One of the things I did in the past few weeks is watch news clips, as well as clips from variety shows to see how much I could understand. One week, I watched a clip from the Korean SNL, where a lot of new slang was used. While I am familiar with most of the older slang, I did not know what a lot of the newer words meant. I feel that compared to the US, my generation in Korea uses far more slang, and like to shorten words - kind of like how we shorten "laugh out loud" to LOL. Therefore, when watching the clip, I had a somewhat harder time with not knowing the definition of some of the words, but my language partner explained it to me after. Therefore this was a good opportunity for me to learn new worlds for daily usage in Korean.
Trying to understand the news clip was also somewhat difficult at times because I did not understand some of the technical words. Because they are also speaking fast, and in monotone, it was harder to get a grasp of what they were talking about, compared to variety shows - where the tone tends to be far more dynamic. I think as I watch more news clips, I will be able to continue improving on my vocabulary.
As we do weekly, I also read a news article out loud, and was given feedback by my language partner. Vocabulary is also the hardest component here. The article was about the Obama administration - thus included a lot of more difficult political words. While I could grasp the general idea of most of the sentences, it is hard for me to be able to know the definition of each individual words. However, I think this is something that will improve over time.
We also had a conversation about culture, and compared the environment in which we were raised. Although my mom moved to the US at a very young age, she always pushed academics very hard growing up, which seems to be the norm in Korea. However, what seemed drastically different was the more open relationship I had with my parents. Especially as I have gotten older, my parents are comfortable talking about most topics whether it pertains to love life, alcohol, etc. However, it seemed that my language partner's parents were not as comfortable. This made sense because it seems that the Korean society is much more conservative than that of the US.
In my first artifact, I did something that was similar to one of my artifacts I did for 110 but tried to expand on it with phrases I was not sure of. It took me a while to make sure I had all the spelling right and used the right vocabulary. However, with the help of my language partner I was able to get through it. I hope that by the end of the semester that I will be able to utilize even more vocabulary, as that is one of the main things I hope to work on. In addition, when listening to the recording, I can definitely hear an accent when speaking, but I think it is understandable enough. However, I did stumble a few times and hope that practicing speaking will get rid of those issues.
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