Biweekly Language Learning Journal (2/16)

[Jiwon Kang]

Jenna and I met twice in the last two weeks. The first meeting was on Feb 6 on a Thursday. During this meeting we went over bachims in Korean writing. Bachims are a singular or cluster of consonants that are placed at the bottom of words that changes the pronunciations of words in Korean. Jenna thought we should go over bachims based on what we learned the week before. The week before Jenna had me write a letter in Korean, where most of my mistakes were bachims. Jenna taught me different forms of bachims, the first being one simple consonant on the bottom, which changes the next syllable black. We also went over twin consonant bachims that makes the next syllable block stronger. Lastly, we talked about the ㅎ bachim which basically makes the sound of a syllable stronger and more accented. Afterwards, Jenna said some Korean words that had bachims in it, and I practiced writing these words out. I had trouble at first but began to get the hang of it after many practice words and phrases. Next Jenna and I reviewed Korean counting and currency/numbers. We talked about the different days and months in Korean and reviewed the difference between Korean counting and Sino-Korean counting. The second week I met with Jenna was on Feb 15. We talked more about bachims in this lesson. Jenna taught me about double bachim combinations, where two different consonants could be added together that changes the next syllable block. She taught me a couple examples of exceptions for bachims and further gave me practice words to try and spell. I had trouble with a lot of these since these bachims are much more complex than the previous ones we learned the week before. After practicing some more complex bachims, Jenna instructed me to write a letter to my parents about anything. She taught me the basic formatting of letters, where in Korean they say, “parents dear” instead of “dear parents.” In my letter, I talked about how my friend and I went out to eat dinner the other day and how I had a great time. Jenna corrected a lot of the words that I misspelled and helped me understand why I misspelled the words in the letter. On the positive side, Jenna did not correct any spacing errors in the sentences. In the first week this semester, I was making many mistakes with spacing in Korean writing, but I can already see the improvement in my writing. During this lesson, Jenna also helped me pronounce bachims better and gave me tips on memorizing the different accents and pronunciations of bachims. In conclusion, I thought that the last two weeks were very helpful in my Korean writing, because I have the most errors spelling Korean words with the correct bachims. If I can master and understand the spelling of bachims, I feel like I would be able to write a lot better than I have in the past. I hope to keep practicing on the aesthetics as well as the spelling of my Korean writing for the next week.