Thus far, Jason and I have met twice for roughly two hours each, and these meetings have been more than helpful. We try to establish a Korean-only environment to help with my immersion, and this environment is pivotal in terms of “switching a gear” of sorts in terms of what language I am speaking. We typically reserve English for words/phrases that I do not know or cannot circumlocute, and from there, I start a running list of these words; in special circumstances, I learn the Hanja for these words––or the ancient Mandarin form––and employing Hanja gives me a chance to apply these root words to other compound words resulting in realizing valuable connections in the language. I try to memorize the novel words/phrases prior to our next class meeting, creating example sentences for Jason to review and give feedback due to nuances that require elucidation. A metric to asses this goal is the ratio between my English to Korean use during conversation. I hope to eventually have a 100% Korean session by the end of the semester, so I’ve also tried to listen to more Korean throughout the day in order to immerse myself even further, and I’ve done this by watching Talk To Me In Korean podcasts between native speakers having conversations entirely in Korean on various topics. This goal is paired with my main goal of learning some of the more advanced Korean grammar rules that can be quite challenging to learn, and it’s been terrific to have Jason explain them to me, and if unable to precisely describe them, we address the issue by doubling down on example sentences to give me a sense of use cases.
This has been the most challenging aspect thus far, as, most of my Korean background stems from speaking with family at home, where colloquial speech naturally dominates, and since I am interested in growing my proficiency at a more advanced level, I cannot simply rely on some sort of intuitive understanding. Though I can intuit some of it, I actually am intentionally trying to avoid doing so in order to have a robust understanding of Korean grammar, and perhaps this can encapsulate a statement of what I hoped to accomplish for this past week: understand Korean grammar rules (and new vocabulary, in general) vis-à-vis thorough explanation and using it meaningfully in conversation with Jason.
Some strategies that we have used are finding blogs and other online resources for Korean learners who are actually learning English, rather than the other way around. This is due to not only the plethora of Korean-speaking English learners resulting in much information but also the explanations seeing it from the “other side” per se gives me ways to connect, since, the best way to learn something is to teach something, and reading through these blogs of Korean’s learning English gives me a chance to ‘teach’ this new information. Jason is able to find these resources as he was once a Korean learning English, so locating helpful information hasn’t been difficult yet. We will continue to build on these strategies, and I think continuing to immerse myself completely will be the most efficacious in terms of reaching my goals.
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