During the past two weeks I met with my direct language partner, Vivian. In our first meeting we discussed what we did over the winter break in the language of Korean. She told me how she spent time with her family in Chicago and I told her my experience of going back to South Korea to visit my family. We decided to meet on Tuesday and Thursday right after our Accounting class.
This semester I want to focus on improving my reading and writing skills for Korean. My end goal of college is to be able to test and certify for the Korean language. I believe that having the language certification will be beneficial for me in the future. In order to accomplish my goal, I want to be able to read Korean articles and short stories and be able to reflect on them. Instead of writing Korean from the everyday conversation and text scenario, I want to be able to write it in a more structured way. The texts/conversations and essays written in Korean are very different.
It was interesting how I am also assisting as a language partner and Vivian became my student. She told me how she wanted to improve her vocabulary skills. I think through helping her learn new vocabulary I will be able to use those in my essay and writings. I am so excited to be able to see how we can help each other improve in the language.
Recently, I read a book called “Magic” which was translated in the language of Korean. My mother has strongly recommended that I read this book. At first I was very hesitant because I preferred reading English books more than Korean books. However, I tried to take time to read it and noticed how important it was for me to practice reading various books in order to improve my Korean reading skills. I was frustrated at how slow it took me to read the first chapter and how the language built in the sentences sounded so deep with different meanings.
After reading the first chapter, I wrote a short reflection on what I read. The book actually talked about the power and strength of gratitude. There were different stories of how being thankful changed a lot of people’s lives. How if one is not grateful for the things they have there will be more negative situations that occur. The power of gratitude is very important for success and a change in the way people view life. I thought these stories were very interesting so I decided to try some of their exercises.
The book contains a 30 day of gratitude challenge where each day there is a different way to be thankful. On the first day, it instructed me to write down ten things that I was thankful for and the reason behind them. As I was writing the list of things I was thankful for I could see a slight change in my mind where a spark of positivity occurred. I was astonished by this moment and decided I would do each challenge and reflect about it by writing my reflections in Korean.
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