For the first week, I spent most of my time traveling home and staying in the hotel for quarantine, so I reviewed the news articles and the conversations that we have practiced with Jenna. I met some words that look familiar to me and give me a general idea of the meaning, such as 전공 (major) and 쓸모 (usefulness). After reading through the words besides the translation, I practiced memorizing them and then started to read the conversations. The conversations helped by providing a context for the words so that I learned these words better. I also read over the news articles and the weather forecasts we practiced earlier in the semester, which is a lot more challenging than the conversations to me. There are a lot of official phrases and expressions in the articles. I found myself getting more and more used to the formal expressions after each practice, and I noticed some expressions commonly used in the weather forecasts, such as 예보했다 (forecasted) and 증가 (increase), which helped me with my reading.
Then, I practiced my listening by watching two 12-minute long videos in Korean without subtitles on YouTube. It turned out better than I thought – I could understand 80% of the conversations, and I could guess the other 20% based on the context. I was surprised when I was about to finish watching it. There are also some short sentences shown on the screen as notes. When they jump out, I would stop the video until I read them over and understood what they meant. I could feel myself faster in reading in Korean by this practice, which was encouraging to me. Besides this, it was very interesting to me as I encountered many brand names in English that are interpreted by Korean characters. I would read out the characters first and then guessed out the represented brand, 발렌시아가 for Balenciaga, and디올 for Dior. It was not hard because the pronunciation is a little bit different from the original one and only has more ending consonants than expected. After finishing the practice, I watched the two videos again with Chinese subtitles. I stopped at the places where I did not quite understand by guessing and read over the phrases and vocabs and matched them with the subtitles. I found this practice challenging but fun, so I plan to do this more often for future practices.
After the practices of these two weeks, I gained more confidence in my reading and listening in Korean, especially in a conversational environment. As I watch Korean variety shows in my spare time, I would stop when there is a written phrase appear on the screen. I would then read it over and match the parts with the translated subtitle. It is super helpful for my reading practice as I now can read short phrases without stopping the show. I would recommend it to anyone who is learning Korean and is very interested in Korean variety shows like me. I mentioned this to Jenna later, and she thinks it’s good too.
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