I am doing quite well following my learning plan especially on making notes and watching Korean culture youtube program. Through watching Korean Englishman, I gained knowledge of Korean food culture and daily life. I also made notes every time I learnt a new Korean word while reading articles and talking with my Korean friends. In this way, I could review easily by myself and I found some simple rules of Hangul system while pronouncing words with similar components. However, there are also some difficulties and goals that I did not achieve. For example, since we have not got our language partners yet, it is hard for me to know if my spoke Korean is correct. In my learning plan, I said that I would try to learn and speak Korean to my Korean friends, however we did not meet that often and it is hard to learn something systematically from your friends. Most of the time, they just taught me one of two funny words instead of explaining thoroughly to me. Thus I think the biggest challenge for me and for self-learning a language is that it is hard to persevere and learning systematically without guidance. Since I have realized these difficulties, I will try to adjust the plan and make a special "Korean learning time" for myself every week so that I could keep track of my progress instead of "learning only when I have time".
As I said, I kept reading articles and watching TV shows about Korean culture as well as the daily Korean news. I think the purpose of learning a language is not only to be able to speak it but also to get to know the culture and history behind the language. These two things also help and facilitate each other. For me, by watching Korean TV shows, not only did I gain the knowledge of Korean food culture and daily life behaviors, but I also learnt the vocabs and pronunciations of the food and Korean festivals. While doing research on the Korean language history, I realized that although it has developed very differently from Chinese now, Chinese once had very deep impact on it in the history. Before Koreans had their own Hangul writing system, they used Chinese Hanzi writing system for a long time. And it is very impressive that the King in the 15th century was already thinking of the literacy rate and commissioned the invention of a more efficient and more accessible phonetic script to the common people.
As I mentioned that one of my biggest problem now is that I am not learning Korean in a systematical and organized way, but only when I am free and meeting with my Korean friends instead. So in order to improve my learning plan and communicative competence, I am going to make every Friday 1:15-3pm as my “Korean learning” time and try to meet with my Korean friend once a week to ask her about the questions I have in Korean learning and to show her the records of my spoken Korean. I hope that I could keep track of my learning progress by doing so, instead of learning in a random pace only if I have time.
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