Since my focus for this semester is to become a fluent, native speaker, I have been doing activities that grow my communication skills. First, I started with studying common spoken phrases that relate to topics that I am interested in like school and business. When meeting with my language partner, we worked on having conversations related to school and business as well, such as what classes we are taking and what business projects we have to complete. I also changed the structure of these conversations often so that sometimes it is like two friends are talking, a student and a professor, or an interview for a job. From this, I hoped to accomplish a more holistic spoken fluency outside of just conversational speech between two students.
I also wanted to incorporate differences in formal and informal speech and learn more vocabulary from my language partner. Whenever she would say something that I did not know, I would immediately ask what it meant and she would explain in Korean what it meant. This strategy of asking immediately what a word means allowed for the conversation to still flow naturally while also learning the new word. Having my language partner explain the word in Korean instead of English also helped me stay within the flow of the conversation and learn the word within context instead of ending abruptly to look through a dictionary. Using different conversation structures like the interview was also very effective in throwing me into a scenario and forcing me to adapt. This made the learning process much quicker than learning phrases from a textbook because if I said something wrong, I had immediate feedback from my language partner so I could fix it. I also attend a Korean church in the community and I have attended the Korean service a couple of times to get more exposure to the language.
I will build upon these strategies by supplementing my conversations with an upper level Korean vocabulary textbook, which is an addition to what I had on my schedule. I hope this will elevate and add more depth to my current conversations, since as of now I’ve been using elementary words and phrases. I will also study the Korean phonetic chart to improve my pronunciation because I want to train myself to make sounds in Korean that don’t exist in the English phonetic inventory.
Something I have not been very successful with is committing to speaking Korean often enough since I only meet my language partner once or twice a week. I may try to speak with Korean relatives on the phone more often to increase exposure. I also want to increase my exposure to listening to Korean by listening to podcasts or news reports that will both give me more insight into Korean culture and current events and also sentence structure, vocabulary, and quicker auditory translation speed. So far, I am feeling excited about language learning and my planned schedule because it feels like I have improved a lot since I first started even though all I did was meet with a language partner and speak for a couple of hours. I am looking forward to experimenting with new strategies and asking other learners for their strategies to see what works best for me.
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