I spent the first two weeks of this new semester reviewing my Korean notes regarding grammar and vocabulary that I had learned last semester. Although I am rusty with my Korean, reviewing my notes actually did get me up to speed quickly. I noticed some of the issues that I still need to work on for this semester to truly gain some fluency and proficiency in Korean. One of these is sentence construction. I spent most of last semester learning the intricate grammar rules and vocabulary in Korean and I did not do a lot of sentence construction or comprehension. I hope to expand greatly in this respect this semester and will try to increase the amount of spoken Korean during my learning sessions with Jannette. I also need to heavily practice Korean particles in conjunction with sentence construction.
I recently have been reading Korean webtoons on Naver to practice my reading comprehension but I still need to use translators to understand the meaning of most phrases. This significantly slows down my reading speed; this is a good thing for comprehension. But, I still find that retaining most words in my vocab difficult. I have seen phrases that I studied last semester showing up in the texts, which is nice. Spoken Korean is still a blur though since it takes me too much time to understand what native speakers say sometimes.
I did plan on reviewing Korean earlier during winter break using the KORLINK app but I found it difficult to do so without a Korean speaker to interact with weekly. Weekly sessions helped to remind me why I learning Korean could be so fun. I initially started to learn because I saw it as a instrument for enhancing my hobbies in Korean culture but interacting with native speakers in their own language turned out to be pretty fun. One thing that I did pick up recently was texting in Korean. The Korean keyboard apps are pretty intuitive and I had lots of fun texting Somyung and Jannette in Korean. Typing Korean isn't nearly as easy and writing it though and I found handwriting to be pretty forgiving when it came to autocomplete. One strategy that I will continue doing this semester is writing down vocab and phrases that I can look back on in my notebook. Many of the insights that I had last semester carried over well in that regard.
I spent the first learning session with Jannette introducing ourselves and our background and interest in Korean. She is a native speaker that moved to America in her youth so I am grateful to learn from her and her expertise. Although Covid makes meeting up extremely difficult, we still plan to have two sessions per week. One session will be one-on-one and the other will be in a group setting. This is for scheduling convenience and also testing the ability to communicate in Korean in a classroom like setting. We will also be delving more into Korean history and culture during these group sessions. This will extend into the authentic cultural assignments for this SDLC.
Comments
Hi Victor! I think your goals of learning how to construct sentences and practicing Korean particles are feasible. Also, I relate to your struggle of retaining vocabulary words. I think the best way to remember vocabulary words is to see and hear them regularly. I look forward to continuing to study Korean together in our group sessions!