Last week in class after a brief review of the previous class's lesson, Jenna, our language partner, gave us a Korean weather forecast article. From the article, we learned many new vocabulary words that have some relation to weather. These words include nouns such as inland, daily range, clouds, air temperature, sea, fine dust, the lowest/the highest and some verbs like to fall/precipitate, to be expected, to forecast, and more. Even though I was familiar with many of these words, we also came across many other words that I normally don't use or saw for the first time. These words are the following: 지표 (the surface of the earth), 가시거리 (visibility/range of visibility), 유의하다 (to pay attention), 미만 (under/below/less than), 형성되다 (to be formed/built/developed), 대기 (atmosphere), 원활하다 (smooth/smoothly), 확산하다 (spread/disperse/diffuse), 농도 (concentration), 권역 (limited area), 천문조 (astronomical tide), 만조 (high tide), 저지되다 (be blocked), 침수 (flooding), 대비 (preparation). After reading it aloud and going over the article together, we answered some reading comprehension questions. Then we also watched some YouTube videos on weather forecasts.
I was very surprised that the article was only about ten sentences long. I didn't know that such a short article about weather would have so many new vocabulary words. I have realized how lacking my range of vocabulary is. It was great to learn more technical/scientific words, because those are the type of words I don't ever use in daily conversations.
This week the day we had class happened to fall on 개천절, or National Foundation Day, so we learned more about it for our lesson. It was on October 3rd, and it is believed to be the day of the traditional founding of Korea in 2333 B.C. Jenna explained to us the folktale of the founding of Korea, which is also the ancentry legend of god-like King Dangun, the founder. One day, a bear and a tiger prayed to Hwanung, the prince of the heavens, that they want to be human. Hawnung told them that if they want to become humans, they have to eat only garlic and mugwort inside a cave without sunlight for a hundred days. After twenty days, the tiger gave up and left, while the bear persevered and eventually become a woman. The bear/woman ended up marrying Hwanung and giving birth to a son named Dangun. Dangun Wanggeom became king and founded the kingdom of Gojosen, or ancient Joseon. We then watched a video that explained this story in Korean. This week's lesson was very interesting. I had not heard about National Foundation Day even though I think I heard the story with the bear and tiger before. It was nice to learn about the history of Korea.
We also review what we learned last week by reading another news weather article in Korean. This article used many of the same vocab words in the article from last week. This time though, I recognized the words we learned and made reading it much smoother. I think reading the vocabulary words in another article made it easier to remember.
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