- 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?
Suyeon Unnie and I have been learning a lot of great Korean culture and language together. She's sooooo awesome!!! <3 So far, we have been on top of things and have been able to go through 5 tasks. We've done the following:
- Greetings/Farewells/Introductions
- Family & Relationships
- Time/Question words
- Food --> types, ordering, asking
- Directions
This week is review week because I really want to be able to enforce everything we've learned and it's just been about a little over halfway the semester. With Korean, I've learned that honorifics play such an important role in understanding the language. Age and experience are so important to the culture and sometimes this makes it harder to learn the language. To me, it's like learning two different dialects in a language, even though there are legit dialects to Korean. But, the nice thing is that most of the time, there are just suffixes which are added to make sentences honorific. Our last session (Monday) Suyeon Unnie and I were able to have small talk. Konglish? haha. She and I were super proud that we were able to have a semi-conversation! Not just about what I had been learning, but putting everything I know together to make a sentence pertaining to the topic she was talking about. Also, I realized that my comprehension of Korean is really good, I can mostly pick up on what Suyeon Unnie says. It's the speaking my own words/thoughts that is really difficult. I think to improve this, I need to study more vocabulary so that I can build up my ability to speak. As well, I feel I can do a better job at writing, so I am going to work on that. What's been really helpful, because I'm an auditory learner, is when Suyeon Unnie records herself for me on the main things that we learn in a session. For instance, she recorded my introductions (formal and informal) and throughout the week I was able to just listen to it and repeat after her. I didn't have to worry about wrong pronunciation. I think I'd like her to do that more often for me. We've just been doing a lot of the situational cases that I've asked, but if we finish all the main tasks and I feel comfortable enough with everything, we agreed to go do some more grammar so I'm excited! I'm of course learning grammar while I learn to do each task, but it's nice to just understand the organization of the language in detail. So far, everything in Korean is great! I'm really excited to go to Yonsei and Korea with the knowledge that I am gaining! <3
Comments