During this month, with reviewing previous material at the beginning of each meeting. We go in-depth into words for weekdays and counting, also memorizing words on the list provided by TOPIK, which is a language test like TOEFL.
Besides the questions that we learned last month “How are you today?” and “How’s the weather?” another basic question that could be asked during a conversation is “What day is today?”, we began to learn words for each weekday and Vivian also taught me an easy way to memorize it. The words for each weekday in English follow a rule that every word ends with “day”, Korean words for each weekday also follow that rule, instead of “day” it has “요일” at the end of each word. Monday is “월요일”, Tuesday is “화요일”, Wednesday is “수요일”, Thursday is “목요일”, Friday is “금요일”, Saturday is “토요일”, Sunday is “일요일”, and every word for a weekday in Korean is formed by 3 letters or characters, the only difference is the first character. So an easy way to remember is it takes out the first character and remember them in order as a sentence, like “월화수목금토일”, every time just count through the sentence and add “요일” after the character could give the words for the specific weekday. While practicing the pronunciation of weekdays, Vivian point out a mistake that I always made, which is some times I forget to give the last consonant of the previous character to the later character. For example, when pronouncing the Thursday “목요일” (Mogyo-il), since the second character “요” is in the form of starting with a vowel, so the last consonant of “목”, which is “ㄱ”, should be pronounced with “요”(Mo-gyo-il). Vivian explained to me that the reason we should pronounce it in this way is to maintain consistency. Later I also learned the word tomorrow “내일”, yesterday “어제” and today “오늘". An interesting point is the word for “the day after tomorrow” is simply double the first character in tomorrow “내일” and gets “내내일”.
There are two ways to count numbers in Korean, so we learned them one by one. The first way we learn is commonly used when talking about dates, prices, and phone numbers. For me, I think it’s easier to remember than another way since within 100 I only need to remember 1-10, which is “1일 2이 3삼 4사 5오 6육 7칠 8팔 9구 10십”. When I want to say for example 22, I just have to combine 2이 and 10십 to get 20이십, then add 2이 after it to get 22 이십이. For numbers over 100, just have to remember how to say hundred and thousand and combine the number I need to form the words. Another way of counting numbers is more complicated, the formation of the words for numbers over 10 doesn’t like the way in previous counting way, I have to remember every number’s Korean words. This second counting way is used when expressing age or ordering food in a restaurant.
Comments
Hi Yanran~
It seems like you’re expanding your Korean vocabulary very quickly! I love how you’re able to connect patterns from English and transferring it to a new language. The 2 number system is always interesting to learn about. A fun fact is that you use both when you tell time!