I’ve been learning a language since Freshman year of high school. In high school, it was Spanish. For the first two years here at UR, it was Arabic. For all the times I have learned a language, I have always enjoyed the cultural aspect of the language. Learning about how the society operates and how their language came into play within their society has always been intriguing. As well, music has always been an integral part of finding a common ground with the foreign language I’m learning or any language to be frank. I’m a music lover and being able to listen and understand what a musician is saying is really rewarding. Emotions are so easily conveyed in music and add understanding to it makes for an amazing experience.
I’m really big into auditory learning, especially when I am able to copy what they’re saying. Of course, it has to be my level of understanding or at least where I can gauge what I’m saying. I really want to watch kids shows and see if I can follow along with them. As well, I am sure there are videos and songs meant for little kids available online where I can memorize the alphabet and numbers so I am definitely going to do that. I am also a visual learner so flash cards will work really well. As well as just writing and memorizing vocabulary. Writing things out is a way I am able to see how the language works so I will be doing a lot of the language learning through hand and not through a word processor. I find speaking to be really intimidating, but I’ve learned that practice is all it takes to improve speaking. So with Korean, I will have no fear to continue to make mistakes in speaking in order to have some sort of fluency in it.
I’m also going to be intentional about seeking out communities and peers where Korean is spoken this semester so that I can have that extra exposure to the Korean culture and language. I learned Arabic that way in becoming conversationally fluent while abroad in Morocco, so I’m hoping my language learning experience with Arabic will fall into step with learning the Korean language.
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