Blogs

오늘 뭐했어?
벌금을 내다: to pay a fine
학교에서 말하기를 제 이력서가 적당하지 않다고 했어요.
검사하다: to check, examine
저번주
저번주 감기에 걸린거 때문에 어제 새벽 세시에 자려고 했는데 목이 아파서 잠이 안 왔어요.

친구를 기차역에 데려다 줄거예요 to drive a friend to the train station

제 친구가 저에게 문자한 이유는 저에게 라이드를 부탁하기 위한건줄 알았어요.
I knew that the reason my friend texted me was to ask for a ride
위하다 in that context emphasizes the purpose of asking, slightly formal

다 합해서 한 120불 정도 들었겟네요
저는 머리를 빨간색으로 염색했어요

사실은 RA미팅은 두시부터 네시까지예요. 중국어 수업하기 때문에 RA미팅에서 좀더 일찍 떠날거예요.

고려하다: to consider

교환학생으로 중국에 가다
교환학생으로 중국에 가면 머리를 blonde색으로 염색하려고 고려하고 있어요

~려고 결정(을)했어요

무엇을 했길래 이렇게 (verb)

그 경험 덕분에 thanks to, positive connotation of because of

예를 들면(어) for example

저는 몰에 가서 몇시간 동안 있을거예요

숙제 다 끝낸 경우에는

아직 무엇을 살지 모르겠어요

전공 major

속해있다 to belong to

부에 속해 있어요

초급, 중급, 고급

아님 : or when asking question

공부를 아주훨씬 일찍 시작할거예요

전공이 두개예요

전공 할라면 수업을 몇개 들어야 돼요?

할라면: if you do something

동기부여: motivation

제가 다음 학기에 한국어 공부를 계속할건지 안 할건지에 대해 너의 생각은 어때요?

대학생활

거시 경제: macroeconomics

밤을 세다: to stay up all night

추수감사절: Thanksgiving

시간이 걸리다 to take up time

화장하는데 얼마나 걸려요?
는데 doesn't mean even though here

무엇을 할 생각이에요?
무엇을 할 예정이에요? What do you plan to do?

평상시에: usually

일주일에 한 번 once a week

Why it’s important: If you want to work in Korea, have to have proper knowledge of the corporate culture you’d be entering and, in my opinion, use this knowledge to evaluate whether you would want to be a part of the Korean workforce or whether you would only want to be there as a tourist because of how strict Korean work culture is in comparison to American work culture. For those who are not learning Korean but want to work abroad, I feel learning about other countries’ work cultures can help highlight how different working in another country would be in general, and can give you insight into what you’d want to research before going abroad.

Caveat that as a foreigner there will be less pressure to fully commit to the norms of Korean culture, but to immerse yourself into the workforce, these norms would be expected of you. Also, my presentation really focuses on the more negative sides of Korean work culture, as that is what is most talked about.

Two main themes of Korean culture that heavily shape the workforce and expectations on employees: Korean obsession with image and hierarchy.

Hierarchy:

Superiors in the company have neat absolute power over lower people in the company. While every culture has these hierarchical structures, it’s much more rigid in Korea. Regarding language, formalities are written into the language, and you have to speak with more formalities added with superiors. Along with this, pronouns are not very common in Korea, and it’s impolite to call a superior by their name. Because of this, it’s much more common to refer to someone by their rank in relation to you, which, while ingrained in the language, also reinforces this hierarchy.

A lot of emphasis is placed on being close with your work group. One way this manifests itself when combined with the rigid hierarchy is that a lot of time is spent reporting to one’s superiors, to the point where a detrimental amount of time is spent simply talking about what you’ve done instead of actually doing work. At the same time, your colleagues become much closer to you than they might in the West, and you’re encouraged to have the mindset that you’re not just working to finish work, but also to help develop your company and therefore the entire country, making you more personally connected to your coworkers and work.

On top of this, a huge part of Korean work culture is eating dinner and drinking together. Often Korean employees are pressured to drink at work gatherings, and because superiors have so much power, it is considered impolite to refuse a drink when offered, even outside of the workplace. So often employees are pressured to drink more than what they’re comfortable with, and will then show up to work hungover.

Image:

A large part of corporate culture in any country is not just being busy, but also looking busy, and this is only magnified in Korea. Korean employees as a whole rank among the longest hours spent at work, but are also among the least productive workers in the OECD, the OECD being a group of developed countries promoting a market economy. It is considered important to work for long hours, often staying until your boss leaves the office. Rather than finishing your work quickly and most productively so as to finish everything before the workday is over, Koreans will often spread their work over the time that they plan to spend overtime in the office.

Along with that, education is seen as the most important aspect of working toward your career, like in many Asian countries. A downside to this is that Koreans often don’t have much work experience before they start their careers, as compared to Western countries that value internships and other experience. The education system is focused on testing rather than practical applications of education. A lot of education combined with mandatory military service for men also means many Koreans, particularly men, enter the workforce a lot later in life. So adapting to the workforce is comparatively more difficult.

A more direct manifestation of image, it is also common in corporate culture for employees to spend a significant amount of time making their presentations look neat rather than more simply presenting data, which can make them less productive.

Something I found interesting was one foreign worker’s description of Korean adults’ viewpoint of learning English. He says, “Most Koreans think that learning English is only useful as a means to communicate with foreign business partners, or for use in business emails. But they overlook the fact that a world of resources and knowledge is available to them via the Internet predominantly in English, and only a fraction of what is out there has been translated thus far into Korean. Foreign workers will always have the advantage of a simple Google search, which can provide hundreds to thousands of alternative information sources to what is available to a Korean limited to searching in Korean on a portal such as Naver.”

Historical aspect: this kind of hard work really helped Korea develop in the past few decades. After the Korean War, in 1960 the country had to work very hard to recover and very quickly developed a globally competitive economy. So it’s that kind of work ethic that helped them develop so rapidly, and is a source of pride for the country. But it just might not be as effective today.

24:50-26:00 http://kshowonline.com/kshow/2495-[engsub]-abnormal-summit-ep.6

35:40-35:50 http://kshowonline.com/kshow/2500-[engsub]-abnormal-summit-ep.11

http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/oped/opinions/3698-insider-perspective-seven-reasons-why-korea-has-worst-productivity-oecd

추수감사절에 무엇을 했나요?

choo-soo-kam-sa-jeol-e moo-eos-eul haet-na-yo?

What did you do for Thanksgiving? 

보스턴에 가서 저희 아빠를 방문했어요. 저는 추수감사절 저녁에 제 친구와 친구의 남자친구를 데려와서 다 함께 저녁을 먹었어요.

bo-seu-teon-e ga-seo jeo-heui a-bba-reul bang-moon-haess-eo-yo. jeo-neun choo-soo-kam-sa-jeol jeo-nyeok-e je chin-goo-wa chin-goo-eui nam-ja-chin-goo-reul de-ryeo-wa-seo da ham-gge jeo-nyeok-eul meok-eoss-eo-yo.

I went to Boston and visited my dad. On Thanksgiving evening I picked up my friend and her boyfriend and we all ate dinner together.

정말 친절하네요. 보스턴을 좋아하나요?

jeong-mal chin-jeol-ha-ne-yo. bo-seu-teon joh-a-ha-na-yo?

That's really nice of you. Do you like Boston?

별로 안 좋아해요. 보스턴보다 시카고 더 좋아해요.

byeol-lo an joh-a-hae-yo. bo-seu-teon-bo-da si-ka-go deo joh-a-hae-yo.

I really don't like it. I like Chicago better than Boston.

왜 보스턴을 안 좋아하나요?

wae bo-seu-teon-eul an joh-a-ha-na-yo?

Why don't you like Boston?

재미없거든요.

jae-mi-eob-geo-deun-yo.

It's not very interesting.

그렇군요.

keu-reoh-goon-yo.

Ah, I see.

Korean Artifact 4.m4a

This semester ended up being a test of how well I could learn Korean while having other college classes to worry about, including my Chinese class. In high school when I learned a lot of Korean vocabulary, I had less work and I still learned the most words during breaks from school. So it was hard to put aside time to focus on Korean and learn more on my own. I found it easiest to quickly review the vocabulary I know and to learn a quick lesson or two and then try to incorporate them into my lessons. Because my goal was to add a practical lens to my existing knowledge of Korean, I was really glad I was able to have conversations with Alvin. It was a casual way for me to build my speaking and sentence-forming skills. If I did not know how to say something--for example, if I knew the necessary vocabulary but did not know how to use it to form a cohesive sentence--I could ask him, and we would build the sentence for me to use and then continue the conversation. This way I got to learn not only how to connect verbs and begin forming more complex sentences, but also learned some basic phrases that I had overlooked when learning Korean on my own. Phrases that have to do with numbers, time, and duration of an event have always been hard for me, so we worked on those a lot and now I am a lot better at using those concepts in sentences and recognizing when someone is talking about them. I plan on continuing learning Korean, but I will try harder to learn sentences on my own and then have a concept prepared for my lessons instead of trying to maintain a free-flowing lesson.

I did not find a lot of the readings useful. Having taken a basic psychology class in high school, I already learned stuff like parts of the brain that have to do with learning and processing language. I feel that for a college class, we should be able to learn these concepts a bit more deeply instead of just learning about the existence of areas such as Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area. This does not mean that I want to have hours of reading, but I do feel that our readings could have gone deeper in describing these concepts to reflect college-level learning. I found the reading about bilinguals interesting, and I liked that you chose articles that gave two different viewpoints. I also liked discussing the article in class about the roots of language, and would like to learn more about it, although not necessarily for this class. 

I learned how to read Korean a few years ago while bored on summer vacation. I had been heavily invested in Korean pop culture for about half a year at that point, and decided to start learning the language on a whim so I could better understand songs and TV shows. I literally learned the alphabet in a morning, but it took me much longer to be able to accurately read Korean words because many symbols are very similar to one another. The easiest way for me to practice reading the alphabet was by learning to read my favorite singers' names, since they were already written in romanization and I could just match up the spelling of their name with the corresponding Korean letters. So if they were mentioned on a talk show, I could find their name in the on-screen captions, and if a fan held up a sign with their name during a performance, I could understand it. As I started learning Korean vocabulary, I stopped reading words letter by letter, and learned to better recognize the shape of the word, which improved my reading comprehension speed. In general, as my vocabulary base, knowledge of sentence structure, and knowledge of how Korean sounds "work" increased, I got better and better at reading Korean sentences, and now I can fluidly read Korean, even if I may not understand every word.

Writing Korean was very easy to learn, as the stroke order for Korean letters is very straightforward and logical. This actually helped me in writing Chinese, since the stroke order for Chinese characters follows the same logic--move from top to bottom and from left to right as you write. Since Korean syllables are housed in one "box," it's hard for me to write Korean quickly sometimes, since you have to know how each syllable is written before you start writing it. This is kind of hard to explain, but I'll give an example. Say we have the syllable 가 (ga) and the syllable 갈 (gal). In the latter, in order to accommodate the ㄹ at the bottom, you have to make the ㄱ and ㅏ smaller than in the first syllable. Keeping track of this while writing can be pretty difficult, but since that is the hardest part for me, it's hardly a complaint at all.

The hardest part about culture shock for me was that I only ever experienced it "in the moment": I didn't really have warning that it was going to happen, and for the most part I had to quickly adapt to that particular aspect of the culture at that time. For example, in China, if I wanted to use the only bathroom nearest to my classroom, I had to use a squat toilet. If I wanted to go off campus and get food at a nearby food street, I had to cross six lanes of busy traffic and erratic drivers. In general, if I traveled anywhere off campus, I was pushed into large crowds and had to quickly become part of the crowd so that I would not disrupt anybody or get jostled around myself. I experienced the most culture shock in China, whereas in Korea a combination of my being a tourist and not staying there for very long meant that I was able to get around more easily. With all the aspects of culture shock that can happen in daily life that the video talked about, I cannot imagine being a full-time student at a Chinese university or living in China or Korea, even if I were fluent in the languages. 

Regarding casual speech, while my language skills are not good enough that this became an issue, I saw a lot of foreigners here experience a bit of culture shock when Americans used slang they were not used to. For example, when I hosted a French exchange student in high school, I had to be very careful of how I spoke so that she would understand me. (She also spent an evening learning how American currency worked, as that was an aspect of culture shock for her that she had to confront when buying stuff.) Hanging out with another French exchange student, I asked her if she wanted to stay where we were or "head back" to her host's house. While a phrase like that is very normal in English, she couldn't understand it because it doesn't exactly translate into French, so we had trouble communicating until I realized what the problem was. Experiences like that have made me be more aware of how I speak with people who don't know English so that they experience less culture shock in our conversations, just as I was grateful to people in Asia who spoke to me more simply so that I could better understand them.

During this semester, learning Korean brought me a lot of interesting and meaningful activities on both language learning and culture development, and it still has a long way to go. My learning process with Alvin went well. Combining the thing I learned last semester and this semester, I can have a 5 minutes conversation with Korean in easy and simple sentence. For speaking, it is not a problem for me, but reading and writing is still my stumbling blocks. Putting different Hangul can get different characters and meanings. I am still trying to remember this different combination, because it is the foundation for me to read and write Korean character. By the end of this semester, I almost have done the tasks on my learning plan. For color and Country topic, I only learned some vocabularies. When I want to use these vocabularies, it is still difficult for me to make sentence. There are still unknown words and complicated grammar.

After this semester, I plan to keep learning Korean. In this winter break, my family in Beijing is going to host an exchange student from Korea, and she will live in my house for a month. She will go to Peking University for learning Chinese culture. It is a good chance for me to talk with her and have more deep cultural development. 

First, I have learned a great deal about myself as a language learner. I did not have a great grasp on the most effective ways I can pick up on a new language because I had never really tried before this course. Throughout the semester, I have come to learn that I retain a new language most effectively when I hear another person speaking. As an example, I found the Italian talk shows and soap operas to be incredibly useful during my language learning process. One aspect of language learning I found difficult is simply starting out on this journey. It is an extremely daunting task to begin to learn a language and I was somewhat intimidated when I began. As far learning a new culture, I loved studying Italian history and geography. I have always been fascinated with Italy and this course has given me the opportunity to explore a new part of the world. Another piece of information I gathered throughout this semester is the fact that I make far less judgments about different cultural practices. By listening to my classmates present on their countries, I began to realize how there is no right way to behave and that every country has their own unique way of going about life. I plan to continue my learning by practicing my Italian and learning new vocabulary in a more casual sense. Although I have already been to three major cities in Italy, I really want to visit the Amalfi Coast and several other parts of Italy, so I hope to travel back one day and implement some of what I have studied in this course.

I enjoyed many of the readings we have completed throughout the semester; however, two, in particular, really sparked my interest. The first reading I thoroughly enjoyed was the New York Times piece on languages becoming extinct and one tribe’s goal to keep their language alive. I found this article incredibly interesting because I had never heard of this kind of action occurring. Also, it is incredibly impressive for a few individuals to dedicate so much time to building out an entire online dictionary of their dying language. The second article I particularly enjoyed was on how the brain handles learning a language. Not only was this a relevant topic for our studies, but I found It riveting to learn about the ways in which the brain processes and retains new language it comes to learn. As I mentioned, I found the in-class presentations to be some of the most useful activities we did as a class because it gave me insight into cultures and practices I had never even considered. If I were to pick a topic to have learned more about in the class, it would be the subject of bilingualism. I found the class on bilingual speakers to be very interesting because I have always wanted to fully master my second language of Spanish. With more information and education on the process, I feel I could have a better plan of attack to go about doing this.  

Overall, I think I did pretty well in achieving my goals for the semester. However, I definitely think I have a long way to go before I get to a point where I want to be overall since that is not something that can be achieved in four short months. Throughout the semester, I definitely felt that my progress went pretty smoothly. Some of the stumbling blocks was that because one of my biggest goals was to be able to understand more from more technical things like news articles and broadcasts, it was frustrating that I could study a set of words, but then watch another broadcast and still be confused. I was able to overcome this by realizing that this is a big goal that will take some time, and learning to be more patient. By the end of the semester, while there are still many words which I still do not know, I have adapted to the fast speaking, and monotone, and have improved a little in my vocabulary. 

One of the most interesting things about taking this class and SDLC 105 was the knowledge in culture I was able to gain. Not only was I able to gain knowledge on Korean culture (and other countries' cultures) through being enrolled in SDLC 105, I was able to gain a lot of insight through speaking with my language partner. My opinion on Korean culture is outdated since I haven't lived there in over a decade, so it was interesting to see what my language partner had to say. 

After this semester, I definitely plan to keep learning Korean. I have yet to decide whether I will be enrolling in SDLC 111, but whether I decide to or not I will keep working in order to become completely "fluent." I will continue using resources like watching and reading the news in order to expand my vocabulary and speaking/writing skills. 

I'm not disppointed with where I am in Turkish- I know that it's always tedious and language learning is kind of slow at the beginning of starting a new language for me because I struggle to contextualize everything with the little information that I have. And not being in a formal classroom affects that a little bit. However, after a semester of exposure, I tend to do better and perform faster. Two of my goals from my learning plan were not met, but I did a learn a lot of other things in place of it. I also found that since I'm not applying the concepts as often as I should (in terms of speaking and practicing grammar), it's been harder to use them in context. For example, the suffix pronoun ordeal is very difficult for me and studying it doesn't help since I'm not applying it as much on the spot. I've made the most mistakes by forgetting to attach the suffix to the end of a word so my grammar in Turkish probably sounds like a caveman. Regardless, here are some new goals for next semester: SURVIVAL TURKISH- asking for directions, transportation, family, and immigration/refugee vocabulary (just to have that in my book for what I'm interested in). 

My goal for the week was to be able to watch a news clip and be able to summarize the general points of what it was saying. This has been difficult for me in the past generally because they speak in monotone, speak very quickly, and use difficult vocabulary. Therefore, I have been watching a few clips throughout this semester in order to reach my goal of being able to understand it by the end of the semester. During week 4, I watched this news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4ngrNN4pl8

To summarize, this clip was that eating fermented foods such as kimchi and Korean bean paste on a regular basis reduces your chances of getting dermatitis by 44%. They said that the bacteria formed insides fermented foods can either prevent dermatitis or help treat it if already diagnosed. 

Resources: 

Because I have a background in Korean, I couldn't really use any beginner textbooks, or any of the resources that many of the other students have used like Mango. Therefore as resources, I read articles online and watched the news and different video clips online. These were great practical ways to improve my Korean skills, and I feel like they were very beneficial to my learning. For example, just watching the news clip would result in having to look up at least 10 words. Throughout the semester, I feel like doing this definitely improved my vocabulary which was one of my main goals. In addition, when I read news articles, I would sometimes also write them out after summarizing them which improved spelling which is one of my biggest weaknesses in Korean.

Working with my language partner:

I thought it was really helpful to work with my language partner for several reasons. First was because meeting with him every week gave me weekly goals and kept me motivated. Second, it was great to have someone to speak back and forth with. One of my goals for the semester was to improve at and also feel more comfortable speaking Korean. Speaking with him every week gave me the opportunity to practice doing so while improving my vocabulary. I was also able to ask him how to say certain words when I couldn't think of it, or how to form sentences when I wasn't aware of how to which was also very helpful. He also gave me news articles to read out loud and summarize and he would correct them. This was very helpful to get immediate feedback and figure out what difficult words meant without having to google anything. He also gave me some tips on how he thinks I can improve such as talking to myself about a certain topic when I am trying to improve on my own.

Effective/not effective

The most effective exercise of the semester was speaking to my language partner as well as watching Korean videos and reading news articles. Through doing this, I improved my vocabulary, and feel a lot more comfortable speaking Korean. This was also a lot more fun and interesting, as well as more applicable than reading from a book which made the learning a lot easier. I don't think anything I did this semester was particularly ineffective, but if I had to choose one it would be watching Korean dramas because I feel like I learned a lot of vocabulary watching news clips. However, I did think it was effective in teaching myself slang terms I was not aware of. 

https://youtu.be/-KkHwCOhu8g

KoreanPresentation.pptx - Cultural Project presentation on the lifestyle of Korean students

Koreanfood.pptx - How to order Korean food in Korea

HistoryofKorean.pptx - History of "hangul"

1st presentation didn't have a powerpoint - but it was on the different couples holidays in Korea

Sources:

http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/04/15/393939759/the-all-work-no-play-culture-of-south-korean-education

http://www.classbase.com/countries/South-Korea/Education-System

http://www.rocketlanguages.com/korean/learn/restaurant-in-korean/

https://www.zkorean.com/hangul/history_of_hangul

http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=261410

This word document has my outline for the project:

Turkish Public Perspective on Syrian Refugee Crisis Notes/outline

This link is to the prezi presentation:

https://prezi.com/a-xyanzqko5-/edit/#59_95982358

The Turkish words I use are the following:

Guest = Misafir

Refugee = mülteci

Urban refugee = kentte yaşayan mülteciler

Temporary asylum = geçici sığınma

Government = hükümet

Refugee camps = mülteci kampları

Burden sharing = yük paylaşımı

Policy/policies = politika/ politikalar

Since my speaking skills are well ahead of my writing skills, I decided to focus my artifacts on the writing part of my learning. Therefore, I decided to write out different greetings I was aware of in Korean just to review them and go over the spelling. While I would be able to say all of these easily, I was not surprised to find that I had to google how to spell some of these greetings because I had forgotten how to write many of them. I feel like this was a good way to practice writing in Korean that is also practical. 

One of my goals for the semester was to be able to understand and summarize Korean news articles. Therefore, I've picked a part of a Korean article, and will summarize it below.

Article: 

일요일 저녁에 오바마 미국 대통령은 TV로 생중계 되는 취임 후 세 번째 '집무실 대국민 연설'을 시작했습니다.

국민의 불안감이 커지는 데다 보안에 구멍이 났다는 비난 여론이 일자 직접 진화에 나선 겁니다.

오바마 대통령은 LA 인근에서 발생한 총기 난사 사건을 '무고한 사람들을 살해한 테러 행위'라고 공식 규정했습니다.

부부 총기 난사범이 테러 조직과 직접 연계됐다는 증거는 없지만 이들이 이슬람을 잘못 해석하는 급진화의 길로 빠져들었다고 말했습니다.

그러면서 미국은 테러리스트를 끝까지 추적하고 IS를 파괴할 것이라고 강조했습니다.

[버락 오바마, 미국 대통령]
"테러 위협은 실질적이지만 미국은 이를 극복할 수 있습니다. 미국은 IS 등 미국을 겨냥하는 테러 단체들을 모두 파괴할 것입니다."

[버락 오바마, 미국 대통령]
"장시간 계속되고 큰 비용이 드는 이라크나 시리아 지상전에 끌려 들어가지 않을 겁니다. 그것은 IS가 원하는 겁니다."

On Sunday, Obama broadcasted over TV regarding the fact that citizens are becoming worried and feel that there is a hole in the US's security. He categorized the recent shooting in LA as terrorism in order to kill innocent civilians. While there's no evidence that they worked with terrorists, he said they misinterpreted the islam radicalization. In addition, he said he will track down IS and destroy them. He said while there is threat of terror, the US can overcome it, the US will destroy IS as well as all terrorists. He said we will not enter their territory which costs a lot of money and continues for a long period of time, because that is what IS wants. 

As I mentioned in an earlier journal, Arzu printed out lyrics to a song that we listened to in class and had me fill in the blanks. This was a cool activity to do in order to practice spelling Turkish words as well as listening comprehension! Two birds with one stone. As for the second worksheet, it was part diction, part putting the appropriate vocabulary next to the correct picture. Regardless, these were all good for listening and writing in Turkish.