SDLC 110 Reflection #3

[Lorena Campos-Castro]

For the month of November, my goals were to elaborate on speaking about plans by adding specifics to the mix. I learned how to tell time and realized it was a lot more complex than I was expecting. I remembered learning this topic in French class and how my teacher at the time apologized for all the confusion caused from it. Looking back now at that moment, telling time in French is actually so simple and I had taken it for granted. Telling time in Korean ended up taking more time for me to fully grasp because it involves both its native Korean number system and the Sino-Korean system. Before this concept, I knew a few numbers but I was not able to determine which number system they belonged to. Therefore, a big chunk of my time was dedicated to getting comfortable counting in both systems and being able to recognize which system the numbers belong with. Aside from the number system portion of telling time, I had to learn the order of words. In latin languages and in English, the “AM” and “PM” come after the time is said yet in Korean, it is placed before the time. This took a bit of time to get the hang of since I was still translating from English to Korean. My language partner has been very helpful in reexplaining concepts and catching my mistakes which further improves my understanding of the concept. Aside from telling time, my language partner and I began focusing on how to ask and answer the 5 W’s (Who, What, Where, When, Why). We naturally fell into this objective by exploring time given that it answers the “when”. I am still not yet to the “why” but I have been using TalktomeinKorean platform to learn how to discuss the “who”, “what”, and “where”. This online platform has proven to be extremely helpful in learning grammar since I needed to learn several particle endings to denote the “where”, “who” and “what”. Aside from particle endings, I learned the appropriate contexts for each particle. I practiced writing sentences with my language partner, asking any lingering questions I still had after talking notes from the platform and doing their respective activities in the workbook. I continued to practice my pronunciation by reading short stories and it has definitely improved my ability to read hangul. I am now able to read Hangul a lot faster and pronounce characters a lot more correctly. My language partner also suggested I try to listen to a Korean song I really like and attempt to read their lyrics out loud with the soundtrack. I thought this was a very smart idea since I kind of already know what sounds to expect throughout the song allowing me to read the lyrics without as many pauses. It is also very intriguing to understand what is being said in between the lines that I otherwise would not have understood. After going over a couple of verses with my language partner, I will be attempting to finish the song on my own because I should focus on my speech fluency too.