SDLAP 111 Journal #1 Vivian Shon

[Vivian Shon]

       During this spring semester, I went to study abroad at Yonsei University in South Korea for 5 months. I have always been bilingual in both English and Korean, with Korean being my first language. However, I moved to the U.S. when I was only 6 years old, so I always carried this imposter syndrome in which I felt like I was neither Korean nor American. Fortunately, this kind of mindset only lasted until the end of elementary school where I really adapted to American culture and also the English language. I was beyond elated that my English speaking abilities drastically improved and I felt like I finally belonged in the States as a valid American citizen. On the other hand, I now felt like I knew nothing about my motherland’s culture. And since I came to the U.S. when I was so young, I never got to attend school there or make any Korean friends. As a result, this is mainly why I decided to go study in South Korea (even during a pandemic), and I have absolutely no regrets. Following my experience at Yonsei, I have decided to not only be a Korean language partner for this semester, but to also take SDLC Korean II myself. Even with a very hectic academic semester, I have decided to make this work because I wanted to almost force myself to speak Korean at Richmond. In Richmond, there is an extremely limited number of Korean American students, so I end up not using Korean for a very long time. However, by teaching and also learning Korean at the same time, I hope that I can retain the Korean vocabulary and phrases I used back at Yonsei. Somyung, my language partner, and I held our first meeting last Saturday over brunch at her dorm. We first went over what my objectives were for this semester. I informed her that I would like to work mostly on conversing and putting my Korean to use as much as possible. Additionally, I informed her that I would also like to read some real-time news articles since improving my reading skills is another one of my goals this semester. I have always been an adequate reader, however, I was never good at reading very technical news articles or understanding complicated television broadcasts. This semester, I hope to be able to read and interpret many different news articles pertaining to social and political issues. For the next hour, Somyung and I competed on who can speak the least amount of Konglish (which is when someone uses English and Korean simultaneously in a sentence). As Korean Americans, code-switching is such a natural phenomenon that I do not even recognize that I do it so often. Therefore, it was great to practice with Somyung next to me since she could always inform me when I used Konglish. After that, we looked up some potential Korean dramas on Netflix that we both could watch without subtitles for the next class. All in all, I am very excited about where my Korean skills will be at by the end of the semester.