For the first few meetings of the semester, my language partner and I have discussed what my goals for this semester were, and have gotten started on our curriculum. While in the previous semesters we focused more on improvement for speech and vocabulary, we've realized that improvement cannot always happen. Rather, I want to steadily practice dialogue in Korean, maintaining my speech proficiency at the minimum. This is the basis of our meetings - improving/maintaining/practicing speech/dialogue. However, my writing is also another goal for this semester. I improved my Korean writing quite a bit last semester, but it has a long way to go. While I don't expect to be writing essays in Korean easily, I'd like to try writing a coherent paper.
To get started on these goals, my partner and I discussed the optimal way to go about our plan. While we continue to talk in Korean and choose topics to talk about - for writing I started to write about a recent event from the news, or summarizing a Korean article. This forces me to use words that may be niche to that specific news, and if I am stuck, I can read the article again and use the vocab in the article. I tried not to do this too much - it felt like cheating, but I would always try to learn the words that I would take from the article.
Going forward, I'm excited to see how my writing improves - if it does, I'll probably stick to this plan, plus a few more ideas. If not, then I'd definitely have to switch things up.
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