This past semester was a tough semester I believe that many students and faculty members can agree. Juggling with classes for my major and with learning Korean from the very basics was not as difficult as I thought. Yes, there were times when my goal of working on Korean once a day was not accomplished but compared to when I first started to learn Korean, I accomplished several language goals. Most of these goals were accomplished with my language partner, Somyung, and my iTalki teacher, Yazi. They helped me identify what I was having trouble with and taught me Korean from introductions to honorifics to the Korean number system. I met with my iTalki teacher once a week usually on a Sunday, and we would learn Korean through the Yonsei University textbook. The textbook contained numerous graphics to help me understand the meaning of the words.
Upon this reflection of the semester, I recognized the difficulties I encountered with learning Korean such as pronunciations and grammar. I am not comfortable, yet, with Korean sentence structure because unlike Chinese and English, Korean follows S-O-V structure while English and Chinese follows S-V-O structure. This difference is enough to confuse me and get me mixed up when forming sentences. Nevertheless, I believe grammar in any language is one of the important if not the most important in learning and speaking a foreign language fluently. Even though I grew up in the States ever since I was three years old, English grammar continues to be somewhat difficult for me. Therefore, grammar is one of my most difficult aspects in language to master.
This past month, I learned Korean vocabulary about different spaces such as restaurant, classroom, bathroom, office, etc. Most of these spaces have the common character “실” which I believe means “space”/ “setting”. In addition to these spaces, I learned location words such as behind, in front of, inside, etc. The pronunciation of these words doesn’t have any similarities to Chinese, so it is hard for me to retain the information. I also learned classroom vocabulary and student supplies vocabulary such as pencil, eraser, notebook, etc. The supplies vocabulary was easier to learn because of their resemblance to the Chinese pronunciations.
With my language partner, we discussed several cultural topics such as the educational system in Korea and compared with the States’ education system. This inspired me to do my cultural presentation on Korean’s education system, and during my research, I stumbled upon several intriguing information such as this huge fascination and emphasis on “cram schools”. Cram schools are after school private tutoring academies that tutor a variety of different subjects in school. We also watched and analyzed the award-winning film Parasite. Parasite highlights the socioeconomic inequalities between the ultra-rich and ultra-poor families, and the film contains many themes that resonates with a large audience.
In the past month, I have difficult time distinguishing the soft and hard sounds of certain consonants. For an example, the consonant “ㅅ” is softer than the “ㅆ” form. I feel as though I can distinguish the sounds when comparing them together but when the consonant is in a character, I don’t know whether I am saying the “ㅅ” sound (softer) or the “ㅆ” sound (harder).
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