In one of my Korean classes in the past two weeks, my language partner brought in a surprisingly short newspaper article that I was surprised about. I thought that since I spoke Korean at home, I would be able to tackle much longer articles with ease. However, I quickly learned that speaking skills do not necessarily translate to reading/writing skills. While my limited vocabulary did not seem to affect my everyday conversations with my parents, it made a large impact when I tried to read that short newspaper article. In the narrow sphere of topics I talk about with my family (e.g. school, friends, health, etc) I essentially didn’t need anything past a middle school, or even elementary school level vocabulary. At first, when I skimmed the article I felt very disoriented and lost. I didn’t recognize almost a third of the words in the entire article and felt immediately frustrated. However, my language partner suggested we go through the article slowly, word-by-word. She also suggested that we stop at each word I did not recognize, and had me first try and figure out the definition by context clues and hints within the word itself (e.g. when a word had the root of another word that I knew). In this way, I found that I could figure out a surprising number of words and the initial feeling of dejection started to fade. My partner provided both the definition and context for the words that I could not figure out by deduction. She explained the context of the word within the article, along with its cultural context in Korean society.
I not only learned the boundaries of my Korean through reading this article, but also learned a lot about the Korean government’s influence in deciding national holidays. The article discussed the Korean public’s discontent about a national holiday being cancelled. In Korea, there are certain policies that allow the government to add a couple days or subtract a couple days for a holiday. For example, if a holiday like Chuseok happened to land on a weekend, when it usually lands on a weekday, the government has the power to suggest additional days off for the time employees “lost”. I learned that these extra days are commonly called Red Days because they are marked by red ink in calendars. Being assigned this article acted as a kind of wake up call to show me just how much I still had to learn about both the Korean language and the Korean culture.
While I am Korean-American, the American side of me is what dominates my idea of culture and society. While I do sometimes watch Korean dramas or variety tv shows, I still have a ways to go in order to understand what modern-day Korean society and culture are about. I will continue to read short, relatively simple articles as suggested by my language partner. I will also continue to use the method of slowly combing through the article and making sure not to skip over words I don’t recognize.
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