The past two weeks, I have been watching more news clips as well as reading news articles. For the most part, we have been sticking with more lifestyle news articles when it comes to reading because of my vocabulary skills. With lifestyle articles, it seems that there are still many words and grammar rules I don't know, but enough that I can get through it and ask questions. As we do every week, I read an with my language partner, one of them being an article about a popular outdoors market in Korea. It took some time to get through it due to the vocabulary (since I ask for its definition as I read), but I was eventually able to make sense of it. However, I feel that I did learn a lot of new words, and reading articles every week is definitely improving my vocabulary skills.
This article was also interesting because it gave me an insight into the Korean culture. This article discussed that there is an outdoor market in Seoul, which is becoming bigger and catching up with those in other Asian countries. While I've been to Korea within the past few years, I had never heard of this market. I know Korea is famous for overnight outdoors market with cheap clothes, but I was surprised to hear about a more trendy market. I am definitely planning to visit the next time I am in Korea.
In addition to reading the article, I also wrote a paragraph about what I've done in the past week. For me, the most difficult part of writing in Korean is coming up with descriptive words to write about, as well as the spelling. I think as my vocabulary expands, it will be easier for me to come up with words to write with. After I finished, my language partner noticed a few mistakes and corrected some of my spelling errors. I feel that I often resort to the same sentence structure and words I am familiar with when I am writing. One of my additional goals for the semester will be to extend out of my comfort zone and start using terms and structure I am not as familiar with.
We also talked about differences in Korean culture to US culture. For example, Koreans tend to believe that your blood type is a good indicator of your personality type. Since personally, I don't really believe in that your blood type or horoscope can tell the future, it is interesting to learn about it. Often in Korean TV shows, they will ask what their blood type is, and discuss how fitting it is with their personality. While I don't believe that there are only four (since there's 4 main types of blood) personalities, I do agree that it may be fun to connect personalities to blood types.
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