Learning Korean has been very interesting and actually kind of tough. It required a lot of time and practice. I found that words and phrases I learned from my friends stuck to me more compared to the ones that my language partner was teaching me. However, phrases that are relevant and useful I remember naturally. Furthermore, when learning Korean what also helped is how it sometimes related back to Mandarin. For instance, in Korean traffic light and in Mandarin sound pretty similar. It is very interesting to find similar sounding words and being able to memorize it instantly.
I thought that using Mango Languages was very helpful in learning Korean. It helped with my basic grammatical skills. For instance, I often had trouble pronouncing some of the harder Korean words. I would use Mango Language in helping me figure out an easier way to pronounce the word.
The first week we learned about time. We learned how to tell the time in Korean as well as what we were doing during that certain time. For instance, we would have a partner conversation where Sissi would ask me what did I during the afternoon and I would reply I was having class or studying.
In addition, we also learned about ways to add and take out honorifics. We would learn conversational monologues and by taking out the different phrases it will make it informal. You would use this type with friends or people younger than you.
After we also learned different popular delicacies of Korea. For example, we learned the phrase for sushi (gim bap), cake (ke-ik), pork belly (sam gyup sal), chicken (chi-kin), and many other phrases. We played a game where she would show us the type of food and we would have to tell her what the food is. Furthermore, we also had a monologue of a conversation that would happen before during and after the meal. In Korea, before you eat you would thank the person for making the food, jal meok ge seum ni da. We also learned how to say the food was delicious, masseseyo. If we wanted to ask for more it is "deo, ju se yo." I often go to Korean restaurants and this is useful in knowing how to describe the taste. In addition, since many of my friends are Korean and I have eaten dinner with her parents. Knowing these phrases is very helpful in communicating and appreciating their cooking.
Out of the different activities that we did, I thought that the ones where we did the monologue that was applicable to everyday life was very helpful. Especially, the phrases we learned on how to describe. In addition, we also learned about basic parts of a sentence we can add an object to it. Also, it was very helpful in learning the different vocabulary because when my friends talk I am able to pick up on some parts of the conversation.
I didn't think learning Hangul was helpful in the beginning because I wasn't planning on learning how to write. However, after talking to our language partner we chose the best way was to use it through the pronunciation of English. Also, in the beginning we did not have English pronunciations and that was really hard. We told our language partner and she started to add it so we could better pronounce it correctly.
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