For the week before, I practiced conversation with my language partner, Jenna, and learning partner, Christiana. Jenna printed out a handout of conversations of two college students talking about the semester so far. We read through a list of vocabulary first, including some related words such as (semester), (class), and (major). We also learned the words for some subjects or majors, including chemistry, computer science, and finance. For each word, we would read it out loud first and then guess its meaning by its pronunciation. There are some words that are very similar to English, which makes them easier to remember. There are some words that sound like Chinese as well, but they turned out to have completely different meanings, which would sometimes confuse me a little bit. As we went into the conversations, however, the vocabs make much more sense to me. Christiana and I chose a character each and read through the conversation line by line. After finishing reading the sentence, just as we did for the list of words, we would guess a rough translation for the sentence. Then, we looked into the sentence more closely and figure out its transition, logic, and phrases used. We all agree that this is a really effective way of learning new words as well as having conversations. When I was confused about a particular word, we would refer back to the list of words we just learned or wrote down the new phrases on it, which helped me learn the new words faster. We love this kind of practice and it builds up our confidence in speaking too.
This week, we watched a Korean Web drama named “XX” together. Different from the most commonly seen Korean dramas with twenty or more episodes and an hour and a half for each, the web dramas are much shorter. They have usually around or even less than twelve episodes, and each episode takes around twenty minutes. Nowadays in this fast-speed society, not a lot of people would spend twenty hours on one drama – it’s too much time commitment. Instead, the web dramas are much shorter and easier to watch on commute. As more and more people start to watch web dramas, the quality of web dramas improved a lot over the past five years. Compared with the first web drama I watched three years ago, “XX” is well-made with higher quality in its soundtracks, choices of actors and actresses, and storytelling. Another interesting thing I noticed in web dramas is that they are slightly more obvious in promoting the products they are sponsored in when compared with TV dramas. In TV dramas, if the actor or actress is sponsored, say by a clothing brand, then they would wear this brand for a larger portion of time while fitting into the settings and characters. The brand name would appear at the very end of the episode but not in the drama. On the other side, the web dramas would actually show the brand name and its products in a scene and have the main characters talking about how they like them. This also shows how the web dramas have a really limited time for their audience to stay focused and interested, so they have to send out the messages in a more direct way. I love learning about these cultural topics and discuss them with my partners.
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