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The week before Thanksgiving, we practiced 대화 (conversation) in Korean. There are three scenes in total. For each scene, we first each read a line, identify the words we don’t know, and then figured out the meaning of the sentence with Jenna. After that, we each played as a character and had a conversation. I learned how to ask a friend to hang out, say I can’t make it and suggest another date, and set a place to meet. I also practiced ordering food in Korean as well as movie tickets. It was a fun class because when we could have more interesting conversations in Korean.

We didn’t have class this week because of the Thanksgiving break.

For my cultural artifact, I watched the Korean weather forecast on YouTube. The forecast is from today, December 1st to the end of the week (December 8th). Currently, it is raining in South Korea and will soon turn into snow/slush mix. While I was watching, I noticed that Korea uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. It was weird seeing single digits like 3 or 4 degrees. Jenna has taught me before about Korean temperature vocabulary. I saw the words for max or min temperature in the video when referring to the highest and lowest temperature it will reach during the day. I also saw the different days of the week and Jenna taught me the days of the week in Korean a couple weeks back. 

In my opinion, I found it pretty hard to keep track of all the words and understand all the words she was saying. But I found that I could read a lot of the words written on the video such as the days of the week, max and min temperatures, and other topics and quick facts. It was interesting to see how simple and serious Korean weather forecasts are when compared to American news stations, where it is more loose and playful. The top right has the time, which starts at 18:49 which is equivalent to 6:49PM. Korea uses military time.

There were many phrases that I still didn’t understand, but I was able to slow down the speed of the video and search up the meaning of the sentences I didn’t understand by playing it on voice notebook. Another thing I found was that the accent of the news broadcaster was very different than how Jenna and I normally talked. The news woman talked in more formal language with a different accent I was not familiar in. 

The video also talks about how the rain will stop at night. When referring to the amount of precipitation, they used cm instead of inches. It is also interesting to note that they don’t report the weather anything above the North Korea/South Korea border. The weather is supposed to decrease over the next week. When I first saw the video, it was hard to understand the whole video, but after watching it a couple times, I was able to pick up many phrases in Korean and understand what she was saying. After transcribing it on voice notebook, I still don’t know what some words and phrases mean, but I will make sure to ask Jenna this week in class about what it means. I think learning vocabulary about Korean weather is a great way of expanding my vocabulary, since weather can be used as small talk with almost anyone during a conversation. The topic of weather is also a great way of expanding my dictionary of words like maximum, minimum, temperature, hot, cold, warm, rain, water, wet, etc. 

I will continue to watch Korean news not only about weather but also about global and current news in order to further expand my Korean vocabulary. I actually enjoyed transcribing words and taking time to understand it. I now feel confident in my ability of listening to fluent Korean speakers and understanding them. https://youtu.be/yIgb3Rleews

This semester, I have become a much better Korean speaker and writer. My student teacher has helped me so much in directing me towards the right direction. Jenna has guided me with topics I should practice and focus on in order to improve my Korean reading and writing. I have gained many insights about myself as a language learner and cultural explorer. On the language learning side, I have learned that I am a really tactile learner, as in I learn really well through hands on activities. My favorite parts of the lesson with Jenna would be where I actively read and write Korean myself instead of Jenna teaching me. On the cultural side, I have learned about myself as an explorer, especially on the final cultural presentation on music. Just like myself as a language learner, I found out that I am a active learner. Listening to Korean music and watching the music videos were the most exciting parts of the final cultural presentation. I think the most difficult part about learning Korean reading and writing was becoming more efficient. I was confident at identifying words and phrases, but was not as fast as I wished I could. I found through weeks of learning, that setting my own time to practice reading and writing was the best way to boost my efficiency. It was hard at first for sure, but now I am reading and writing Korean at a much more faster pace than before. I have enjoyed many parts of this semester. I loved writing random Korean sentences and reading random Korean show subtitles. I have also began to text in Korean to my parents and they have been impressed with my improvement with Korean. They correct me when I misspell a word and correct my grammar. I will continue to practice reading and writing Korean by reading articles and watching Korean shows. I will also continue to text my parents in Korean and occasionally listen to Korean radio shows. 

During class, I think the most useful activity/topics we have learned is the IPA transcription of phonetic sounds. It has helped me articulate and pronounce Korean characters with more ease. For the readings, Crystal D.’s papers about how the brain processes language was the most useful article from this semester. It helped me understand how my brain works and how it processes new sounds, languages, and words. I hope to learn more about the biology/psychology behind the human brain in the future. Because I am a chemistry major, I have an interest in the science of things. I also hope to learn more about the deeper cultural ideals of Korean. Although I have learned a lot about Korean culture, such as music and history, I hope to learn more about the country’s traditions and ideals. 

In conclusion, I have learned so much about myself as a learner. Practicing Korean has been something that I really enjoyed doing during my free time. Being able to achieve my goals have been exciting and I hope to continue to set new goals in learning Korean next semester and become more efficient in writing and reading. 

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Parasite, a Korean film directed by Joon-Ho Bong, depicts the life of an impoverished Korean family and its unethical efforts to climb the socio-economic ladder. The drama begins when Ki-Woo, the son of the Kim family, is hired to teach English to the Park family’s daughter. Ki-Woo is not qualified whatsoever to teach as he never attended college, but he is hired anyways due to an excellent recommendation by his friend, who was the previous English teacher. After Ki-Woo’s first lesson, he recommends his own sister to be an art teacher for the Park family’s son. This pattern of recommendation is repeated discreetly until the entirety of the Kim family is employed by the rich Park family. Throughout the film, the employed family discreetly works for the wealthy household during the day, while enjoying their unethically earned salary at night.

            This film exaggerates the struggles of an impoverished family in Korea, but its point is not to create an accurate depiction. Rather, it tries to highlight a deep and ongoing chasm between the working and wealthy class. The film not only depicts the marginalization of the working class, but the loss of their dignity and voice to change the community around them. For example, the Park family commands sets strong and excessive boundaries when the workers don’t perform their duties properly. The film further highlights the chasm by juxtaposing vocations that are of different social classes. For instance, Ki-Taek, the head of the Kim family, is constantly seen driving Mr. Park, the head of the Park family and CEO of his own successful company. While Mr. Park seems to respect and admire Ki-Taek on the outside, he secretly talks about Ki-Taek’s disgusting scent, describing it as a “special subway smell”.

            After watching this film, I found a new interest in the division of classes in South Korea. After further research, I learned that more than 100,000 taxi drivers and chauffeurs are considered laborers rather than contract workers, meaning that their employment status can be hired and terminated at the will of companies that manage these drivers. Drivers are also unable to unionize, preventing them from objecting to any unfair rules passed by their companies. To make matters worse, these drivers are paid less than $1,750 even after being on-call for 24 hours. It’s unfortunate that individuals with low-paying jobs are unable to change careers due to South Korea’s rigid and ineffective education and labor system.

            I’m very curious about the steps that the South Korean government is taking to relieve the pressure from the working-class. In 2018, 60 percent of the 100,000 drivers in Korea protested against the rise of ridesharing apps in South Korea. Many of the drivers expressed extreme discontent because of the ridesharing apps’ abilities to eliminate the taxi industry entirely. The government responded by banning ridesharing apps and forced app developers to connect their apps to pre-existing yellow cabs. More research is necessary, but I think South Korea is taking the right steps to ensure the survival of an industry that mostly employs the impoverished working class.

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I am excited to study at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea next semester! Yonsei University was established by American missionaries in 1885, making it one of the oldest universities in Korea. It is also one of the top universities in South Korea and Asia. Most students enrolled at Yonsei University were in the top 1% of their high school graduating class.

Yonsei University is different than UR in several ways. First, it has over 36,000 students and three campuses, which is much larger than the 3,000 undergraduate students at UR. Secondly, it is more competitive. Yonsei University is one of Korea’s SKY universities (Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University). These three universities are the most prestigious universities in Korea.

I am particularly excited to study Korean at Yonsei because I would like to learn Korean in a formal classroom setting. I am also looking forward to learning in a different kind of classroom setting. At UR, most of the classes are discussion-based. At Yonsei, many of the classes are lecture-style. I want to experience not only a different culture and society, but a different educational setting as well.

There is a difference between how I assume Yonsei University is regarded in Korea and the stories that I have heard from UR students who have studied abroad. Almost all of the students from UR who have studied abroad have told me that there is more school work at UR. At their abroad institutions, their final grades have comprised mostly on their final exam or one paper. I expect there to be less school work throughout my semester at Yonsei than a regular semester at UR. A factor that will contribute to this is that I will have fewer obligations while abroad. I hope to have less school work throughout my semester abroad so that I can travel and truly enjoy the unique culture.

Course registration for Yonsei is in January/February, so I won’t know which classes are being offered next semester until then. In previous semesters, there were classes offered for specifically exchange students. Some that look particularly interesting to me are Korean Popular Culture and Korean Wave, Korean Traditional Music and Culture, Korean Food and Culture, and Understanding K-Pop. There were also classes relating to my leadership major, including Law and Justice, Early Modern Korea and its Historical Sites in Seoul, Business and Society, and Korea-US Relations. Korea is a very popular place to study abroad, largely due to the presence of Korean culture in mainstream media. For this reason, many students who are interested in Korean popular culture study abroad in Korea.

My main purpose for studying at Yonsei University next semester is to explore my Korean heritage, which is an aspect of my identity that I have never truly learned about before. I have never been to Korea, but I have always wanted to visit. Additionally, I want to hear my grandmother’s stories from her life in Korea and coming to the United States. These stories are part of my history too.

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When I first decided that I wanted to learn Korean, I wanted to focus on learning basic conversational phrases. My emphasis was also on verbal communication. After 3 months of studying Korean (under several different teachers), I have discovered that my focus has changed. The majority of my time and effort has gone into learning the Korean alphabet. This is very important because it is the foundation for all written Korean. Furthermore, it will help me achieve my future language goals easier. Additionally, I have been learning the technical foundations of the Korean language, rather than just memorizing vocabulary. This also makes sense to me, because it will allow me to really understand the language so that I can use it however I need to. I do not want to be in a position in which I know a lot of vocabulary words and phrases, but do not know how to adapt them to use in different situations. Overall, my process of learning a new language can be illustrated with an exponential graph. The beginning (which is where I am now) is slow and steady, with not much quick progress. However, I am laying the foundation for me to hopefully advance faster.

As I finish this semester with my current language partners, I hope to continue to learn how the Korean language is structured and how it functions. I think it is better to learn grammar with a knowledgeable teacher who can explain it to me. I think that grammar is the most difficult aspect of learning any new language. I actually prefer studying vocabulary because it is easier for me to memorize words than understand new concepts. I can study vocabulary on my own anytime, but I cannot understand new grammatical concepts on my own. For this reason, I will learn the more difficult concepts from my language partners and focus on expanding my vocabulary after the semester ends.

Over Thanksgiving break, I have been enjoying speaking Korean with my family members. My grandmother is pleased that I am learning Korean and is eager to help me in my studies. She is helpful in correcting my pronunciation and teaching me more simple phrases. She is also great to practice with because she is incredibly patient and enthusiastic.

I am really trying to speak Korean whenever I can, because only practice will help me improve in my speaking and listening skills. Jenna told me that students in Korea are very good at reading and writing in English, but they are not as good at speaking and listening. This is because they have to study English in school, but they do not get much practice verbally using the language. I hope to be able to speak and listen in Korean in particular because I predict that I will be speaking and listening in Korean more often than I will be reading and writing. However, I am realizing more and more that the different skills are intertwined, especially with a language that has an alphabet that is new to me.

This time we focussed on understanding the Korean honorifics system. 

I learned that if we take a verb in its standard form and either add suffix -아요 to it if it ends with vowels ㅗ or ㅏ, or add suffix -어요 to it if it doesn’t end with these vowels, it results in a conjugation of the verb that can be used in polite informal speech. For example, the verb 보다 (bhoda, meaning to see) would be 보다 + -아요 = 봐요 in informal polite speech. 

If we take a verb in its standard form and either add suffix -습니다 to it if it ends in a vowel, or add suffix -읍니다 to it if it ends in a consonant, it results in a conjugation of the verb that can be used in polite formal speech to formally declare the topic of the sentence to the listener. For example, the verb 보다 would become 보다 + -습니다 = 보십니다. 

If we take a verb in its standard form and either add infix - 으시- it if it ends in a vowel, or add infix -시- to it if it ends in a consonant, it results in a conjugation of the verb that can be used in polite formal speech to emphasize on respect for the subject of the sentence. For example, the verb 보다 would become 보다 + -시- = 보시다.

If we take a verb in its standard form and add various combinations of the above endings to it to form another conjugation, it can increase the degree of respect and/or politeness implied by using that conjugation in speech. For example, the verb 보다 can become 보다 + -시- + 어요 = 보세요 which implies a higher degree of respect than 봐요 and 보시다. 

I also learned that if I want to refer to someone respectfully then I can either add the prefix 씨- or add the suffix -님. 

Korea has a very complicated honorifics system. This system has a lot of different terms for addressing someone respectfully, and there also exist multi-tiered speech levels which communicate different degrees of respect. This was relatively a little easier for me to wrap my head around because both Telugu and Hindi have honorific systems similar to that of Korean; however, Korean’s honorifics system is a lot broader so learning it and remembering it is much tougher. I am aware that it is extremely important to learn this though because in Korean culture there is a clear hierarchy where people older than oneself, people holding a higher social rank than oneself, and people working in more reputable professions than oneself are clearly meant to be held in higher honor than oneself. This hierarchy is held in very high regard and it is frowned upon when people don’t follow it while interacting with others. Hence, to make sure that I fully embrace Korean culture and definitely do not offend anyone I will dedicate my time and energy to learning this.

Just for fun: I watch a lot of BTS videos so when we started talking about honorifics in class I remembered a scene (shots included below) from one of their videos when one of the members addresses one of the older members without using honorifics.

My target language is Korean. The first step would be to go to Korea, assuming that my grant is enough. Learning while living in the culture and being engulfed by the language is, according to me, the best way to start studying a language. Then, I’d start looking into the language by following the diagram in Aitchison’s linguistics (given below) going from the inner most circle to the outer most circle. 

So, in order, I would look into the phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the Korean language, and then I’d look into the language from different perspectives by approaching it from various disciplines. In class we've looked into phonetics, phonology, morphology, and a bit of syntax, so all I need is a grant and I can start the research (I'm joking of course, but I am extremely glad that we delved deeper into some of the fundamental structural components of a language in class).

Korea has a very complicated honorifics system. In the English language, if you want to show respect to the person you’re interacting with or to the person you’re referring to in your sentence, you’d show respect by adding a Ms./Mr./Dr. or sir/madam before their name, or you’d refer to them by using their full name. This is probably the most complicated that the English honorifics system can get. However, in Korean culture people never really use full names while conversing, instead the Korean language has a complicated honorifics system. This system not only a lot of different terms for addressing someone respectfully, but there also exist multi-tiered speech levels which communicate different degrees of respect; for example different conjugations of a verb can imply different levels of respect.The thing that further complicates this is that in Korean culture there is a clear hierarchy where people older than oneself, people holding a higher social rank than oneself, and people working in more reputable professions than oneself are clearly meant to be held in higher honor than oneself. This hierarchy is held in very high regard and it is frowned upon when people don’t follow it while interacting with others. This is the reason why when people who are unfamiliar with the Korean culture want to learn Korean, they should learn the conjugations of words that imply high respect and politeness in order to make sure that they don’t offend anyone who embraces the Korean culture.

If I were to simplify the Korean honorifics system, I’d say that it has three main levels informal, standard, and formal. These can further be divided into multiple levels of respect and politeness, but this is the big umbrella. The formal is to show respect, the standard is for everyday speech, and the informal is for close relationships. For example, a student would talk to their upperclassman using formal speech because the upperclassman is older and more knowledgeable than the student; a person would talk to their classmates using standard speech; a daughter could talk to her mother using informal speech because even though the mother is older and definitely held with higher regard than the daughter, they probably share a close relationship so they can use informal speech with each other. This helps people who aren’t familiar with the Korean culture get a good broader picture of the situation. For me, understanding the Korean honorifics system was pretty simple because both Telugu and Hindi (Telugu more so than Hindi) also have similar honorifics systems where different terms can be used for addressing people politely and imply higher regard and different conjugations of verbs can imply different levels of politeness and respect. However, unlike Korean which has multi-tiered levels of speech, Telugu only has three main ones. Here’s an example that offers a glimpse into the levels of speech in Korean:

The standard form of a verb meaning ‘to see’ is 보다 and the words given below are all conjugations of the same word but they’re in ascending order of formality and politeness.

봐요, 보다, 보시다, 보세요, 보십니다

The words above don’t include many conjugations for informal speech (like the one used between close friends) because for a beginner, such as myself, Prof. Sumi Kim made sure to focus on formal speech. Yet there’s already 3 levels of formal speech which can give you an idea of how complicated the Korean honorifics system can get.

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These two weeks, I focussed on improving my conversational Korean. I am a college student and these few weeks have been stressful for everyone because we all had tests in out current classes and we also had registration for next semester. Hence, I worked with my language partner to learn sentences which are fitting for a college student at this time in the semester so that I could use them to have regular conversations with my friends in Korean. These are the main sentences that I learned -

안녕하세요, 교수님! (Hello, professor!)

몇학년이에요? (What grade (year in college) are you in?)

나는 이 학년입니다. (I’m in the 2nd grade (year).)

전공이 뭐에요? (What’s your major?)

오늘 수업 몇개 있어요? (How many classes do you have today?)

오늘 수업 두개 있어요. (I have 2 classes today.)

어제 과제하느라 잠을 못잤어요. (I was doing homework last night so I couldn’t sleep.)

곧 시험기간이에요? (Is it going to be exam season soon?)

수강신청 잘했어? (Did registration go well?) 

시험 어땠어? 잘봤어? (How was the exam? Did you do well?)

응! 잘봤어 / 아니 잘 못봤어 (Yes I did / No I couldn’t)

Funnily enough, 어제 과제하느라 잠을 못잤어요 has been one of my most used sentences, because like most college students I tend to procrastinate my work and cram everything in the last minute. Also, because most college students procrastinate work sometimes or tend to work really hard before their tests, everyone I said this to found the statement extremely relatable. They would laugh when they heard me say this sentence and my story behind it and then they would tell me about how they too did not sleep for various reasons. They told me their reasons in Korean, and they were very patient with me when I’d ask them to explain some words that they used that I didn’t know or didn’t immediately understand. This simple process of sharing our familiar struggles with each other firstly helped me learn a lot of new vocabulary which people my age use with each other in everyday life, and secondly helped me and people who are native Korean speakers connect with each other at a level beyond just basic greetings.

In order to help improve my conversational Korean even more I realised that I need to understand how people interact with each other in Korean in their everyday lives. K-dramas come pretty close to emulating such interactions and a lot of them are centered around college students such as myself. So, I have also been watching the K-drama Boys with Flowers over the past few weeks and I finally finished it. I learned a lot of useful words and phrase from it. I also learned how the words and phrases are used differently depending on the social situation and also how saying them in different tones or with a different body language can cause slight changes in their meanings. Listed here are some of the words and phrases that I learned:

준비 (ready) , 그래 (really) , 알았어 (got it), 선배 (senpai), 오빠 (female’s older brother), 아빠 (dad), 엄마 (mom), 할아버지 (grandfather), 가자 (let’s go), 가지 마 (don’t go),  빨리빨리 (hurry up), 걱정 말아 (don’t worry)

For your amusement: This earth used to be inhabited by dinosaurs. Then, a big rock came falling from the sky. “Oh no!” said the dinosaurs. And so they went extinct. Just like the languages.

For real: Linguist K. David Harrison talks about the death of a language in his interview. He mentions how a language goes extinct usually when there is no person/community left that speaks the language. This can result in a loss of a lot of valuable knowledge and culture which was only known to the speakers of the language. 

To paraphrase K. David Harrison's words from the interview, most people believe that if something exists, then science knows about it, but how this is actually not true. There are many indigenous communities that closely interact with the nature around them and know a lot more about the animals and plants than science does because they are an integral part of the community’s everyday life. So, when the language of an indigenous community goes extinct, so do their classifications of the nature around them, and this results in a lot of undiscovered knowledge that only remained undiscovered because no one dived deeper into the language and the community. This is only one aspect of how the death of a language could have a negative effect on the entirety of humankind.

However, a dead language can definitely be brought back to life. Consider Hebrew for example, it was a dead language for about a century and people still managed to revive it. More and more people are understanding the importance of preserving languages, and a lot of institutions are dedicating their resources to documenting indigenous languages. For example the SOAS University of London has an Endangered Language Documentation Programme whose key focus is on trying to delve deeper into and helping document endangered languages and make them freely available to everyone.

So far I’ve learned Hangul and I can read Korean now, and I’ve expanded my vocabulary quite a bit in the basic words realm. After reading H.D. Brown’s work, I realized that my current learning plan places emphasis on organizational competence and sociolinguistic competence. I think these are important parts of communicative competence so my learning plan seems good. However, a key aspect of communicative competence that I haven’t given a lot of importance to is strategic competence. While building up my organizational competence and sociolinguistic competence is important, it is also very slow, and I need to keep practicing the language everyday without knowing everything about this. This requires strategic competence. Knowing how I can use the words I currently know to convey a message about something outside my vocabulary is a skill that I need to develop and it falls under strategic competence. I’m going to try to modify my learning plan a bit to include goals that advance my strategic competence.

Korean food is a big part of Korean culture, and another big part of Korean culture is behaviour. In Korea a lot of importance is placed on how a person looks, acts, and talks. In order to successfully navigate through or embrace Korean culture it is important to inculcate behaviour that is perceived as good within the culture. So, I decided to delve deeper into good table manners in Korean culture, how exactly a typical Korean meal looks, and how one should eat it. 

A typical Korean meal consists of the rice and, as in most Asian countries, it is considered the hero of a meal and all other dishes are served as accompaniments to the rice. A bowl of rice is usually served with a stew or soup on the side. Note that it is crucial to make sure that the rice is always to the left of the stew/soup. Apparently the rice bowl is only to the right of the soup to signify someone’s death. There are usually a bunch of side dishes that are served alongside the rice and the stew/soup which are referred to as banchan. They’re there to offer some variety and they consist of dishes like kimchi (spicy pickled vegetables), gyeran mari (rolled omelette), and namul (seasoned vegetable dish). Along with this, a meaty side dish can be served to be had with the rice or with ssam. Ssam is a dish where meats and other sides are wrapped with leafy vegetables like lettuce or cabbage. This is usually had in one bite so it is very important to ration your ssam such that you can eat it all in one bite. 

The cutlery to eat all the delicious food mentioned above consists of metal chopsticks and a metal spoon. The fascinating thing is that Korean chopsticks are flat! It is important to note that unlike cultures in Japan where it is considered normal to pick up your bowl or rice and eat it, in Korean it is considered rude to lift up any bowl while eating. Hence, the spoon is usually used to eat rice. It is also important to note that it is considered rude to use both the spoon and the chopsticks at the same time. So, while it may seem reasonable to use both the spoon and chopsticks while eating the stew, apparently one should remember to not do it!

Other rules for proper supper table etiquette include maintaining good posture while eating, chewing quietly, and not showing the food in your mouth. Also, because Korean culture places a lot of importance on honoring your elders, it is essential for younger people to not pick up their cutlery until their elders have picked up theirs, and the younger people should only leave the table after their elders do.

This is all the information that I found through my search through the internet. Truth is, I never actually had Korean food in a Korean household or any other traditional Korean settings, but if the opportunity presents itself, I will gladly accept it and try to make sure that I display good table manners.

There is a consensus among linguists that Korean is a member of the Altaic family of languages, which originated in northern Asia and includes the Mongol, Turkic, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic (Manchu) languages. 

Korean was originally written using hanja (Chinese characters), but now it is written in Hangul (Korean alphabet). Although Korean and Chinese are not related in terms of grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is Sino-Korean i.e. derived from Chinese loanwords. Just to give an idea, there’s an idiom in Korean that goes 공자 앞에서 문자 쓴다 which literally translates to writing hanja in from of Confucius (a Chinese philosopher), and it is used to refer to someone who is arrogant enough to try and teach an expert how to deal with their area of expertise.

Korea and Japan also have very similar grammatical structures, and this could’ve been due to the imperial Japanese rule over Korea. Just to give an idea, the honorific term 각하 (gakha) is reserved for high-ranking government officials, including the president; it is equivalent to His Excellency. This honorific is no longer used in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) nowadays as it serves as an unpleasant reminder of the Japanese rule.

The Korean entertainment industry has always been fascinating to me. The past few years I’ve mainly been interested in Korean pop culture revolving around idols and fashion. In general, I think that it takes a certain level of mastery of a language to be able to understand songs written in that language, because singers have an artistic license to stray from grammatical rules and they might use subtle metaphor to refer to the theme of the song which can easily get very complicated to understand–especially for someone who is just starting to learn the language. Someday I want to be able to listen to a Korean pop song and fully understand it on my own. For now, I just listen to K-pop songs as a source of entertainment and as a source for learning new vocabulary. To reach the level of aforementioned mastery, I’ll start by working on expanding my vocabulary and by spending time on understanding the fundamentals of Korean grammar.

In Atchison’s linguistics, he provides a diagram to show the range that linguistics covers. It has phonetics in the center, surrounded by phonology, then syntax, then semantics, then pragmatics, and then various fields of study centred in linguistics. Similarly in the structure of language, David Crystal divides language into disciplines—pronunciation, grammar, and meaning—which have their own sub-disciplines and some variations of approach like sociolinguistic, historical, and psycholinguistic. After reading these texts I’ve come to understand that I would not want to learn a language by perfecting the inner circle before moving onto the outer one in Atchison’s linguistics, or by perfecting one discipline before moving onto the next in David Crystal’s structure of language. Instead, I’d want to work on each of the circles/ disciplines simultaneously as I keep learning. What I mean to say is that I do not want to just perfect my pronunciation before learning about grammar, I want to learn common phrases and words and dive into each one of them by examining their structure in the order of moving from inside out in Atchison’s analysis and from right-to-left in David Crystal’s analysis. I prefer learning ‘안녕하세요’ along side learning Hangul, pronunciations, and the correct way to use it, over just working on Hangul till I perfect it. 

Similarly, I think that it would be best to analyse what I learn in a historical, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approach to get a holistic understanding of the language.I personally prefer diving deeper into the sociolinguistic approach because I find this approach to be the most exciting in the way that it relates how different social situations influence language which essentially speaks to the culture of the native speakers of the language, and that is something I’m really interested in learning about.