Reflection 6
It has been quite a long time since I studied Korean because of the condition I’m in, so I decided to do some review first to get me prepared to continue learning new lessons. Covering the meanings, I go through all the vocabulary I’ve learned from the textbook and try to recall their meanings. When I encounter words I don’t remember or feeling shaky about, I write them down in a small notebook to keep track of the words that I didn’t acquired without writing down their meanings. After going through all of the words, I try to recall their meanings and write them down besides each word. During this process, I found out many words that are similar and confusing to me. For example, the character 참, has several meanings: 1 really; 2 a modal particle; 3 to express complaint. I only remember the last two and by reviewing I acquired the first. Moreover, the pronunciation of it is very similar to another character 잠, which most often occurs in the phrase 잠시만요 and 잠깐만요, which means please wait a second. These two characters confuse me before but get clarified after I searched it during revision. Another example is 마시다 and 맛있다 which have the same pronunciations but different meanings: to drink and to be tasty. From reviewing vocabulary, I also make more connections between the words/phrases in dictionary form and words/phrases I know from other sources. For example, the phrase for to get along is 지내다, which never used on its dictionary form but widely used when greeting along with the adjective 잘, as 잘 지내요. Knowing its meaning in greeting but not in its original form might burden learners to remember things more than they need to be, just like in English we can add prefixes and postfixed to change meanings. New words may have different meanings, pronunciations, or properties, but they share the same roots.
New lesson for today is related to numbers. As well known, there are two counting systems in Korean: Sino-Korean and Native Korean. For me, to remember Sino-Korean numbers is really easy because their pronunciations are like a dialect of mandarin. Surprisingly, I spend less effort on remembering Native Korean numbers as I’ve imagined, maybe it is because that they are frequently occurred on reality shows and dramas so that they become really familiar to me. This phenomenon has the exact opposite when I learnt English. The multipliers also align with Chinese. Besides hundred and thousand, Korean and Chinese count numbers with the multiplication of 10,000 instead of 1,000 in most western countries. This can be hard for learners who are used to other multipliers to adjust to the new concepts of amount. The same applied when I studied English since I have to get to feel weight in pounds instead of kilograms, liquid in ounce instead of liters, temperature in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, and objects in thousands and millions instead of ten thousands and hundred millions. Another difficulty that learners may encounter is that Korean, again like Chinese, uses different counters for different objects. What makes it more complex for me is that different counters are paired with different types of counting systems with additional exceptions. For example, when 과 is used to count lessons, it uses native Korean numbers; when it is used to count lesson numbers, it uses Sino-Korean. Another special case is that 달 is used to count months and uses native Korean; 월 is used to count months for date and uses Sino-Korean. If we want to express possession, we have to choose the correct particle for the noun which requires us to make a lot of decisions. I decided to practice writing down sentences using these words I’ve learned related to counting.
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