The highlights of this month include finishing TTMIK Level 1 book and textbook and watching a Korean thriller called “All of Us are Dead” on Netflix. The TTMIK workbooks arrived mid-February and I did the older lessons in the workbook to catch up. I am glad that I came across TTMIK because they have a variety of resources online including textbooks, workbooks, grammar workshops, and audio recordings for beginners. Working through the workbook helps reinforce and apply the lessons that I learned from the textbook. This is definitely a resource I would recommend to beginner learners because TTMIK is comprehensive and makes it easy for the average student.
This month, I learned present and past tense conjugations of verbs, “I want to …”, interrogative words such as “Who”, “What, “How”, “When”, “Where”, “Why”, the native Korean number system, and how to negate sentences. My structured syllabus this semester has really helped me stay on track and utilize my time wisely. Since I plan out what I want to do per week, I can adjust the weeks accordingly if I feel I need more practice on a particular topic such as present and past tense conjugations. I can recognize sentences in past and present tense, but to be able to write them out myself is a bit challenging because some verbs have changes depending on other characters that are attached. The interrogative words were the easiest to understand and applicable to daily life conversations. For example, I watched the Korean thriller “All of Us are Dead”, and I heard many times “nu gu” or “nu ga”, which means “Who”. This was in the movie lines, “Who was bitten by the zombie?”. Compared to the Sino Korean number system, the native Korean system was more difficult to understand. I remember the Sino Korean numbers better because the pronunciations are similar to that of Cantonese and Mandarin. This makes sense because Sino Korean numbers are derived from Chinese. One to ten in native Korean is not difficult to understand, but when you get to higher numbers such as 30, 40, 50, and so on, each ten has its own distinct name. In Sino Korean numbers, 30 is “san sip”. 40 is “sa sip”.
During our language partner meetings, Somyung does a great job at preparing material for Peace and I to practice speaking and give immediate feedback afterwards. We read Korean children stories and wrote our own introductions. While the Korean stories were a bit hard for me to read, it was a great exercise to improve my reading and pronunciation skills. I read “The Lion and the Mouse” and we all read “The Rabbit and the Turtle” together. The plots were easy to understand since I heard the stories when I was a small child.
My plan for March is to start TTMIK Level 2 textbook and TTMIK Level 2 workbook. I hope to make a comprehensive list of all the verbs and vocabulary words in TTMIK Level 1 book in Quizlet or in google docs. This way I can easily review the essential verbs and vocabulary.
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