SDLC 110 Reflection #4

[Lorena Campos-Castro]

Towards the end of the semester, I got to the chapters on verb conjugations and was really excited because it facilitated conversations. I now had a lot more verbs to work with and after discovering I could practically create verbs just by adding a specific ending to the noun, I had a lot of fun doing so. I covered the three basic tenses: present, past and future tense. I thought I would struggle a lot more with the conjugations and tenses since I learned all three almost back to back but was pleasantly surprised to see that it was not nearly as difficult as I had expected. Unlike Russian, French, or Spanish, their conjugations and tenses tend to fit their rules and established patterns. At least, at the level I currently am, it seems to be this way. This is the part of the semester where my goal grew into being able to hold a basic conversation with the Korean students at the University of Richmond. I went to a lot of the Korean American Student Association events this semester and realized I knew quite a few Koreans who were excited about me learning their language. This realization further pushed me to really try to improve my pronunciation and practice my ability to speak spontaneously. As a result, I began to simply chant the sentences I worked on for practice previously so that I am reviewing the structure of the sentence while simultaneously working on my pronunciation. This proved to be very helpful as it made me a much more enthusiastic language learner especially now that I had developed some go to lines to demonstrate my Korean. As time went by, I noticed that I was not just reciting sentences I had almost memorized by heart, I had subconsciously begun to use Korean exclamation words/phrases. It was starting to sound natural for me to just say [a-ra-seo] to get myself to refocus on the task at hand. I brought this up to my language partner and met with my Korean friend to learn more casual phrases that I could use with people my age. Inadvertently, I also learned a few slang words and even how to text. I found out the equivalent of emphasizing a word through text messages like “Noooooo” . In Korean, they also just repeat the last character to emphasize it.  Hand in hand, I asked both my language partner and my friend to help give me ways to express myself as I would in English. They had to ponder some of the phrases I wanted translated like “I see” (in the informal context) given that it is not simply translating every word but also figuring out how to convey the meaning as similarly as possible. These past lessons have been fundamental to my language learning as I have found ways for me to feel comfortable speaking the language and also made it so that it flows more naturally. In the future, I will continue to practice reading the short stories out loud, conversing with my friends in Korean as much as I can, and using the talktomeinkorean website to learn more.