The last two weeks of classes are used to wrap up the semester. I video chatted with Jenna, my language partner, and did the podcast interview to reflect on the semester.
My plan for this semester of Korean is to improve my language skills while learning more about the interesting aspects of Korean culture. For the first half of the semester, I met with Jenna and Christi, and we did more practice on reading and conversations. Jenna would print out a news article or a weather forecast for us once a week, and we would read through the material line by line and tried to translate it. It was definitely challenging to us at first since sometimes there might be hidden meaning under the expression. Different from my first language, Koreans would say the sentences in a less direct way, which takes one step further when it comes to translation. I remember when we were translating a long sentence from a news article, it took us some time to figure out the logical connection between the parts. It was also not easy for me to get used to the formal expression and the vocabs when we were trying to interpret the weather forecasts.
I enjoyed the conversation practices a lot. Each time Christiana and I would divide our roles and read the lines for each role. We would learn some new vocabulary in a specific scenario before the conversation, and then find them in our lines. I found myself good at guessing a rough idea of the meaning of the sentence, which gave me some confidence in the practice. It was also a very effective way for me to learn new words as I used them in our conversation. I miss doing this practice with Jenna and Christi a lot as we moved on to the online instruction.
For the second half of the semester, we did a lot of cultural learning. We started with learning about the drinking manner in Korea, which turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. We then watched a Korean web drama together, which is a new way of drama that I was not familiar with. As the tempo of society gets faster, people don’t have the time and patience to watch one episode from a traditional drama for an hour or even longer. Therefore, web dramas are becoming more and more popular. They are much shorter in length compared with traditional dramas and thus more convenient for people to watch on their commute. I’ve also noticed that some variety shows are trying out a similar way too. Some TV programs have only 5 minutes on TV, so it gets to condense all the funny parts and thus attracts more people to watch. I’ve practiced watching a short Korean variety show on YouTube without subtitles, and I was surprised that I could understand most of it. This has been my goal since I started learning Korean, and I’m glad that I can feel my improvement. I’m now more confident in my listening and conversations, which is satisfying.
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