For the month of April, I completed the usual work: writing diaries, watching 2 Days and 1 Night, and vocabulary quizzes, and article summaries. I had a lot of fun with the article summaries this month. I was able to find articles on celebrities and dramas that I was genuinely interested in, and it was fun to read about them, improving my Korean reading and comprehension and writing skills. I also wrote my diary entries, and my language partner pointed out how I improved on writing more complex and longer sentences, and I felt really happy about my improvement. Rachel also suggested to me to start writing on paper more despite my preference to type Korean. She gave me multiple suggestions, and I chose to choose my favorite song and write down the lyrics for it to practice my penmanship. I thought this was a great way of practicing my writing skills because it made me really think about the lyrics and their meaning behind them, and I also was able to learn new vocabulary words along the way.
Generally, I find the areas of grammar I struggle with when I write my diary entries. This month, I focused on two areas of grammar to learn about with my language partner. The first grammar rule I learned about was how to write that shows surprise or displeasure, which is expressed with 는다니. Adding this ending to a vowel would create a meaning that implies the speaker’s astonishment at what happened. I also learned how to express my surprise with nouns, which is done by adding -라니. The second grammar rule was learning how to talk about a negative result that happened because of an unexpected or unpreventable event, which is expressed with -는 바람에. However, -는 바람에 could only be used if it is described by something that has the connector 는 attached to it. I thought this rule was interesting because it uses 바람, which means wind in Korean. I found it fascinating how this could be used to express an unexpected event that happened.
I added a new agenda to my learning plan, which was learning about superstitions in Korea. As I was watching a drama in my own free time, it brought up a superstition that Koreans believed in, and I thought it would be fun to include it in my learning plan. I told my language partner about it, and we explored the different superstitions that Koreans believed in, and it was really interesting to learn about them. When we learned about them, I even remembered the superstitions my mom told me about when I was younger. Some superstitions I learned about was the evil spirit free day calendar, which is called 손없는날 달력 in Korean. This superstition is about how if you move on certain days of the month, it can be bad luck, and there is a specific calendar that shows the acceptable and non-acceptable dates for moving. Another superstition is shaking your legs shakes the wealth out of you, which is 다리 떨면 복 나간다. In Korean culture, your legs symbolize wealth and prosperity so shaking them will shake out all the luck and wealth out of you. I had a lot of fun learning about these different superstitions, and I hope to continue learning more about them.
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