It has been a great semester in terms of my self-directed Korean learning experience. During the process, I developed better skills of self-learning, time management, study planning. This class is different from any other classes I’ve taken at UR because it requires me to make a study plan myself and design my learning goals. In that way, I have to take charge of making progress instead of others pushing me for progress. In this paper, I will first talk about the weekly daily routine and how it helped with my learning of Korean. Next, I will reflect on the problems I encountered and how I deal with them. Finally, I will talk about my learning result and what I can improve in the future.
Every week, I met with my language partner twice, and each session last fifty minutes. In addition to the learning sessions, we complete homework outside of class. I really enjoyed these classes. There are four beginners in our learning session. I felt more involved when learning with peers. Our language partner combined visual tools and traditional learning techniques. In addition, we practiced conversion with each other in every meeting. At the same of learning speaking and dialogues, we also learn the Korean alphabets. Combining the two elements laid a solid foundation for us beginners. Through the meetings, I was practicing my spoken Korean in a real room setting, which helped with my listening and pronunciation. The most fundamental material is, however, Korean alphabets. By mastering all the alphabets, we are able to pronounce all words in Korean. To help with the learning of Korean alphabets, we had competition almost every class to pronounce Korean words by combining the syllables. We also watched various videos. Some were k-pops that contained the words we learned that class, and some were learning videos to help with our understanding of grammar. Overall, all the techniques helped me with my listening, writing, speaking. Outside of class, I have been watch Youtube Videos that teach Korean through some popular culture. The YouTuber I often watch is called “Alice Wonderland”. She can fluently speak Korean, English, and Cantonese. She often teaches grammar, sets of words, or phrases under k-pop context. In that way, one can learn words and phrases from song lyrics. I found it to be really fun and helpful to watch. Overall, I think practicing dialogues with my peers to be a very effective method of learning.
There are also some difficulties I encountered during my study of Korean. The first is the pronunciation. While alphabets themselves are easy to pronounce, once they combine to become a word, it is hard for me to imagine the combined sound of the word. In the future, I will spend more time in practicing speaking words by imaging how to combine the alphabets more. It will require lots of practices to master it. Also, grammar is particularly hard to learn because the sentence structures of Korean are very different from English. One word has many forms depending on the place it is in a sentence. Even if I know the word, it changes form in a sentence and I no longer recognizes it. I will need to learn more grammar to know how to use single words into sentences.
I also learned a lot from the cultural presentations. I learned from my cultural presentation that there is still huge gender gap in Korea. Women get more than 30% less pay than men in average and have fewer opportunities at work. However, the situation is changing as more women get higher education. For the presentation on Turkey's gender equality issue, even though women's status is still low, it has progressed a lot and the percentage of women holding leadership positions are even higher than many developed nations. I learned from Yuchi's cultural presentation about the trainee system in Korea. The entertainment industry is one of the largest industries in Korea and its popular culture spreads around the world. It has a very systemic way of training future k-pop stars. I learned that trainees start at a very young age, and their daily lives are controlled by their companies and they are usually not allow to rest during their promotion period even if they are sick. It is a cruel system but still very competitive.
In conclusion, I am pleased with my learning result, as I met most of my learning goals and the learning sessions with language partner were very effective and fun. Once knowing the alphabets, it is easier to learn new words and write them. The classes laid a solid foundation for me to continue my self-study in Korean after graduation.
Comments