This semester, my goal was basically to expand on what I started last semester. My initial goal was to expand on my Korean skills particularly involving writing and vocabulary in general, as well as becoming more comfortable speaking Korean. In the past year, I feel that I am definitely more comfortable speaking Korean. When I first started, my confidence in Korean was very low, and would always speak it with hesitation and at a low volume, and I only used it when I absolutely had to. However, by practicing it on a very regular basis, I have become much more comfortable speaking it, and feel that it will continue to improve as I practice after graduation. One of the biggest goals I had was to expand on my vocabulary, and improve on my writing skills. I've always had a much harder time reading things like news articles because I didn't know much of the vocabulary. However, this semester, I spent a lot of time reading news articles and translating them with my language partner. I feel like this had a great impact on my vocabulary as I was able to have regular practice with these more difficult words.
In addition, I wanted to work on improving my writing skills. A lot of my difficulty in writing came with the fact that I didn't know a lot of vocabulary. It was even more difficult to come up with the vocabulary myself than to just know its definition. However, throughout this semester I spent some time on writing on different topics with my language partner, as well as just memorizing vocabulary on a flash card. I think this helped a lot, and my writing skills have improved from how it was originally when I started last spring.
In terms of culture, I thought that I already had a lot of knowledge in Korean culture since I grew up there. However, through learning more about it, I was able to see that there were a lot of aspects I did not know. Even in topics which I did know about, I was about to expand my knowledge on it. For example, I learned more about Korean food especially Korean fusion and its impact on Koreans who live in foreign countries, the drinking culture, as well as the process to become an "idol" in Korea. These were all really interesting and I feel that I have a more well rounded knowledge on Korea as a whole.
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