After starting learning Korean this semester, I have already known a lot of basic sentences and vocabularies, such as how to greet people, how to introduce myself to others, how to order food in restaurant and the vocabularies of families and basic vegetables, fruit, dishes and Korean food. My process over this half semester is quite amazing and wonderful. My first language is Mandarin, and I started learning English since primary school. With the different extents of learning English and Korean, I found how the brain handles the task of learning languages.
Starting a new language means learning new words, so it is vital to memory these vocabularies that learner partner gave us on class. After class, I also explored more words that I interested daily on Korean learning website, such as Mango Language, and using color-flashcards help me remember these vocabularies. Vocabularies are the raw material for forming the whole sentences, but I need to get involved in the environment of target language. Talking with Korean and knowing about Korean culture gives me motivation to study my target language, because when I talked with them, I will use simple words or sentences that I learned. So far, Sun Yoon and us watched Korean movie together and cooked the traditional Korean food on Friday night. These activities make me feel more interested in learning my target language. The accent is obvious when you start to learn a new language, and through talking with native speaker I can work on sounding more native. In order to pronounce correctly, Sun Yoon recorded the words and sentence that she taught us on class so that we can listen and repeat anytime. Knowing about the correct pronunciations at the beginning of starting a language is really important, which could build the foundation for the future learning. Even though sometimes it is difficult to identify the subtle difference between two similar words, only because I still do not get used to the skills of Korean pronunciation.
Learning language requires an explicit awareness and understanding, during this process I found some vocabularies I studies sounds like English, such as juice—jusee, waffle---waple, and ice cream---ice klim. Due to the long-term American and Chinese presence in South Korean, many Koreans are used to seeing and hearing English on a daily basis. Korean has also borrowed some words directly from English and Chinese. Generally language and culture are closely related. Language is a mirror of culture, and Korean also reflects many unique aspects of Korean cultures. So far, through watching the drama, I find one of the most noticeable characteristics of Korean is that Koreans use the word “our” a lot more often than “my.” Some English phrase like “my home,” “my school,” and “my country” would be translated into “our home,” “our school,” and “our country” in Korean, even though you are talking about yourself without others. Because Korean culture is more collective than western cultures, Korean’s way of thinking that a group in which an individual is involved is more important than the individual itself. under this kind of culture, the tendency to regard a group’s profit is more valuable than personal’s profit, which help Korean society grow to economically. Another noticeable point of Korean is its polite forms. Different from Japanese and Chinese, Korean possesses several different expressions for the same word. People have to choose different expression whom they are talking with. For example, we could say “Bab(meal)” to our friends, but we have to say “Jin-ji(meal)” to my father or grandfather. The more academic knowledge I learned, the more Korean culture I will understand.
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