Journal #1

[Logan Motyka]

This week marked the beginning of my language-learning Journey with my instructor Isaac. We began going over very simple topics, which started with reviewing my understanding of the alphabet. Before starting the course, Isaac instructed me to learn Hangul, which is essentially the Korean alphabet. We then moved on and worked on the double consonants; in the beginning, this was hard for me to understand how you had to emphasize and change the pronunciation of the letter, but Isaac was very good at breaking it down and helping me through it. I felt very proud and almost prideful when I was able to conquer the tasks from the beginning of class that I had such a hard time pronouncing. We then moved to basic words; Isaac pulled up a YouTube channel that he uses with his students to explain the basics of pronunciation, we dove in and learned words like “bread” “hello” and “teacher”. Surprisingly I was able to get the pronunciation pretty quickly; Isaac told me I was doing what some people take weeks to understand in one session, which I was very happy about. In this session we hope to accomplish a basic understanding of the alphabet, which we were able to do and also work towards some basic conversational words. One of my goals was to be able to watch Korean Esports and have a basic understanding of the commentary presented. That being said after we reviewed the alphabet, Isaac pulled up a short commentary about 5 minutes of the most popular game played in Korea, League of Legends. We were able to turn on captions and bit by bit we went through the video, dissecting each of the words and their meaning. This was honestly so fun for me because I enjoy watching these videos but I don't understand what they are saying because they are obviously commentating in Korean. By watching these videos and reciting back what they were saying I was able to work on my pronunciation along with understanding intricate letter positioning within Hangul. We plan on referring back to these commentaries frequently because as discussed at the beginning of the session, Isaac wants to gear this toward my learning goals and what I deem interesting while keeping the class professional and rigorous. After watching this 5-minute clip, we then moved to reviewing some specific words. We went over words like breakfast, lunch, and dinner and also how to ask if someone had eaten. This first lesson was a bit daunting because it was a whole lot of Korean thrown at me at once, but the key about this technique is the immersion aspect. Isaac wants me to be immersed in the language, the more I am exposed to it the more my brain will pick up on these words and begin to hear the differences between them. I would say overall our first session was a huge success; we laid the grounding for a great semester and what we will be working towards, And I am more than excited to continue next week. Isaac also instructed me to practice the new words that I learned in the meantime, while talking to him and while talking to my other Korean-speaking friends to reinforce these specific words.