This semester, my study into the Korean language and Korean culture offered me a different perspective into what I was accustomed to my entire life. I was able to read up more on the history behind why Korean cultures act in a certain way, as I could relate to it in my own life experiences with Korean people.
Learning my language in depth and being able to constantly practice with it outside of my family members was a rewarding challenge for me. By being able to speak with native speakers, I had to constantly ask what certain words, or use my contextual skills to find the meaning of a word within a sentence. In addition, by exposing myself to large amounts of Korean media to enhance my Korean, I found myself picking up my pronunciation to be better as well as using phrases that I hadn’t used before.
I found it difficult to spell Korean. It still is a problem for me, especially since there are a variety of ways one could go about spelling a word and sounding the same. I did enjoy this experience in learning more about the language and the history behind it. I knew about Korean being linked to Hanja, the Chinese written form of Korean, but I did not know that Koreans did not actually use their own alphabet until the late 19th century, despite the language being created around the 1400s, nearly 450 years prior to its creation. I am impressed that it survived that long.
In addition to that, presenting about Korean hip hop, a topic that I am extremely interested in, especially since that was one of my resources to expanding my vocabulary, helped me understand more about the contrasts of Korean pop culture and its traditional culture.
The readings that I found the most useful were the bilingual articles. Growing up as a bilingual, I had constantly heard that bilinguals’ brains were wired differently than those who grew up with just one language in their household. But to actually read an article that confirmed that the way bilinguals brains were actually focused on different areas on the brain was a very interesting read. It was also useful to know that the brain patterns could mimic bilinguals even later in life, which gives me hope for when I want to learn another language later down the line. I would love to be able to become more fluent in other languages.
I would love to be able to learn more about etymology and the origin of languages. I always found that aspect extremely interesting. It was one of the main topics of the semester that I was genuinely interested in.
Luckily, being Korean and surrounded in Korean culture, I always have opportunities to continue my learning. During my winter break, I plan on continuing to learn the Korean language, since I have a lot more time, by using my Mango resource and hopefully picking up a Korean textbook. I also want to look for jobs in Korea, so that I can become fully immersed into the language and my language capabilities would expand dramatically.
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