Having already learned Korean on my own for about three years, along with experience formally learning French and Chinese, I think I am accurately able to assess my own strengths and weaknesses with learning languages, and what steps to take in the classroom to push myself out of my comfort zone and learn a language more fully. I learn best by reading and writing (after all, the best way to get better at Chinese characters is to practice writing them), as I find I am more easily able to memorize something after having written it down. The act of writing something, even if it is rote copying something in a textbook, forces me to slow down my reading and give me the opportunity to make sense of it while writing. I am also better at learning concrete facts. This manifests itself in languages in that I am best at reading and writing a language, and my stronger skills are memorizing vocabulary and grammar points.
Learning Korean on my own time, I am definitely stronger in vocabulary than any other aspect. This is why I want to have a formal education, where I can be encouraged to speak to others and rely not just on written recognition of words in communicating, but also on spoken recognition. I am good at reviewing flash cards, and can learn a grammar point as applied to multiple example sentences pretty quickly, and I have done those activities in the past. What I have not done is listen to Korean media with the goal of using it to learn, nor have I sought out practicing speaking Korean with others. Despite having this background learning Korean, where I know a lot of words and my pronunciation is pretty fluid, when I visited Korea over the summer, I was barely able to communicate because I had no real-world application of the grammar I have learned, and thus found it difficult to both speak in complex sentences and understand Koreans speaking. I know this is one area I have to improve to overall become a better learner of Korean.
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