Although I was born in the United States, I grew up learning Korean as my first language and was an ELL student until the second grade. However, as I became more integrated into American culture, I began to lose my ability to speak, read, and write Korean well. At home, I still speak Korean with my family but I would not consider myself as fluent. In elementary school, I took a few hangul classes at a Korean school, which was mostly to learn how to read and write, as well as some basic vocabulary and phrases. In 2017, I took one semester of a 200-level Korean class during my first year of college at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Before transferring to the University of Richmond, I was actually a Korean Flagship major. In addition to learning Korean, I took three years of French in high school, but have mostly forgotten everything that I learned, aside from a few basic terms.
In my past language learning experiences, I enjoyed learning through textbooks and workbooks. Since I have always been an avid reader, I can easily pick up things such as spelling and grammar simply by seeing the words in front of me. Although language is difficult to learn for anyone, I was able to avoid any struggles in reading and writing through constant repetition. However, I did have a hard time with speaking any foreign language. I have never been confident in my ability to speak either of the languages that I learned previously, even though I was perfectly capable of doing so. It is one aspect of my language learning experience that I acknowledge to have neglected in comparison to the amount of effort I committed to reading and writing. Even speaking Korean to family members beside my immediate family makes me uncomfortable because I am aware of any mistakes I make.
Through the learning style survey, I learned that I am a Visual/Tactile learner– I scored 35% for both the Visual and Tactile categories, and 30% for Auditory. This seems fairly accurate because I like to see and directly interact with what I am learning. Furthermore, I learn and study well in environments that are free of distracting sounds. Through the multiple intelligences survey, I learned that my top three intelligences are Musical– 4.29, Self– 4, and Language– 3.43. Because I am a very independent learner and as I mentioned before, I enjoy working with words, I agree strongly with the two latter intelligences. However, I was pretty surprised by the Musical intelligence because I do not consider myself to be an Auditory learner. On the other hand, I grew up learning piano at a young age and have played clarinet for the past nine years so I can understand how my musical background impacts my learning. Based on the FIRE model, I seem to be more Factual and Insightful, and occasionally Rational.
My main goal for learning Korean is to be able to converse with native speakers. I especially want to be able to communicate easily with my mother and grandmother, both who primarily use Korean with me. To improve my abilities, I know that I should place greater importance on practicing my speaking, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Otherwise, I will never become a fluent speaker. As for reading and writing, I know that I had no difficulties in the past so it will just be a matter of continuing my past performance.
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