I think I've made some substantial progress in my learning plan thus far through both my lessons with Jimin and my own independent study. The most important aspect of this was the communication between Jimin and I when we first started lessons. I explained what I wanted to accomplish by the end of the semester and gave a rough outline of activities I thought would be useful in achieving that goal, and Jimin helped me polish that into a structured learning plan. So far, we've watched clips of Korean variety tv shows that have really helped me understand the cultural environment around the usage of certain idioms and Korean slang phrases. Although I have a relative understanding of basic vocabulary of Korean, I'm unfamiliar with a lot of the colloquial language of Korean, and that makes it difficult to truly grasp the meaning of a conversation at times. By learning the contexts of certain sayings and their meanings, I was able to then use that meaning in the context of webtoons and other forms of media that I stated wanting to be able to understand in my learning plan.
I still have a long way to go before I fully accomplish all the goals I talked about wanting to achieve in my PanOpto recording, but I think that continuing on my current path will get me there. I think in particular, gaining competence in grammar along with a firmer grasp of colloquial language or slang language will really help in my attempt to reach these goals, especially when reading webtoons. While most of the text in webtoons are split into short speech bubbles, an advanced understanding of Korean grammar structure is needed to understand this, arguably more than regular sentences in a novel or any other traditional form of Korean text. The shortened forms of words, slang and irregular grammar structures used in many popular Korean webtoons may seem easier to understand than "regular" Korean, but in order to understand this abnormal Korean grammar and wording, I need to have a clear grasp of what "normal" Korean grammar and wording looks like and then work my way backwards.
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