Learning Korean has been a great experience so far. It has been a very long time since I learned a new language. Last time I attempted to learn a new language was probably 10 years ago when I tried to learn Mandarin. However, I decided to give up after 2 years because I didn’t feel the need to learn Mandarin. On the other side, learning Korean this semester was definitely a different experience and it was a positive one. One of my main goals was to learn Hangul, which is the alphabet system in Korean. After this semester I would say that I succeeded. I can read and write many words in Korean. However, my vocabulary is still very limited. Thus, I may be able to read or write words, but do not know the meaning of them.
The main goal for me to learn Korean was to make basic conversations with my Korean friends and also Korean elders. As mentioned many times, honorifics are greatly emphasized in the Korean language system. I would say that I have not been too successful in learning the formality in the Korean language. First of all, it would be too much for me to learn both formal and informal ways of saying things. Second of all, it wasn’t really the main focus in my learning progress because I was trying to understand the meaning of the words and constructing sentences. Therefore, if I were to continue my learning, I will put more focus into learning the honorifics.
Some of the biggest challenges for me were learning the different forms of the vowels in the alphabet system (when 2 vowels are combined to make another sound), sentence structure, and grammar. When the vowels are combined into one, some of them sound exactly the same but different length in the sound. It was really confusing for me because it really depends on the word. The Korean sentence structure is also really tough because the structure is completely different than English and Indonesian (my native language). Lastly, grammar is also another area I have been struggling in, such as adding suffix in the end of a word to make it grammatically correct. However, as a beginner, this shouldn’t really be my focus because I can still say a sentence (constructed from words without being grammatically correct) and Korean people can still make sense of it.
Having to do the artifacts definitely helped a lot in constructing sentences because you have to be able to put together the words that you have learned. Also, the 2 articles about bilinguals are very interesting. As a bilingual myself, I would want to agree with the New York Times article that argues that bilinguals are smarter. However, there is some sort of bias in their argument of being smart. What does it mean to be smart? And there are other variables outside of the argument that can affect kids’ intelligence besides having the ability to know one more language. So I definitely want to learn more about the effect of being a bilingual on intelligence.
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