The highlights of this month include learning about iconic places in South Korea as part of my cultural presentation, freshen up on previous language topics, continuing with TTMIK textbook and notebook, listening to a weekly podcast, and creating a podcast with Somyung and Peace about the activities that we did over this semester.
South Korea has numerous tourist places that capture their fast paced culture and their traditional side. The traditional sites are attractive to tourists because the building architecture is unique and reveals South Korea’s history along with it. For example, one of my favorite places that I researched about was the Jeonju Hanok Village. This village was situated behind a busy city, but the village itself was quiet and with traditional architecture. One of the most noticeable parts of this village was the type of roofing the shops have. The roofs are made with thin rectangular cement bricks laid over top of each other and the corners of the roof are curved up. This type of roofing style gave a traditional aesthetic and was depicted across many historical buildings including Gyeonbukgung palace.
I reviewed Sino and Native Korean numbers, present/past/future tense, and days of the week. Sino-Korean numbers were easier for me to understand because they sound similar to Cantonese/Mandarin characters and forming numbers higher than 100 is a similar format in Chinese. On the other hand, native Korean numbers are still the system that I am still having trouble with remembering the pronunciation for the higher numbers such as 7, 8 and 9. One, two and three are easier to understand because I hear them in Korean reality shows. For example, when the actors are taking a photo, they often say, “One, two, three!” or when they are starting a game. Therefore, I believe I need to hear the number system being used in order to remember it better. The tenses and days of the week were topics that I learned a few weeks ago, so I didn’t have a hard time recalling them from my memory. However, I still get somewhat nervous when conjugating the verbs to match the tense because there are some verbs that don’t follow the structure sometimes for easier pronunciation.
These past couple of weeks, I learned Korean counting units, how to do self-introductions, and months of the year. One of the grammar topics that I think makes learning Mandarin hard for beginners is the concept of counting units because it feels unnatural when coming from an English background. Therefore, I was surprised when learning that Korean had counting units as well. This topic adds an additional layer of complexity to learning Korean. “Ja lu” or “gae” can be used to count objects such as pencils, pens, and knives. For self-introductions, there weren't many new topics to learn, rather, the TTMIK book organized the list of topics to talk about when introducing yourself. The months of the year weren’t difficult to understand either because they follow the Sino-Korean system. The names of the month correspond to their order in the year. For example, January is the first month of the year so it is “i-rwol” because “i” (pronounced “ee”) is one in Sino-Korean.
This has been a very productive semester because I had a structured syllabus that guided me week-by-week on what to focus on and identified valuable resources to help me learn Korean. Thank you Dr. Soloway for this opportunity!
Comments