Before fall semester began, I have already started to learn the Hangul alphabet over the summer and found the alphabet to be very useful in phonetically sounding out a Korean character. Mandarin, on the other hand, lack an alphabet system which explains part of the reason why learning Mandarin has an additional degree of difficulty. The week prior to the start of classes, I met with my Mandarin teacher, and coincidentally, she also speaks Korean. She lived in Busan, South Korea for four years, and teaches both Mandarin and Korean on iTalki. I found this to be the perfect opportunity to learn Korean simultaneously practicing Mandarin.
Yesterday, we had our first official Korean one-on-one lesson, and we went over consonants and vowels that are the simplest and phonetically distinguishable. For an example, we practiced these vowels 아, 이, 오, and 요 , and their individual sounds. Then, we combined those characters with consonants such as ㅁ, ㄴ, ㄹ, andㅎ together to connect the sounds between the vowels and consonants. An example that we did was ㅁ + ㅏ = ma. My tutor tried to associate that character with Korean words, and I found that to be very helpful. Through yesterday’s tutoring session, my strengths and weakness were clear. I struggled with some of the vowel pronunciation especially when two vowels look very similar but only differ by one line or stroke. For an example, 아 has a long “a” sound while어 sounds like “ohhh”. However, I believe these differences can be distinguished if I practice and read more Korean characters that contain those vowels. As of right now, I am planning to meet with my tutor once a week for one hour on Saturdays. Eventually, I would like to be tutored two times a week that way I know my pronunciation and my performance won’t fall behind. One of the benefits of SDLAP is how flexible the schedule can be since it is based on my own schedule. However, this flexibility can also be a disadvantage because I can easily fall behind in my language learning journey without a structured schedule. I may revise my syllabus and put in a structured schedule to ensure that I won’t fall behind in learning Korean.
In my first language partner session with Somyung, we set up our meeting times and what our plan for the semester will look like. I was able to learn a few words such as how to say “teacher” and the popular children’s TV show “Pororo”. Additionally, we explored activities that I can do to expose myself to Korean such as watching children’s TV shows, listening to Korean language podcasts, and watch Korean TV shows. Somyung, a native Korean speaker, offer her insights into how her previous student studied Korean and reveal that he learned the language quicker when reading materials in Korean. While that seems like a far goal and ability to do as of right now with my Korean level, this goal is attainable once I have a strong foundation of the Hangul alphabet.
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