Starting from week 8, Vivian and I agreed that I should start doing some reading and writing exercises. This week, we did some writing practices along with conversations. Vivian chose some emojis and pictures that were easy to recognize and commonly used in our daily life, and I needed to recognize them and then write down the Korean word for them. I was very proud of and surprised by myself that I was able to recognize most of them and write them down correctly. While we went over the word, Vivian would also point out some similar words, either in pronunciation or meaning. Even though I knew most of the words in speaking, some words are confusing in writing since they can be connected to the next word in the sentence or have a sound at the bottom that is very light when pronounced. I learned a lot from this exercise and I found it very fun to do.
For week 9, I worked on a worksheet made by Vivian, where I need to watch a video in Korean and write down my answers to her questions. It was a video from the channel Korean Englishman where they invited 김수미 (Soo-mi Kim) to teach them how to make kimchi. 김수미 is a Korean actress who debuted 50 years ago and has a very prolific career. In this video, she showed Josh and Joe how to make kimchi and made ramen with kimchi for them. I was able to understand most of what they are saying, and the video was so interesting that I want to try making kimchi myself too. When writing on the worksheet, I was able to write out mostly what I wanted to say, but there were some spelling mistakes, again, because of the connected sounds. Vivian fixed the mistakes for me and then I tried rewriting the whole sentence again. I love how we were able to practice listening, speaking, and writing in this one practice.
For week 10’s class, Vivian assigned a list of English songs to me and asked me to choose one to translate into Korean. I tried to do so but found all of them hard, so Vivian did the practice with me in class. We listened to the song first, and then we tried to translate it by half a sentence. I found that there were many verbs, especially verbs in phrases, that I didn’t know, which made the translation especially hard to do. Vivian was very patient when I was stuck, but I had to say it was a struggle for both of us. After translating a verse, I re-read our translation again, and it gave me a sense of accomplishment. We translated a verse and a chorus together, and I took notes of all the vocabulary that I need to learn. It was a hard but fulfilling practice.
For week 11, we started to do more practice on reading. This week, we read a news article together that is about the YouTube channel, Korean Englishman. We’ve watched some videos of theirs as practice before so I was familiar with the person on it, but I didn’t know there was a controversy about them too. For practice, we read the article line by line and translated the lines to English. At the end of each paragraph, I need to summarize the paragraph. I couldn’t read very fast, but I could understand the content after Vivian read it at a normal speed. Vivian encouraged me to do more readings so that my reading speed will be faster, so I’m thinking to spend more time on reading practices next semester.
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