For this week, Somyung and I decided to conduct our weekly meeting at our local Korean church called Richmond Korean Central Presbyterian Church. I hoped to accomplish speaking as much Korean with her as possible especially in a solemn setting, so it would force me to use formal language like 잘 지내셨어요 instead of 잘지냈어? The “요” added at the end of words and phrases turns the informal sentences into formal ones to use for adults and elders. Since I only really use informal language with my parents (because my parents do not want me to use formal language with them), I realized I was using this type of language in places that were not totally appropriate. I also wanted to practice praying in Korean since this is something I never really tried to do. During our small group, Somyung and I got placed in the same Connect Group. Since all of the members were Korean American students, Somyung asked the group if we could all try and speak in Korean. First, we all one by one took turns saying out loud our prayer requests for the week. When it was my turn, I did not expect myself to hesitate much, however, it was very difficult to convey my prayer request because I had to translate religious terms I had never used before. For example, I never knew that Matthew was 마태복음 and prayer request was 기도제목 in Korean. After a few seconds of shuffling around my thoughts, I was finally able to say 이번주 하나님께 저의 기도 제목은요 학교에서 좋은 성적 받고 집중할수있는거에요. In English, this translates to, “my prayer request for this week is to get good grades in school and I also hope God helps me focus.” Another thing we tried to do was to read together with the Korean version of the Bible. For my entire life, I have only read the English versions (which is already hard to read with all of the difficult names and pronunciations). However, I thought this would be a fun challenge to give to myself. When Somyung got me a Korean version and we all started reading it, my tongue started twisting and I mispronounced words way more than I pronounced them correctly. It took almost 5 minutes for me to read a single scripture, so for my next bi-weekly meeting, I hope to have gotten better at reading the Korean Bible and also speaking with formal language.
Although I am pretty proficient in my target language, it still gets very frustrating when I try to fix the small mistakes in my technical skills. Sometimes, the progress seems slow because I am trying to improve things on a micro-scale. However, I will still persistently work to try and always improve because I want to get to the level where I can talk like a native speaker. I understand that in order to do that, I have to verbally practice it as much as I can and try to learn from other native speakers like the elders from my church.
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