Week 1: Assessment and goals for the semester:
According to the Levels of competence and LinguaFolio document, I am a novice learner at the beginning level of one. I am able to understand familiar words and very basic phrases concerning my family, my immediate surroundings and myself when people speak slowly and clearly. The korean language is spoken very fast so in order for me to pick up on familiar phrases and words, I need to listen very carefully to the people talking. I can recognize all the characters that are used most often to read sentences slowly. I have an understanding for the basic structures of simple sentences. I can ask and answer simple questions with a little help (some in formal and some in informal). I can also text my partner about the times we can meet and what day is good for us.
This semester I plan on focusing more on grammar so I can try to formulate sentences correctly, start to learn to conjugate simple verbs, and learn negation. I will also focus on listening to dialogues to better my pronunciation skills and learn to distinguish words from one another. My main focus will be on grammar and new vocabulary.
Week 2: First Cultural Post: What are your cultural learning goals for this semester?
I am interested in learning more about the concept of beauty and how everyone perceives it as a society. Beauty seems to be a hot topic because of the number of plastic surgeries performed annually in order to fit in to the ideal image of beauty as described by Koreans. Just from watching Korean dramas, I know that men and women both wear make-up. I think I will find interesting reads on this topic so I would like to explore more throughout to semester to prepare for my cultural project presentation. I hope to learn why and how the idea of beauty came about and why it is important for them to feel the need to get plastic surgeries.
Week 3: First bi-weekly post
My partner and I met for the first time during the third week of classes. During our session, we reviewed what we learned from the last semester since it's been a while since we last met up. The task for this week was to rehearse and review the important lessons from last semester so I can be ready to learn new tasks for future sessions. What I hoped to accomplish during out two hour meeting was to revive and pull out old information and vocabularies I've learned previously. We achieved this task by going through my notebook with every lesson in it. I read a few things to her and listened to her speak in Korean to see if I was familiar with the words in the sentences. This seemed to be effective because old knowledge came back to me slowly and I was able to recognize most things. I will build on to what I already learned by practicing my future tasks and by trying to use it everyday.
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