My target language is Korean. I was born in South Korea so I am technically a native speaker. However, I have moved to the United States at a very early age. While I have not completely lost fluency in the language, a lot of my vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension still needs work.
I have some parts of the basics down already in Korean. I can speak fairly fluently with friends and family. However, things like formal language and grammar still need a lot of work. Learning these skills in Korean is particularly difficult because of the culture. The Korean culture is a very collectivistic culture that pays special respect toward elders and tradition. There is a separate posture, gesture, and even vocabulary that changes depending on who the individual is talking to. For example, it is common courtesy in Korea to gently grasp your own wrist or forearm when pointing or shaking hands with someone that is older or in a higher position. In addition various words are different completely when directed to those that are older.
In order to better learn my target language, I have to be culturally aware of these changes when talking in a formal setting. I have to be aware of my current communicative competence and how to improve them further. I am already proficient at talking with classmates and friends in Korean. However, with the change in diction and gesture, I struggle a lot when talking to those that are adults or people that I have just met. Despite being seemily close in age, when meeting someone new, it is courteous to use a different mode of speech than the one used in an informal setting. I will need to spend as much time as possible with native speakers to really help my target culture become more intuitive. This will not be easy since I only see my language partner once a week. Because of this, my language partner introduced me to several resources such as Korean movies to become more culturally attuned with the Korean culture. In addition to movies, my language partner also recommended several reality TV shows to help with learning the dynamic of casual conversations.
In addition to cultural awareness, I really need work on other competences as well. Grammatical competence is an important one for me because I was not in Korea long enough to learn the grammar of the language. Korean is structured very differently than English. Many of its sentence structures differ and the proper use of punctuation is completely unclear to me. I would like to consult a basic Korean textbook to take time learning the structure of Hangul and have some level of proficiency in that as well. With grammatical competence, I would also like to eventually strive toward discourse competence. This is the language competence that deals with big picture meanings instead of small details. I would eventually like to learn how to read and understand lengthy documents. Things like a whole movie, a novel, and even a long conversation are some of the things I really would like to get better understanding.
Comments
Hi Kevin- I see you posted this reflection paper before we got to our brief unit on bilingualism. Having learned about what it means to be a native speaker, i.e. a definition that stresses the connection between language, instinct, cultural knowledge, cognition, and thought, do you think you are truly a native speaker? There's no right or wrong answer to this question, but depending on when you moved to the U.S., I'm wondering if one the other categories of bilingualism- coordinate, conjunctive, and subordinate, etc., might be more applicable to describe your linguistic knowledge as either a native or heritage speaker. Either way, fascinating post.
It's cool to see that you're picking Korean back up. I've also had friends who came to the US at a young age and have slowly lost their fluency of their home language. Maybe you had a head start than someone who just started learning from scratch, but it seems like there's so much out there to mastery of a language and it takes a lot of time to become fully fluent and be able to understand movies/novels/long conversations like you said.