Reflection 1
The first class is mainly about me and my instructor Jenna working knowing each other. We first looked at the alphabet table and we decided to skip the very first beginning of the language learning since I had already known the alphabet. Then Jenna provided two short daily conversations for me to read through. I read through the conversations and cleared the new words that get into the way of understanding. Jenna also gave me a short newspaper article about a K-Pop group called BTS. There were much more words that I have never seen before, and the syntax was very different with the everyday language use. At the end of the session, we discussed the content of this semester. My initiative to learn Korean is that I want to be able to travel in Korea and understand people’s words in Korean. From this original intention, I would be focus more on listening and speaking and less on reading and the least in writing. However, Jenna explained to me that knowing how to write will be very helpful for the other three of language aspects.
Reflection 2
On Tuesday, I attended Jenna’s session with three other students. We went through the single supporting consonants again in Korean and then we took a step forward to the double supporting consonants. When we were going through the material that I had already learned last week, I found myself forgetting some of the material. The difficult part about the supporting consonants is that both of the writing and the pronunciation is different for different words. Korean, like English, the words don’t always sounds like what they are written. For the supporting consonants especially, sometime some part of the character is mute and sometime we pronounce the second part instead of the first part of it. The one thing that I am afraid when learning languages is the process of forgetting. It makes the learning seems useless and never able to proceed. Especially after this session of learning double supporting consonants, Jenna explained that this part of language phenomenon really need us to spend time and memorize them. There are exceptions out of exceptions and the best way to learn is to practice using them and correct mistake.
My goals for these two weeks are trying to list out most of the common used words including supporting consonants. By listing out the words I would be able to create my own sentences. This self-assignment will be sent to Jenna and corrected together on the following sessions.
The class on February 11th we learned about phonology and articulatory phonetics. Some of the final consonants pronunciation include what we have talked about in class. The airstream has been stopped at some part of the body. For example, ㅆ stops the airstream at the alveolar region; ㄱ stops the airstream at the epiglottis. ㅌ stops the airflow at dental region. Having the knowledge of phonetic articulation in mind, it makes the learning process slightly easier, but it definitely helps me better remember how to produce the exact sound I made a long time ago. I would be using this method to teach languages if I have a chance in the future.
Reflection 4
This week, I borrowed a Korean language learning textbook from the global studio called Integrated Korean. It is a textbook that my language partner Jenna and many other Korean language learner friends suggested. There are a few volumes for different language learner at different stages. For me, I chose the Beginning 1 to start off my language learning process. The book organizes the content into Introduction and Objectives with Appendices and Grammar Index and the end of the book. This week I read the first half of the introduction to Korean hoping to have a general impression and knowledge about the language. Having some knowledge of Korean, reading through the introduction is more like a review on the information that I’ve already had. Although, I do gained a lot of new knowledge such as the relationship to mandarin and Japanese. From a few years in Kpop culture, I noticed that Korean entertainment companies always have the attempt to break into the Chinese and Japanese market with either by making songs in the language or having their groups debut in the country. For example, one of the most well-known group, EXO, had a subunit called EXO-M. The M in their name stands for Mandarin, which coincides with their main purpose to perform their songs in Mandarin. Besides, one of the biggest girl group, Blackpink, made their debut in Japan a few years ago. According to the idols who speaks Korean had experience learning Japanese and Mandarin, it is very similar in terms of grammar with Japanese, words with Mandarin, which made the learning process slightly easier that learning English and Spanish. From the book, I learned that there word-borrowing from Japanese created based on Chinese characters which is called Sino-Korean.
Besides the connection with other cultures, Korean itself is, of course, a special language. The characteristic of situation-oriented makes it different from the languages that I can speak. Speakers will not include the subject or/and object when the context makes them obvious. The degree of obviousness can be vague and usually are played around with in lyrics and K-dramas. Another unique feature is its word order. The general order is subject + object
+ verb, but it is also often called free word order language because it permits the element before the verb to be scrambled for emphatic or other purposes. Unlike Mandarin and English, the two language that I speak, where subject/object and word order are comparatively important in comprehension, Korean can be hard for me to get used to based on these two features.
By connecting the knowledge that I had about the culture and the language with the content in the book, I feel more confident in the upcoming language learning because I can see the progress, the increase in knowledge each week. It is also a good way to test and organize what you’ve already had. Learning by with a proper textbook is what I’ve always wanted to try since that is how I learnt English with a decent efficiency. I would continue to use this strategy for the future language learning and make adjustment when necessary.
Reflection 5
This week I studied the remaining introduction and the first chapter —greetings. The introduction mentions the subject honorific suffix with multiple examples. Long before I started to learn Korean seriously, I noticed that there would always be a series of sound: Si-Mi-De, at the end of each sentence. Just like “hello, how are you” is a typical short sentence that we will say if we are asked about English, Si-Mi-Da is the general impression of Korean among Chinese people. Knowing that this is a honorific suffix used when at the end of the sentence when the subject is a senior or an adult equal. The sound pattern is another point worth mentioning. It has always been hard for me to separate the consonants. Unlike Chinese or English were consonants are separated into two degree: voiced and voiceless, for example, tie and die, 台 and 代, Korean has unique structure of dividing the consonants into three parts: plain, aspirate and tense: ㅍ, ㅂ, and ㅃ. Therefore, learning the pronounciation by looking at the book is hard. I would definetely seek help from my language partner for specifications. Although, after studying the international phonetic alphabet, other sounds became easier to find by looking at description, for example, nasal soft palate ㅇ is pronounced as /-ng/; alveolar fricative ㅅ is pronounced as /s/. I would suggest other Korean language learners who might be struggling with the prononciation to study the international phonetic alphabet.
Similar to Chinese, Korean can be written both horizontally and vertically, most on newspapers. However, in north Korea, only vertical is used. This is something that I have never heard of before. From my knowledge of Chinese culture, vertical text is always used for books made of bamboos in ancient time because of the texture of the book and continue to be in this way until 1950. Besides, the stroke order for writing hangul is the same for writing Chinese characters, which was never noticed by me when I copied down lyrics in Korean. The connections between my own culture and my target language’s culture encourage me to learn more about it, and help me to be conscious about what I have already known about the language and the culture itself.
The next part of the introduction is a review for me on pronunciation rules which was covered by my language partner a few weeks before. I do not find more information than she provided. My favorite part of this introduction is its last part: useful classroom expressions where the book provides a few basic sentence that can be used right away without knowing grammar rules, which are essential for studying in Korean. The section is very thoughtful for students who don’t have time to fully study Korean before study abroad in Korea.
In the first lesson, my second half content for this week, I studied two conversations and a narration. The book provides the vocabulary lists with their word classes and humble/plain indication. For this chapter, most of the vocabulary are already familiar with me, so I focused more on the spelling instead of trying to remember the words.
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