These past two weeks have been really rough weeks for everyone I am guessing. During spring break I was just relaxing and watching a Korean variety show called running man which I have started finding extremely entertaining, and then all of a sudden I had to put all my things in storage and fly back home within 24 hours. This has been a big shift for everyone and I wasn’t really able to find a good time to meet with Prof. Sumi Kim either. So, I was not able to learn a lot of new things these two weeks, but I did do something that I found really fun and useful. I tried to simulate random conversations in Korean in different settings with different people and see how to structure sentence and what kinds of words to use. A lot of Korean culture is based on your reputation and how you present yourself. So, with the different levels of politeness and respect and different words that convey them, it is very important to know how to communicate with different types of people, so this was a fun activity to do. It felt kind of like a matching game which also served as a great review of everything I have learned so far. These are some vague English translations of some of the hypothetical conversations that I came up with-
Conversation 1-
Setting: In a cafe alone
Waiter: Hello how are you?
Me: Hello, I’m good. How are you?
Waiter: I’m good. What can I get for you?
Me: Could I have 1 cup of oolong tea please, thank you.
Conversation 2-
Setting: Working on a group project
Older group mate 1: Which part of the project do you want to do?
Group mate 2: I think I would like to do <this>.
Me: I am pretty good with this, so I think I can work on this.
Older group mate 1: I think we should do it this way.
Me: That sounds like a good idea. What if we also added <this> perspective?
Group mate 2: Yeah we can look into that too.
Conversation 3-
Setting: Making plans to hangout with friends
Me: Hey guys! Do you have any plans for Thursday night?
Friend 1: No, have not come up with anything.
Me: We should do something together.
Friend 2: How about seeing the new movie that came out.
Friend 3: I was planning on checking out the new sushi place that opened downtown.
Friend 1: I already watched that movie and it wasn’t that great. I do like sushi though.
Friend 2: Let’s get sushi then.
Me: Sounds good what time should we meet?
Friend 3: How about 6pm?
Everyone: *agree*
Conversation 4-
Setting: Job interview
Me: Good afternoon, sir. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Interviewer: It is good to have you. Why do you want this position?
Me: *praises the company and the interviewer and mentioned how I want to be a part of it*
Along with having fun with all these conversations and getting a few good laughs out of them too, another thing that made me really happy was an email I wrote to Prof. Kim Sumi. I asked how she has been, told her how I have been, and also mentioned a few good times to schedule a call. The part that made me super happy was that the entire email was only in Korean. I was really glad to see myself using the material that we covered about dates, days, and time.
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