This semester, I studied the Korean language and some of the Korean culture. Initially when starting this adventure, I was quite ambitious about what I wanted to learn before the semester ended. As the semester progressed, I realized that my learning plan involved more than I could accomplish within this semester so I had to scale back my goals. Thus I decided to learn greetings, ordering food, important shopping words and phrases, and question phrases such as “what is this?”, “what is that?”, etc. Throughout the semester, I’ve learned many words and phrases some that were new to me, but others were old to me because of my years of listening to Korean pop music and watching Korean dramas. I have had the chance to get to know my peers better who were also studying Korean. By doing the learning journals, I was able to reflect on my progress this semester, which was a bit slow at first, but I slowly progressed. Now I can read hangul, as well as a basic introduction and asking questions, so I think if I keep up with Korean for years to come, I’ll be able to write it without looking at the writing of others.
The difficulty that I encountered was not having a language partner to help me or to converse with because I, along with some others who have been studying Korean, was never assigned a language partner. Despite asking our professor many times for the language partner, we were not assigned a language partner at all. However, even though I did not have a language partner, I was able to find some free online resources that helped me with my Korean, but sometimes it is helpful to have a native speaker who can help you with pronunciation. Other than that slight difficulty, everything else with studying my target language of Korean went well.
Overall insights that I have gained as a language learner and a cultural explorer is that learning a language can be fun if you have good resources. I had the chance to to find a Korean language app called Eggbun that was helpful as well as a few Korean websites. After leaving this class, I plan to continue learning Korean by going to South Korea for two weeks after my graduation next month. After undergrad, I want to continue exposing myself to the Korean language and the Korean culture.
Throughout this semester, I had the chance to read numerous articles and readings about languages that would sometimes ignite my interest. One particular article was Why Bilinguals Are Smarter? the writer mentioned how people who were bilingual tend to be smarter and he even used the example of the children who were asked to sort blue circles and red squares into bins on the computer. At the end of this task, it seems that the bilingual students did better. What the writer also mentioned was that those who are bilingual are able to concentrate more on tasks and ignore distractions. They also have the ability to switch their attention from one thing to another, like driving while memorizing directions. This made me reflect a lot on my own language learning experiences and I thought that if I had continued learning French then I would be quite fluent right now and I think I would consider myself to be bilingual.
Taking this self-directing language class has made me realize that I do better learning a language when I am in the classroom as opposed to just learning it on my own. When you learn the language on your own it can be difficult because there is no one there to guide you properly or to help you when you need it. Overall, if I had to the self-directed language experience all over again, I do not think that I would do it, but I would prefer learning the language in a classroom setting.
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