It would be wrong to say that I did not know any Korean when I registered for the class. I already knew how say the following:
1. 안녕하세요 (Hello)
2. 안녕 (Bye)
3. Excuse me
4. 잠깐만요 (One moment please!)
5.사랑해요 (I love/like you.)
6. 엄마 (Mom)/ 아빠 (Dad)/ 언니 (Sister)/ 오빠 (brother)/ 할머니(Grandmother)/ 할아버지 (Grandfather)
7. 가자 (let’s go)
8. 감사합니다 (Thank you)
9. 죄송합니다 (Sorry)
These are the words and phrases that I had picked from the Korean dramas and TV shows that I had watched .
The first thing that I learned from my language partner, Sun Yoon, is the alphabet. She also taught us how to read and write in Korean. While reading the letters I struggled a little with the letter ㅅwhich is the Korean equivalent of S. We also practiced dictation where she would say a word in korean and we would write down. This helped a lot in understanding the practicing the structure of written Korean. Since the letters are not written in a sequence but arranged in blocks of syllables, it took some time to remember which letters are positioned where in the block.
The difficulty I faced while reading was that the pronunciation of letters changes depending on the word and the position of the letters in the word. Nevertheless, my experience with Korean dramas helped me identify my mistakes in pronunciation and improve my reading. I also discovered that among reading, writing and speaking, speaking was the easiest for me. This was mostly because I have already familiarized myself to the Korean sounds by watching Korean TV shows.
Next, I focused on self-introductions. I learned how to introduce myself as well as ask questions about others. Among the things I learned to say includes telling my name, age, where I am from and my age. When learning the questions and answers, I noticed the structure of Korean sentences was very different from that of English. In Korean the subject comes in the beginning of the sentence, followed by the object and the verb comes in the end. At the same I realized that the Korean sentence has the same structure as Bengali sentence structure. As a result I was not very difficult to familiarize myself with Korean sentences.
The following week, I worked on more grammar with my language partner. We talked about how to say I, you, they, we, he, she in Korean. Before meeting with Sun, I looked at some online resources to get an idea of Korean verb conjugation. I noticed that in different website, different forms of I, you and the other pronouns are used. Therefore, I asked Sun about it. She said that different forms of the same pronoun was used depending on the person we are talking to and also the level of formality of the situation.
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