- Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language. What do you need to improve your communicative competence?
Learning Korean has taught a lot to me about the culture. For instance, for a class I learned about the difference of formality for elders and friends. This showed that in Korea there is a very high importance in hierarchy. Koreans care a lot about being respectful and even have additional things they need to add to respond to elders. Another class we also learned about different Korean foods. Koreans have a lot of different ways of describing how a food tastes and different ways of saying it if you want to sound cute. Korea also has a lot of cute language culture. Since a lot of my friends at Richmond are Korean, I was able to better understand some of the things they constantly say or do.
Moreover, from learning about a conversation you would hold at a meal you learn a lot about the Korean culture. For example, you learn a lot of the types of food that Koreans eat. They usually have a lot of side dishes unlike American dishes where you have usually one main course and an appetizer. From learning this you also learn that Korea is a collectivist country and understand why they have so many side dishes and share their food unlike the America, which is individualistic. Furthermore, from learning the language I also learned about the different and unique trends happening in Korea like Muk-bang. I would not have heard about it if I weren't learning about the language. It was a very interesting trend and unique to Korea, but has started to spread to the rest of the world. Continuing to learn the language I hope to continue to learn more about the Korean culture. I am interested in further learning about the Korean culture and from the presentations I have learned a lot from other fellow classmates.
What I need to improve on for my communicative competence is the ability to understand a conversation. Right now, I can only pick up certain words and from there guess what my friends are saying. I would also like to increase my Korean vocabulary and learn more phrases. Hopefully in the future also soon be able to hold a basic conversation with someone. In addition, or be able to communicate or ask questions when I am traveling in Korea. I would like to be able to get around Korea and be able to understand when they give me information on directions. I would also like to be able to combine and make sentences myself from the words I have learned. I hope that they will soon create a keyboard for typing online but with English instead of just Hangul.
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