During last Friday's meeting with my language partner, he showed me a news article on naver, a popular Korean search portal, about some guy's altercation with the police (I don't have the exact link to the story). I read the article aloud so that he can gauge my reading level. I mainly had trouble pronouncing words that I hardly ever come across since my mouth is unaccustomed to shaping them. Reading an article like this on The Korea Times, about a Japanese scholar's criticism of Japan's claim to S. Korea's islets, is difficult because I may understand the barebones gist of a sentence but lack many important details. (That Korea Times article has a side-by-side translation so I see what I'm missing.) Written Korean is also much more formal than daily speech, which is something I'm more used to, having grown up trying to speak to my grandmother.
In terms of new words that I've learned, I've been using the Korean widget on my ning page. It gives a word of the day along with an example sentence and I would write it in my notebook. I have to review it daily because the vocab is learned in isolation; in other words, I'm not encountering these words through shows or music and I have to work harder to put them into my long-term memory. I've also been watching an episode or two of a Korean drama a week as part of my meeting with my language partner and listening to K-Pop on my iPod as a supplement for some 'ear-training.' I have lowered my expectations since the beginning of the semester, though. As long as I feel more comfortable speaking it by the semester's end, I will consider this a success.
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