After I decided to go to Korea for summer school, I began searching online about various aspects of Korean culture, including tips to live in Korea, commonly used Korean words, how to look for help, etc. Then, I realized that all these topics could be very useful learning-materials so that I added them into my learning plan.
I asked my language partner to teach me some applicable Korean. For example, I made an artifact with Azmain about getting directions. I imagined the situation of me getting lost in the downtown Seoul and hoping to get to Hanyang University, the place for my summer school. Also, we learned many vocabularies about places to go.
Also, I realized that knowing how to speak is totally different from knowing how to respond. Sometimes even if I could initiate the conversation, I could not completely understand their words and make appropriate response. One reason is that the speed of speaking would be a great challenge, and another reason is that in Korean, same idea can be expressed in several different ways. Therefore, when I was learning Korean from my language partner, I would ask for as many ways to say one thing as possible. Especially, there is a difference in formal and informal Korean. I enjoyed learning the different versions of speaking one point.
After learning a large amount of vocabularies, I tried to make up my own conversation with Azmain. However, due to the lack of grammar knowledge, it was pretty difficult for us to create complete sentences. Therefore, we decided to go beyond vocabularies, and start learning some common verbs and different tenses, including past tense, present tense and future tense. Interestingly, I saw a connection between grammar and characters’ construction. The structure of words may largely decide the usage of verb and tense. The memorization of such rules would be important.
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