Reflection #2

[Justin Park]

Throughout the semester, I learned that basically if I learn a language that I genuinely want to learn, then I will put much more effort into it compared to something that I’m forced to learn. This may sound very obvious but I think if I had just known the scale to which it would affect my learning, then I would’ve without a doubt learned Korean much sooner. Having almost daily conversations in Korean helped me expand greatly, rather than just sitting down and going through lecture about probably Korean grammar and whatnot. Having a language partner does make the experience much more enjoyable as they help me learn the content in a fun way. Learning the language through videos about history and culture as well as of course the music, will be something that I continue to do without a doubt. What I found most difficult however was trying to learn the writing in Korean. Although the alphabet, forming words, and reading are possibly one of the easiest out of any language, the grammar itself I feel is one of the hardest. Sometimes “conjugating” words did not follow any rule depending on the root word making it extremely difficult to follow along. Learning about the language families helped me with my final project (and coming up with my final project topic). After learning that Korean, Japanese, and Chinese were all very similar I wanted to know how similar they really were and if they changed over time at all. Overall, this experience was nothing to forget as it helped me learn so much about Korean culture and language in such a short timeframe. I don’t think I’ve ever learned this much about a language/culture before on any scale and if given the chance, I’d definitely do it again.

[Henry Mitchell]

I agree with a lot of your points! I definitely found that self-learning is a much more rewarding process then classroom learning in many ways. I do believe however that the pressure of the classroom does help with keeping on schedule. Other than this, I would say that self-learning is almost always preferable.