One of my main goals was to learn Hangul, which is the alphabet system in Korean. After this semester I would say that I succeeded. I can read and write many words in Korean. However, my vocabulary is still very limited. I can introduce myself and my family in Korean, which is a significant progress for me. On top of that, I can now make basic conversation with my Korean friends. I can ask simple questions like “Do you want to eat?”, “Where are you from?”, “Is it delicious?”, etc.
Some of the biggest challenges for me were learning the different forms of the vowels in the alphabet system (when 2 vowels are combined to make another sound), sentence structure, and grammar. When the vowels are combined into one, some of them sound exactly the same but different length in the sound. It was really confusing for me because it really depends on the word. The Korean sentence structure is also really tough because the structure is completely different than English and Indonesian (my native language). Lastly, grammar is also another area I have been struggling in, such as adding suffix in the end of a word to make it grammatically correct. However, as a beginner, this shouldn’t really be my focus because I can still say a sentence (constructed from words without being grammatically correct) and Korean people can still make sense of it.
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