According to my PanOpto presentation video, I wanted to improve on two main aspects: improve my Korean for my future career as a prospective business student and to also further improve my grammar skills. My learning guide consisted of certain activities that I wanted to accomplish in order to achieve my goals. First, I wanted to understand and better listen to television news and different media broadcasting coverages about current event topics. I knew that improving my ability to comprehend news and current event issues would be vital for me to succeed in the future as a hopeful businesswoman. As a result, I informed my language partner, Jenna, that I would like to read different articles and understand the technical lexicon used in these professional articles to a better extent. This is why for the next few meetings, Jenna printed me a few articles and some were about weather. At first, I thought it was odd to simply read about the weather because I thought my Korean level was sufficient enough to read the weather, however, I was very wrong. As soon as we hit the first sentence, I already had around 6 new vocabulary words I had never seen and it shocked me how much of the article I failed to understand in the first try. This is why Jenna and I worked to read each sentence one by one carefully, unpacking different vocabulary words and phrases along the way.
I remember a recent discussion about individualism vs collectivism and I think this discussion helped me greatly to understand a big cultural difference between the United States and South Korea’s culture. I read a recent article regarding the coronavirus and how different countries handle this news in different ways. In Korea, since it is a collectivist country where the people work together for a cause, the coronavirus (although it spread rapidly in the beginning because it was so new), actually dissipated faster and is slowing down more than the United States now because everyone worked together to stop the spread. I think in the United States, we have more of a “everyone for themselves” kind of motto especially with the millennials failing to prioritize the health of the country (elders) over their own entertainment.
Comments
Great post Vivian! Understanding and listening to television news and different media broadcasting coverage are some of the first couple steps that I took to improve my Korean. Keep doing what you're doing and you'll become proficient in no time. Like you, I also overestimated my Korean reading skills. Reality struck when I first read my first Korean article in class, but I'm sure you'll be fine.