For the second class of this semester, my language learning partner, Jenna, printed out a news artificial published online that discusses the recent Coronavirus and the effects it brought. The article, similar to the news report we went over the week before, is written in a very formal language with large use of vocabulary that I have not seen. We read the lines out loud line by line first and then went through the words and phrases that we are not familiar with. We did encounter some phrases that are appeared in the weather report as well, but there were still so many vocabularies that are not commonly used in conversations that it took us some time to read through the sentences. After that, we tried to interpret the meaning of the whole sentence. Even though we were given the meaning of every word in the sentence, it would still take us some work to translate the whole sentence because there are many conjunction words or phrases that are implied. Sometimes the sentence might look like a long list of nouns and adjectives because of the hidden logical words. I do believe that with more practices like this throughout the semester, we will learn more vocabulary and be more comfortable reading the published articles with professional language.
For the past week, we learned about the final consonants (받침 ) and also the drinking culture in Korea. With the Korean lessons taken back home, I thought I should be already familiar with the final consonants, but it turned out that there are more rules and exceptions than I expected. For example, I did not know that ㄷ (d) sound is pronounced ㅈ (ji) when it is followed by the vowel ㅣ(i). Similarly, ㅌ (t) sound should be pronounced as ㅊ(ch) with the vowelㅣ(i). I did not pay attention to these before. In addition, we also went through the double 받침 combinations, and the rules for these are a lot more complicated. For example, for the double final consonant ㄹㄱ, the first syllable pronounces ㄱ while the consonant in the next syllable will sound stronger. These rules with exceptions are a lot to memorize.
I suggested the drinking culture to Jenna because even though I have seen a lot of people drinking soju (소주 ) on a Korean variety show or drama, I did not get a chance to learn about every detail of the drinking manner. Jenna printed out a handout for the vocabulary regarding drinking and a list of drinking manners in Korea. There are so many that I would not even notice if others don’t mention it to me. For example, when drinking with an elder, you need to wait for the elder to put down their drinking glass before you put down yours. We also watched a YouTube video together that shows how an English man learns about drinking culture by drinking with a Korean elder. It was very interesting to see him doing all kinds of wrong things first and then called out by his friend. It also helped to learn the manners better because he was making the mistakes that I would too if I was in that position.
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