During this week, we continued to discuss phonetics and the breakdown of sound. It was interesting to see how sounds could be broken down into components and sounds. For this weeks discussion post, we are asked to look into an aspect of culture in our target language.
I grew up in a Korean household, where I was taught to speak Korean ever since I was a child. Also, because I grew up with my Korean parents and grandparents, I was fully immersed in Korean culture. Though we did not live in Korea, we celebrated all the holidays and aspects of the Korean culture here in America. Therefore, a lot of the unique cultural aspects of Korea is common to me. However, there are some aspects of the Korean culture that I do not fully understand because I did not grow up in Korean. An example of this is acronyms in Korean.
From various variety shows in Korean entertainment, there are segments that usually talks about how "young kids" are now using acronyms in Korean. An example of this is like "ㄱㄱ", pronounced "guh guh", which means "go go". There are many examples of this sort of acronyms are beginning to trend, and become more frequently used in the Korean language. This is very similar to the English language, where we use phrases such as "LOL" and "TFTI". It is important that you must understand the basics of the Korean language and letters in order to learn this. There is also a substantial amount of vocabulary required since these words are shorter versions of the original. As a young person myself, I know how important keeping up with trends is for young people today. Therefore, I believe it is important for me to keep in touch with this side of Korean culture, in order to fully understand and look the part of a young Korean person.
When I signed up for this course, my main objective was to learn and expand my vocabulary of the Korean language, and also to just practice and become more comfortable speaking Korean. Therefore, I believe that learning acronyms is also important because it shows that not only am I fluent in the language, but I am able to speak and be relevant like a foreign speaker would. As a result, for my learning objectives, I plan to learn and master at least two acronyms a week and try to incorporate them into my speech.
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