During the past two weeks I met with my language partner, Somyung. In our first meeting we set some rules and expectations we want to follow during our lessons. We decided to meet every morning on saturday and a rule we set was to speak only in Korean. I also told her the area I wanted to improve my korean this semester which was writing. We discussed some of our plans to improve my skills such as writing diaries every week. Also, my language partner will be providing me with some prompts to write about during our lesson. We will also be watching XX which are short videos in Korean to try to improve my vocabulary for my writing. My end goal for learning Korean is to be able to write essays or educational paragraphs in Korean. I really feel relieved and excited at the steps we are taking to get to my end goal. Usually, Korean tutors would overburden students with a workload of essays to write to improve their skills. However, I am more engaged in my learning since we are taking small steps and moving along with how I progress.
Today, I met with my language partner in the morning. We went over my homework, the diary I wrote for this week, and fixed my grammar mistakes. I noticed that I would write my diary in a way I would speak. So I would leave out a lot of 을 behind words. I also made a mistake where I was saying I went to eat food. So “I went” is 갔다 but I misspelled it as 같다 which means “same”. My language partner noticed how my diary was written like the schedule of my day. She advised me to try writing more of how I felt about an event or activity because my writing felt very choppy. This is my first time writing anything in korean other than the alphabet or text messages. I have a lot of areas to improve in. Next, we watched a short video of XX episode 1 and I heard familiar vocabulary in this episode. By the end of the semester I want to be able to know some vocabulary other than the commonly understood words. The last assignment we did today was writing a page that answers a prompt Somyung prepared for me. The prompt asked to write about my favorite and least favorite food from the cafeteria. I had difficulty starting this prompt because I didn’t really know how to start. So I started by saying which school and I went and introduced the cafeteria we had here. While I was writing I noticed that I had some difficulty spelling out some vocabulary like 풍경 which means scenery. I became aware of the difference of knowing the vocabulary word from speaking to actually trying to write it and spell it out. My language partner let me look it up but later I want to make sure I reduce the amount of times I look up how to spell words.
Comments
Hi Rachel Kim, being able to write essays or educational paragraphs in Korean is a great end goal! Especially if you wish to be able to use Korean in your future career! I would suggest that you try reading Korean online newspapers. it will not only help you get the style of Korean formal writing but it will also allow you to be updated with Korean current events.