This is the last week of this semester and I do not want to say goodbye to my learning partner Brenda and my talented classmates, Yuting and Amber. We reviewed what we learned during the whole semester including advanced version of self-introduction, conversation we can use in restaurant, the names of scenic spots and how to ask direction. We also discuss the Korean history during Japanese colonial and idioms and slangs that are commonly-used in Korean. What I learned in this class not only meet with my expectation at the beginning of the semester but even beyond that and brought me many new aspects of Korean culture that expand my horizon.
Instead of keep using Yonsei textbook to learn grammar and vocabularies, Brenda applied a more interesting method to teach us by choosing different topics each classes and letting us learn vocabularies and sentences while doing conversations. All the topics we chose are interesting and useful. For example, when we are in restaurant, something we must know how to say is “What would you recommend?” and in Korean, it is “어떤것을추천하세요?”; or when we take a tour in Soul, we want to ask “where is the museum?” we can say: “박물관이 어디에 있어요?” 박물관 means museum and we can replace it with any other places we want to ask. After practicing with Brenda and my classmates, I can fluently ask and answer questions related to theses topics.
One of my favorite class this semester is idioms and slang. Korean idioms have great similarities with Chinese idioms and that might because of the great influence of ancient Chinese cultural to Korean. The Korean idioms are even more commonly used in daily conversations than Chinese idioms. Similar to idioms, slang is widely used and has become one of the popular trends in Korea. By learning and using some slang and idioms during conversation, we can better understand the Korean culture and sound more native. Idioms and slang show me a different aspect of Korean culture because they keep up with times and they are something I cannot learn from text book. I believe that taking students to learn grammar and formalities, they can produce great coherent sentences. However, take students out of the classroom and away from textbooks, they will encounter a world of language that break those rules. Thus, I think taking time to learn slangs and idioms allow students to get to know a language and a culture faster and deeper.
I gained invaluable insights appertaining to myself as far as learning the Korean language and exploration of culture are concerned. As what I said last semester, developing advanced skills in a new language is quite a slow and incremental process and learning Korean, in this case, requires some sufficient amount of time. I feel that every small steps forward makes me more confident about my learning process.
Comments
This is a really interesting post! I am really sad too about SDLC ending for this semester and the methods that Brenda used to create a more fully immersive and interactive learning environment sound really great! A lot of times, learning just from a textbook or formal lecture can be restricting so I'm glad she was able to find an alternative language learning method for your group!