Throughout this course, not only was I able to improve my Korean skills, but was also able to further my understanding the Korean culture and learn other cultures from our class discussions and presentations.
Being enrolled in self-directed learning was a great opportunity for me for I was able to specifically choose and focus on what areas I wanted to improve on by setting goals for myself after finding out how I learned best by completing the Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences surveys. These surveys also helped me understand how I learned best and how I could expand on my learning for other courses as well which was very helpful. Moreover, although I lived in Korea until the age of 8, I didn’t know the full history behind the Korean writing system (“Hangul”) until this course. I knew that King SeJong created Hangul and that his face was on a Korean won bill, but didn’t know why, how, or when, he created Hangul until I researched for our language presentations.
I really enjoyed watching and learning from everyone’s cultural presentations. I gained both language and cultural exposure from Greece, Korea, Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel. In addition to improving my communicative competence, I think understanding the culture is an essential part of speaking the language, and I believe that this course did a good job in making connections between the Korean language and the culture.
I also enjoyed all the readings in this course, particularly the one on bilingualism and revival of a language. I learned the importance of stabilizing a language by having a group of people who speak the language so the language doesn’t die out. I realized that when a language dies out, people lose cultural identities, richness, and diversity of humanity's linguistic heritage. A language contains the words and sounds that a particular group uses to describe and interact with the world, and thus forms an essential part of that group's identity. In order to preserve that identity, many people are trying to preserve languages from dying out just like we are trying to prevent endangered species from going extinct to maintain diversity in the ecosystem. The readings in this course also made me more appreciative and curious about different languages, especially because I never really thought about linguistics or languages in general until this course.
In the future, I would like to learn more about the history of languages and how the grammatical structure was established for various languages. When I took Chinese in middle school, I realized that the grammar was somewhat similar to Korean. I’ve heard similar things about Japanese grammar too. I think it would be interesting and fun to explore the history and the similarities and differences between the grammatical structure of different languages.This opportunity as an autonomous learner gave me the chance to improve and advance my knowledge and understanding of my first language, and it has been very fulfilling. Throughout the semester, I have definitely improved my reading skills through the use of an audio book.
I want to continue working on my Korean, and I plan to enroll in SDLC 111 next semester if my schedule allows. Even if I can’t take SDLC 111 next semester, I plan on improving my Korean with all the resources I have found online and with the skills I have learned as a self-directed learner in class.
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