After discussing with Dr. Scinicariello, I modified my learning goal from the beginning of this semester into a specific and practical topic: Shopping in Korea. Choosing this topic actually gave me a special and inspiring angle to explore this language. Also, because I really want to go shopping in Korea, this skill would be very useful. Therefore, I slightly changed my original goals and decided to focus on all vocabularies that are related with shopping. After making this change, I found that my learning plan is much more specific.
So far, I have learned greetings, counting numbers and describing ages, countries, majors. I also finished three artifacts, including greeting recording, family tree and cooking Korean food. In my spare time, I also tried to order foods in Korean Garden, a Korean restaurant in Richmond. First, I tried to greet the waitress in Korean and she relied me with typical greeting words as well. Then I ordered some foods such as Kimchi bokumbab gurigo (and) ddeokbokyi (spicy rice cake with fish cake). She said alget supnida (okay) as a reply. Then, she began to talk to me in Korean and I had no idea what was she talking about, so we continued our conversation in English.
Moreover, I really appreciate how reading complements my learning in Korean. Many readings are supported by strong scholarly research, and news readings spawn moments of my deep thought. My favorite reading is about extinct language, which reminds me of the important roles that languages play.
Discussions in class and in cultural posts gave me a lot of inspiration. All discussion topics are very intriguing for me. They are very important questions but I have not thought about them before I actually need to discuss about them. For example, the most interesting topics for me include body language in Korea, how Koreans evaluate time and family. I loved doing research for this topics and hearing from Henry and Nuannuan. Even though three of us are learning the same language and discussing the same topic, we always came up with different ideas and opinions. It helps me to know Korean in a much more comprehensive perspective.
In retrospect, the experience of learning Korean up to now is very different from the experience of learning English in the past twelve years. The way I learned Korean is much more flexible and creative. When I was learning English, most things are learned from textbooks and I seldom do research on western culture by myself. In contrast, learning Korean is much more interesting because it is an autonomous learning process: I made my own plan according to my personal passion and I learned from various sources, including Mango, dramas, songs and presentations.
Since I have done many artifacts and did much research on Korean culture. In the next half of this semester, I will do more real work on learning vocabularies, such as body, directions, clothes and colors.
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