During these weeks, my main focus was to develop more grammar skills because I had minimal grammar skills. In other words, I could form sentences together, but they were usually half gibberish because there were many grammar aspects I was lacking in, such as using the right grammar structure, subject marker, verb ending, etc. So, I wanted to make sure that my grammar was more specific to what I wanted to learn.
This week, I also had to revise my learning plan a lot because of how general it was. I had a basic idea of what I wanted to learn and achieve, but my goals lacked definition and it wasn’t well organized based on my learning style. For example, one of my goals was to “learn more grammar”, but I didn’t have a goal in mind of what specific grammar structures I wanted to cover. So, Vivian and I spent some extra time revising specific grammar topics. In the end, one of my main goals was to get better at daily conversation, so the grammar structures centered around those that would be used on the daily.
These topics that we covered included the basic sentence structures of: SOV. An example would be 나는 피자 먹어요 (I eat pizza). From Korean, it would literally translate to “I pizza eat”. This sentence structure was very hard for me to get familiar with because when I learn languages, I usually link the English to Korean, but it was more difficult with Korean just because I had to think ahead about what the object was before.
In addition, another important structure was the verb 이다 (ida - to be) is one of the most distinctive sentence constructions in the Korean language. This is especially true for English speakers because the word "to be" changes form when you conjugate it when talking about yourself or to other people so you can define what people or objects are. It's an important aspect of learning Korean, and it's pronounced similarly to how it’s said in English. For example, the sentence 저는 학생입니다 means “I am a student” or more literally in Korean to English, “I student am”. This sentence structure combines the knowledge of verb conjugations and verb endings from the previous weeks.
Another topic I learned was about subject markers. A topic marker helps to indicate the subject of a sentence. For example, 저는 고양이를 봐요 means “I see the cat”. But after each subject word (I and cat), there needs to be a subject marker to complete the sentence. This sentence has the particles 는 (neun) after the word for “I” (저 | jeo) and 를 (reul) after the word for “cat” (고양이 | goyangi). This topic was easy to learn but challenging to master because there is nothing like it in English. Also, because there are so many variations of subject markers and rules for which one to use, I often get confused with another subject marker. I find myself having to think about which subject marker goes with the sentence I am trying to speak. But after more practice, it will come more naturally.
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