I was focused on the planning of what I want the semester to look like for a few weeks in the beginning. This included researching online resources, tv shows , physical textbooks that I can use to immerse myself in the Korean language and culture. After gathering several resources, I then went through them to determine which ones I wanted to use as my main source for learning and categorize the others as either optional for extra work I may want to do or supplemental resources which were designated in my plan as simply a source to use for alternative explanations or practice. I hoped to have gotten through almost half of talk to me in korean as it is a relatively short textbook. I was clearly overestimating my capacity and ability to retain the information. Though some of the concepts were relatively straightforward, I still had to practice being able to withdraw the skills from my brain spontaneously. This has proved difficult to do as I am getting all of the languages I am learning confused.
One of my main priorities for this section of the semester was to learn hangul well because I know some of the sounds do not have an equivalent sound in our GAE phonetic inventory making it difficult to really produce the same sounds as native korean speakers. I think my solution for the time being at least, has been to sound out the characters using my Spanish accent since the characters are not stressed as much as the english vowels are. By doing a soft trill of the r, I am starting to pick up how to make the ㄹ character as it is between an r/l sound. Overall, learning a language at my own pace is forcing me to learn how to be patient and actually focusing more on the over process than on the objectives as I will learn more from my mistakes. It is definitely nerve wracking though to practice pronunciation with a native korean speaker and frustrating when I can replicate the sounds as it is still hard to really differentiate some of the sounds like the three variations of their [k] and [b] sounds.
Another challenge I have been facing is simply writing by hand since I do not have the neatest handwriting. Since I need to be able to read the characters, I have been taking longer to write. I am generally a very impatient person so having to take my time with each stroke and making sure I am aligning the characters correctly within their blocks, has been delaying my progress. With my visually unappealing handwriting, it has proven terribly difficult for me to organize 4-character syllables into a single block. Personally, I feel like it is more complex than it seems because the characters are different widths/lengths so it is similar to piecing a puzzle together. As I start to become more familiar with hangul and the characters naturally fall into place in their block, writing full sentences will no longer be a hurdle in my learning process.
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