I organized my learning plan for Korean through the app MindNode. It allows me to add and delete thoughts and move things around very easily. Based on the suggestions provided by Dr. Soloway and my own desire to be able to have daily conversations in Korean, I divided my syllabus in a few fields including hobbies, health, food, accommodation, directions and so on. Besides, I also added the learning methods section which contains several strategies I want to try during my language learning process.
I started to have contact with K-pop culture in 2014. Then the immersion of Korean continued since then. I had learned Korean alphabet and some simple words and phrases on my own, but have never studied the language systematically and continuously.
The book I have been using is called 标准韩国语 which has three books in one set for version 7. The book is written in Chinese. Each chapter has a short conversational passage in the beginning and vocabulary lists after that, and there are related exercises at the end of each chapter. There is a limited amount of pictures and graphs which may seem a little dull at first, however I found it informative and efficient. Probably there is a relation in my previous language learning experience which is pure structural approach and my expectation with this new journey. Beyond that I also found an app called Duolinguo very interesting. I have started using this app to learning Korean a year ago and I really like the test program design which allows me to see how much I have conquered the content.
I always think of language is the product of civilization, in other words, languages exist because of the culture and the people. After I came to America and started to explain Chinese to people from other cultural backgrounds, it occurred to me that explanation is hard to proceed if they do not know about the culture. Little by little, I noticed the extremely strong impact of culture on language and vice versa. In Korean, this observation still stands. The concept of respecting elders and many other cultural signs are shown in Hangul both explicitly and implicitly. By learning the language, it is inevitable to understand it with the support of learning about the culture and the history.
The very first motivation for me to learn Korean is the K-pop idols and their live streaming videos which I can only understand a few words and phrases. Another important push for me to learn the language is the urge to be able to communicate friends from Korea that I met and the urge to meeting more people from Korea.
Many of my classmates are taking Korean and we share our ideas about how to increase learning efficiency. One of my classmates suggested that I should be more specified about grammar learning. I would improve my plans about grammar after I got more information about Korean grammar in general.
Comments
it is a really cool learning plan and it has included so many different branches. I will steal some from you such as study methods, hobbies, and descriptions. I did not come up with these many different learning categories and it is very interesting to see the website and app you are using. I will try the Duolingo App and hope it will help me during the course of studying