So far, I have worked on my writing and speaking skills. I have been reading and working on the Online Intermediate College Korean exercises by Clare You and Eunsu Cho on Berkeley’s language site (http://www.language.berkeley.edu/Korean/10/index.htm). This website has been extremely helpful in improving my listening skills through audio texts as well as my writing skills. To become more familiar with Hangul, I have been copying down the texts for each lesson (currently on Lesson 11). In order to further improve my writing and spelling, I’ve been trying my best to message/text my parents using just Korean. Although some of the words I type in Korean are autocorrected to the correct word, seeing my mistakes and practicing typing in Korean have improved my writing skills significantly and I feel a bit more comfortable writing in Korean. Currently, I’m pretty slow at typing in Korean, but I hope to memorize the Korean alphabet keyboard soon so I can learn to type Korean on my laptop as well.
In order to further improve my communicative competence, I believe I need to converse more frequently in Korean, especially with a native Korean speaker. I don’t have a language partner yet, but the online site I have been using has been extremely helpful. Each lesson comes with a dialogue and audio, which is great for getting the right pronunciation and practicing fluency and flow of the sentences. The dialogues from the Berkeley’s language site are very helpful for it goes over past tense, present tense, and future tense. I have been reading dialogues out loud, and this helped me strengthen my grammatical competence as well as my pronunciation. Although it’s hard, I’m also trying to change my habit of speaking in Konglish (mixture of Korean and English) when I speak to my parents so I can improve my speaking skills in Korean. This means that I’ll probably be speaking slower, but it will be good practice.
In addition to improving my communicative competence, I think understanding the culture is an essential part of speaking the language. For example, Korea has a Confucian hierarchy and etiquette system, where elders are referred to and spoken to with honorifics. In contrast to English, sentences are changed when speaking to an elder versus someone your age. Koreans use “banmal” with friends their age and use “jondaemal” to elders or to those of higher status. For example, asking “did you eat?” to a friend would be “Bap muk eot seo?” whereas asking your grandpa if he has eaten yet would be “Jinji deu sheot seo yo?” These two sentences have the same meaning but use different words to convey more respect.
Throughout this semester, I hope to learn about the connections between the Korean language and its culture to fully immerse myself in the language. I think watching Korean dramas and tv shows are a good way to further understand Korean culture, especially dramas that pertain to family. Korean dramas illustrate the general lifestyle and culture in Korea, and use many slang words that I am not familiar with. I am going to continue using Berkeley Intermediate Language site and try to watch videos that pertain to Korea’s modern day culture.
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