I really enjoyed getting to know my language partner. She was an asset to my learning because of her insights as a fluent Korean speaker. Her background was interesting - although she was raised in Korea, she also spent a significant amount of time abroad, so she was able to develop a very worldview of culture and language, which she conveyed through our lessons when we talked about differences in both of those things. She was extremely helpful for my questions about things like beauty and food, which I ended up using for my projects and presentations. Her firsthand experience with those aspects of Korean culture were invaluable.
Our meetings were divided into different lessons based on things that I listed as part of what I wanted to learn overall in the beginning of the semester. We broke it down into subjects and then part of our lessons would be to learn the vocabulary, and the other part would be to use it in conversation. She was very helpful when it came to brushing up my pronunciation and also picking up mistakes I made (and had been making for awhile).
My favorite lesson was probably when we went to the Korean restaurant with the other language group. It was great to be able to integrate food into our lesson, for obvious reasons. I ended up realizing how passionate I was about Korean cuisine during this visit because it reminded me of home, and my parents' stellar culinary skills. Consequently, I did my final presentation about not just food, but the culture of Korean cuisine.
Brigid helped me with the culture aspect in particular. I knew a pretty good amount of things about food in general, but I didn't know things about the culture as much, because my family raised us in an American eating style. It was interesting to learn the other aspects of it!
This was a great experience and I'm so glad that UR offers this kind of specialized language and culture learning. I really enjoyed it and I have recommended it to many of my friends!
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