This semester, I took the SDLC 105 and 110 classes in tandem which I found to be very helpful in learning my target language: Korean. My learning activities have been made for the goal of increasing my Korean speaking fluency. When the year began, my plan consisted of speaking activities such as specific topics to talk about with my language partner that I had an interest in such as talking about school, business topics (my language partner and I were both business majors so this worked great), and about Korean modern language and trending or “meme” phrases. I really enjoyed these activities because they were already topics I was interested in and I could learn new vocabulary and grow more comfortable with speaking in Korean as well. However, I was having some difficulty with doing just the speaking activities since I was still a beginner in proper sentence structure, tense, vocabulary, and also sociocultural aspects of the language like respect and formality. The topics we learned about in class helped me to adjust and add to my language learning plan to improve these aspects of my speaking as the semester progressed.
The topics in class also helped me to gain a greater interest in certain aspects of Korean language outside of just speaking. For example, I included activities such as learning and sounding out the Korean phonetic alphabet to get better at pronunciation and forming sounds that did not exist in the English phonetic inventory. I also included more activities to supplement my grammar knowledge due to the grammar topics we learned in class by reading different levels of a Korean textbook series. I was reading “Talk to Me in Korean” and got to workbook level 3. This book also helped me learn more about vocabulary and practice speaking Korean in a real-life context. I also learned more about Korean morphemes through the activities we did in class about splitting up inflectional and derivational morphemes. I learned a lot about myself as a language learner such as how quickly I can learn if I am constantly exposing myself to the target language and trying to get exposure to it every single day. I also learned that all the aspects of a language are tightly linked like speaking, reading, and writing and I can’t attempt to master one without learning the others.
I found that my main goal changed to include learning about more sociocultural aspects of Korea because I learned a bit about it through conversations with my language partner, listening to Korean podcasts, and writing cultural posts for SDLC 110 which was helping me to learn parts of Korean language such as formality and traditional terms. I learned that removing a language from its cultural context makes it lose a lot of depth and meaningfulness so I would also like to learn more about it after this semester! I also plan on visiting Korea after I graduate (May 2025) so I hope to use what I learned from these classes in a real practical setting.
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