My main learning goal for this semester is to improve my reading skills, which I am working on with my learning partner through reading a book called “괭이부리말 아이들.” This title is hard to directly translate into English, but the first part is the name of a location and the second part is “children.” As a result, it can be roughly translated as “the children in this location.” This title may not be super descriptive, but this book details the stories of children who grew up in this poor community and how it affected them.
Through reading this book, I have been able to increase my vocabulary and learn about the history that has shaped South Korea. I learned about the extremely descriptive language used in Korean, for instance, they use “살아 숨쉬는 과거” to describe “alive and breathing history.” Instead of just saying “alive history,” they also described it as “breathing,” which relates to how they use a lot of metaphors to provide visual depictions of what they are trying to describe. Although metaphors are used in the U.S. as well, I noticed that this was a specific theme in the book that we are reading to allow the reader to truly feel as if they are apart of the story. Therefore, it was a little hard to understand certain parts of the book because of the complicated metaphors, but this is when my learning partner and I would stop to try and understand what I am confused about.
So far, this book is very interesting and I am excited to see how the story continues. It is a little on the sad side, but it allows for a good and meaningful story.
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