaks Korean. I believe that during my time here, my ability to think and speak in Korean has become much more proficient and natural. I find that I am able to confidently express what I want to say to my parents without having to stand there stumbling for words. In addition, over the course of the break, I watched a Korean drama called Itaewon Class. This was a very fun drama that was released on Netflix. I made it a goal to watch the drama and try not to rely on the English subtitles that they provide. I found that I was able to understand a majority of what they said, but I found it difficult to understand once they started to use slang and curse at each other, which are parts of the Korean language that are constantly changing. But overall, I enjoyed the drama very much and I learned a lot of new vocabulary as a result.
Looking towards the future, I realize now that I will be home for the rest of the semester, which is something that I am not totally against. While I am here with my family, I will try my best to continue to speak Korean and practice my Korean speaking, while being quarantined. In addition, I will try to get in touch with my language learning partner and continue our weekly meetings.
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