This month, I read episodes of the webtoon that I chose, which is Park Eun Hyuk’s “Random chat” (랜덤채팅의 그녀!). 랜덤채팅의 그녀 is about Jun-woo, an outcast at his high school, who enjoys spending his time on his phone, randomly chatting with strangers. Almost every conversation is odd and meaningless until he talks with a girl who is his age. Because it’s a meaningless conversation, Jun-woo lies about his identity and says he is a lot older than he is. Coincidentally, he finds out that the girl is his classmate.
I chose this because it has a little bit of everything that I was looking for. It not only had an advanced vocabulary, but it also had the texting language in there. The plotline was very interesting and fun to read, so I am having a lot of fun reading this webtoon. For each episode I read, I write a detailed summary of what happened in the episode. I mainly focus on the plot and character development, and I send my summary to Rachel. Rachel then edits and corrects my grammar, spelling, and mistakes and answers any questions I wrote out for her. We then meet up and discuss my mistakes, and she teaches me how I could improve with the next summary and what I could fix.
One thing that Rachel noticed in my writing skills is that I have difficulty making my sentences flow and connect with each other. I tend to put a lot of declarative sentences one after the other, but when it is all put together, it can sound really choppy. I put Rachel’s suggestions into mind when writing, and I have been working on making my sentences flow more smoothly. Another issue is that I tend to go back and forth from present to past tense. She told me that since I am used to only speaking in Korean, I use both present and past tense in my writing. This is because when speaking, using both tenses usually makes sense and is easy to understand. However, when writing, I need to be more cautious about which tense to use in order for my summary to flow and make sense. The last issue I have to work on is using connecting sentences and clauses. This will also help me improve my writing to flow better in the future. Overall, my language partner told me that I have been doing well and am improving in terms of sentence flow.
Because this webtoon has texting language in it, I have been learning a lot about the texting style in Korean. I do not text anyone in Korean, so I have no idea what the slang is, and reading the text messages in this webtoon has been teaching me some common texting words. I was confused about what ㅉㅉ meant, and I learned that it is equivalent to English’s shaking my head (smh). I also learned that 에베베베 was onomatopoeic and it is just meaningless and random noise to text.
Overall, I have learned a lot and feel like my writing is improving more in the way that I hoped to improve it. I also really like how this webtoon is also teaching me the informal way of texting because I don’t want to sound too formal when I text my family or friends back in Korea. I am excited to continue reading this webtoon and writing summaries about it, which will help my writing and reading skills improve. I am also excited to go to a Korean restaurant with my language partner and put my Korean into use outside of talking with my parents and language partner.
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