In the first meet up with Jenna two weeks ago, we went over formal conversation in Korean. I practiced talking about myself and my hobbies. I also practiced talking about what I want to do in the future and what I am currently doing in school (chemistry major and pre-med track). Jenna also gave me a worksheet with new vocab words about Sino-Korean. I learned about the influence of Chinese characters on Korean. Sino-Korean is used for dates, money, time and addresses/numbers over 100. On the other hand, Korean numbers are used for age, # of times something occurs, and different counters for objects. It was interesting that Korean uses different counting numbers for specific topics and subjects. This is different from English and it was kind of confusing at first. Furthermore, Jenna taught me how to count in Korean numbers up to 100. During the session, Jenna also taught me how to pronounce each number in both Korean and Sin-Korean. Away from the lessons, I have continued using radio garden to listen to Korean broadcasts and music. I spent around 10-15 minutes a day to just listen to random news stations or music stations. I also have been practicing speaking in Korean with my parents and my grandmother over the phone. I have called them multiple times every week and limited my English vocabulary. I can see an improvement in my ability to speak in Korean. Furthermore, my friend and I went out to eat at a Korean restaurant and I ordered the food in Korean. I will discuss this further in my cultural posts for this week.
For my second meet up with Jenna, we reviewed the Sino-Korean and Korean counting. I got quizzed on some of the numbers and practiced saying specific numbers like 43 or 124. Jenna also gave me more numerical vocab words in Korean, such as currency. She taught me the currency in Korean and how to count currency. Something interesting that I learned was that any won (dollar) amount larger than 10,000 is counted based on a certain base suffix, similar to how Americans use thousands to count dollars up until one million. Jenna also introduced me to times and dates in Korean. She taught me how to say the time in Korean. Something interesting about time in Korean is that the hour uses the Korean counting system while the minutes use the Sino-Korean counting system. Just as we say “half past 2” in English, Korean also uses a shortcut phrase for halfway of an hour. Korean also utilizes AM and PM, except that place them in the beginning of the time compared to English. For the dates, we use a mix of Sino-Korean and Korean counting for the months. Jenna also taught me the days of the week in Korean and how to pronounce it. Similar to English, Korean uses a common suffix like “day” in MonDAY, TuesDAY, WednesDAY, etc. Overall, I think I am proud and excited about the amount of Korean I learned in the past two weeks. I have learned numerical counting systems in Korean, as well as increasing my skills in speaking and writing Korean. I am excited to continue improving in Korean.
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