Discussion Post #7

[Ethan Han]

I have made great progress so far in my language learning. I have been able to do most of what I had planned so far. I am writing daily journals, reading short stories, memorizing new vocab, and watching lots of Korean content. However, I am lacking in the speaking portion of my language learning. I do speak with family over the phone in Korean from time to time but I don’t practice my speaking as much as I do with my reading, writing, and listening. Learning about a language's family and history has helped me a lot with Korean because it allows me to identify where the majority of Korean words come from which in turn allows me to connect words to their meanings. For example, in Korean, a lot of root words, prefixes and suffixes can be traced back to Chinese. After I recognized this I began to recognize the pattern in other words. Recognizing these root words, prefixes and suffixes has allowed me to quickly pick up new vocab or has helped me interpret words I don’t know in my readings. Also, knowing the history of a language has helped me understand Korea’s culture as a whole. Korea was largely impacted by the Chinese; therefore, there are a lot of similarities between Korean and Chinese culture. Daily exposure to Korean through writing, reading, and listening has helped me develop a “Korean brain”. This means that I am not translating everything in my head from English to Korean every time I write or speak. Instead, I am developing a brain that thinks in Korean. Thus, I only use words and grammar rules that I know so far. This makes life a bit more difficult when using Korean because it’s like I have the proficiency of a baby in Korean but when learning something new I do have to start off with baby steps. Something I can do to improve my communicative competence is by reading and listening to media that is produced in Korea for Koreans. This will help me pick up words, phrases, and slang used in the present day in Korean. Therefore, reading old children's stories isn’t always the best solution because they contain many words that are not used at all in the Korean language.