With the shift to remote learning, and lesser meeting with Prof. Sumi Kim, I have been able to explore more resources and get creative with existing ones to make sure that I am on track in my language learning journey. This shift has finally pushed me to find a good way of practicing speaking and bettering my pronunciations.
I first started with rewatching the Korean drama that I enjoyed, Cheese in the Trap. This time when I saw it, I wasn’t as involved in the story as the first time because I knew what is going to happen now. So, this time I put all my focus on picking up the words that they were using. After every dialogue, almost every word, I tried to repeat the sentences that the actors were saying out loud and tried to make sure that I’m making it sound like they are. I paused frequently and made sure to try and grasp every sound and repeat it as is. Once I started getting the hang of just saying the words, I also tried putting my focus replicating the emotion that was behind it because there are a lot of context clues hidden in the way a sentence is said. A Korean drama was a good resource for doing this because the dialogues are very clear and easy to grasp and often have good grammar and well-formed sentences unlike everyday conversations that people have with each other.
After I got a good grasp of this, I wanted to make sure that the sounds that I’m am listening to and saying are actually correct. So, I turned to another source of entertaining for me: VLive. I absolutely love watching BTS’s VLive videos, so I turned on the Korean subtitle option, and started repeating after them by using the subtitles. I still had to pause frequently because I can’t read very fast, but this definitely helped improve my reading and speaking. BTS members’ conversations with each other are more casual, which is good for improving my conversational Korean. This was actually surprisingly really helpful while being super fun at the same time.
The biggest challenge to overcome with this was not needing to know what everything I’m hearing and saying means. At first, I wasted a lot of time pausing and looking up the meanings of every word, and eventually I realised how time consuming this was, and how this was really not helping at all because I often forgot all the words I looked up because I was just taking in so much information without repetition. I eventually stopped doing this and simply started speaking without knowing what I was saying, but this helped a lot! While I was doing this, I was actually even able to pick up some words that were being frequently used in the show/video and their meanings registered well too.
To take this a step further, I also started using voicenotebook. I read the subtitles to the videos out loud and voicenotebook would record what I am saying and based on what it would record which was fairly accurate, I could see which pronunciations I’m getting right and which ones I’m getting wrong. Some days when I didn’t feel like watching videos, I would just open random Korean websites and read the contents into voicenotebook. I am really glad that I started using this strategy and I can clearly see an improvement in my pronunciation, reading, and confidence.
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