Up to now, I have had a fun Korean learning journey. I followed what I wrote in the learning plan that I learn better if I am immersed into Korean-speaking environment. Therefore, I have listened to Korean radio through Tuneln Radio apps on a daily basis. I tried to listen to Korean news, but I found out that instead of listening to monotonous news, listening to talk shows and music programs could make language-learning much more fun. Having listened to Korean on a regular basis, I start to pick some words and phrases up from what I have learned. As time goes along, the more words I could pick up, the more I wanted to learn Korean, and I am curious about how much I could pick up at the end of this semester.
Understanding Korean culture has helped me learn Korean more easily. Knowing that Korean minors need to bow to elders when they greet and leave, I can understand how important it is to remember to add an extra word in the end of each sentence when talking to elders. I have learned that Korean language was invented in a very recent time, late fifteenth century, comparing to other languages. The King Sejong of the Korea wanted to have their own written language and not dependent on Chinese whenever they have to write something. Thus, the King Sejong invented Korean in a consistent and scientific way, structured on the orientation of sun and moon, so that Koreans could learn the written language easily and swiftly. After knowing the origin of the language, it helps me learn the vocabularies easier. In addition, in Korean, the numbers can be pronounced and expressed in two ways, one is Korean own way and another is imported and modified from Chinese way. Koreans tend to mix the two ways when they express numbers. This piece of knowledge also made sense to me that I need to not only learn one or another way of expressing numbers, but both ways, so I would not be confused when I order things.
Communicative competence consists of four aspects: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence. So far, I am working on the first aspect. Out of Halliday’s seven functions of languages, I have learned how to introduce self and other people and family members, how to greet people, how to order food, how to exchange personal information, and apologize and thank people. I need to learn about how to give commands, identify and describe people. After becoming competent in grammatical level, I will dive into the discourse aspect of communicative competence. Discourse competence involves analyzing the background context on the words or sentences other people said, and being able to come up with a proper response within the context. In order to know how to respond properly, I also need to become more familiar about Korean’s culture.
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