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I have noticed that Korean words which are the same have different endings depending on the type of the sentence, the tense and the level of formality used. I then realized that I hardly knew anything about the grammar in Korean language. Therefore, I asked Sun for assistance in understanding Korean grammar. She provided us with a grammar sheet which explained the purpose of the various endings of words.
Korean verbs and adjectives are made of stems and endings. The stem is the actual verb and adjective but it can never stand alone. It always needs to have an ending and the ending changes. There are also two types of endings: pre-final ending and sentence ending. Pre-final endings come between the stem and the sentence ending. Pre-final endings usually contain the honorific suffix and the tense marker. For instance, the verb "go" has the stem "ka". In a declarative sentence, the endings vary depending on the level of formality used. In case of deferential speech level "seubnida" is used, for polite speech "ayo" is used and for plain speech "nda" is used as ending.
I also learned that there are two types of verbs and adjectives: vowel-ending and consonant ending. In order to practice the endings, I then did a few written grammar exercises. Doing the written exercises made me realize the importance of practicing written Korean alongside spoken Korean. It helped me understand the formation of syllables better and thus helped me pronounce words better. It also helped me practice writing Korean and improve my Korean handwriting and become more comfortable with the Korean script.
As a result, I have decided to increase practicing written Korean. Moreover, I was very happy that I was learning some grammar because I could see its direct effect on my understanding of Korean. While watching Korean shows, I could pick out the endings and actually make sense out of them.
Education is extremely important to South Koreans as it plays a pivotal role in future jobs and career path. In fact the literacy rate of South Korea, as of 2014, is 97.9% of the total population, 99.2% of males and 96.6% of females. Moreover, 85% of the students go to college.
There are public and private schools in South Korea, both of which are funded by the government. The school system consists of infant school (0-6 years of age), primary school (chodeung hakgyo) (1-6 grade), middle school (jung hakgyo) (7-9 grade) and high school (godeung hakgyo) (10-12 grade). Most of the schools have uniforms and strict rules for haircut. Students attend middle schools in the same district as their respective primary schools through a lottery system. Education is mandatory till middle school.
More than 95% of middle schoolers attend after-school tutoring agencies known as hagwon. Some of the students have private tutors. Students high school grades affect the college they will be admitted to. As a result, students face even more pressure to do better than everyone else in high school. Hence, students usually leave home at 5 am and come back after 10 pm after attending hagwon or sometimes even as late as 2 am due to after-school class in school. It is said that if a high schooler sleeps 3 hours, s/he can get into the top three universities, Seoul University, Korean University and Yonsei University. The college entrance exam is called CAT (National College aptitude Test, Korean) administered by the Ministry of Education.
Competition between peers in extremely fierce. There is tremendous pressure to always do well in school as it will affect their chance of getting into a good university. Since institutional reputation and alumni network play an important role in future job opportunities and career prospects, it is vital to attend a top university.
From all the Korean drama shows that I have watched, the pressure students face in South Korea has always stood out. Parents always have high expectations from their children as a result the children are always striving to reach the bar set by their parents and are in constant fear of disappointing their parents. In fact, it is shown that competition between students and their parents start as early as kindergarten and primary school. Every parent want their children to be the best be it in studies or in extracurricular activities like martial arts, music or sports. Often this results in depression in students and might even lead to suicide.
The first task that I undertook was learning how to give and ask for directions along with a list of vocabulary related to directions and places. I hoped to learn how to ask where a certain place is. I will also learn to give directions to taxi-driver or to someone asking for directions. I also hoped to be able to describe the positions of things and places as well learn a list of names of places and modes of transportation.
My language partner made a list of vocabulary and wrote some example questions and sentences that are commonly used. I practiced their pronunciations with my language partner. Sun also explained the grammar behind the questions and sentences. We then held a conversation in Korean using what I had learned. Later, I tried to use some of the words and phrases is normal conversation with my friends in order to retain what I learned. I also taught some of the words to my friends. Moreover, when I watched Korean drama shows I looked for words related to directions and noticed how they were used. I am very excited every time I am able to identify words of directions, that I could not previously understand, in Korean shows.
I think using Korean words and phrases in daily life conversations really helped me in retain more vocabulary. Also the Korean shows helped me understand the extensive usage of the words.
Next I would like to learn how to give a series of directions using connecting words. Moreover, I want to learn how to conjugate verbs like go, ride, turn etc in the past, present and future tense, as well as in the formal, semi-formal and informal forms.
Since using newly learned vocabulary and phrases in daily life conversations helped me remember them well, I am going to continue to do it. In addition, I think it would be a good idea to practice writing down phrases to become more comfortable in writing Korean.
Since I have previously had one semester of Korean, I performed a self-assessment in the beginning of the semester in order to find my level of Korean. I used the Level of Competence chart provided in the SDLAP wiki for the assessment.
I came to the following conclusion:
1. Interpretive:
a) Listening: Beginning 2. I can understand phrases and vocabulary related to family, personal information, shopping and simple conversation, without going into too much details.
b) Reading: Beginning 1. I can read simple words.
2. Interpersonal:
a) Speaking: Beginning 2. I can hold simple conversation and exchange information on familiar topics and activities. I can also ask for necessary information in a restaurant, store and on the streets.
3. Presentational:
a) Speaking: Beginning 2. I can describe myself as well as my family using complete sentences.
b) Writing: Beginning 1. I can write short simple sentences about myself and my family.
My goals for this semester are:
1. Learn how to give directions and ask for directions as well as a list of vocabulary related to directions, places, modes of transportation etc.
2. Talk about the weather and learn the vocabulary related to the weather.
3. Learn a list of adjectives and learn how to describe things.
4. Learn some verbs and how to use them in the present, past and future tense.
5. Learn some of the most commonly used vocabulary concerning food, clothes and body parts.
6. Practice more reading that I can read any book or article even if I do not understand it.
7. Learn to write most of the words that I will learn.
Up to now, I have had a fun Korean learning journey. I followed what I wrote in the learning plan that I learn better if I am immersed into Korean-speaking environment. Therefore, I have listened to Korean radio through Tuneln Radio apps on a daily basis. I tried to listen to Korean news, but I found out that instead of listening to monotonous news, listening to talk shows and music programs could make language-learning much more fun. Having listened to Korean on a regular basis, I start to pick some words and phrases up from what I have learned. As time goes along, the more words I could pick up, the more I wanted to learn Korean, and I am curious about how much I could pick up at the end of this semester.
Understanding Korean culture has helped me learn Korean more easily. Knowing that Korean minors need to bow to elders when they greet and leave, I can understand how important it is to remember to add an extra word in the end of each sentence when talking to elders. I have learned that Korean language was invented in a very recent time, late fifteenth century, comparing to other languages. The King Sejong of the Korea wanted to have their own written language and not dependent on Chinese whenever they have to write something. Thus, the King Sejong invented Korean in a consistent and scientific way, structured on the orientation of sun and moon, so that Koreans could learn the written language easily and swiftly. After knowing the origin of the language, it helps me learn the vocabularies easier. In addition, in Korean, the numbers can be pronounced and expressed in two ways, one is Korean own way and another is imported and modified from Chinese way. Koreans tend to mix the two ways when they express numbers. This piece of knowledge also made sense to me that I need to not only learn one or another way of expressing numbers, but both ways, so I would not be confused when I order things.
Communicative competence consists of four aspects: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence. So far, I am working on the first aspect. Out of Halliday’s seven functions of languages, I have learned how to introduce self and other people and family members, how to greet people, how to order food, how to exchange personal information, and apologize and thank people. I need to learn about how to give commands, identify and describe people. After becoming competent in grammatical level, I will dive into the discourse aspect of communicative competence. Discourse competence involves analyzing the background context on the words or sentences other people said, and being able to come up with a proper response within the context. In order to know how to respond properly, I also need to become more familiar about Korean’s culture.
When I first arrived in the US, I knew and I expected there were a lot of culture differences between China and the U.S. Therefore I remained open-minded to observe what I had to experience. The biggest struggle for me was that I had to contribute my thoughts and opinions from the readings and say something meaningful in class discussion. I wasn’t comfortable firstly to express my thoughts in front of a class, secondly to have to raise hand and come up with some ideas fast enough so that my classmates would not have said the similar thing already. I was grateful to experience culture shock in which it made me become a more open-minded person. Korea, however, is a neighboring country to China, thus there are fewer culture shocks I could imagine to experience comparing to that of America. One thing I do shocked when I first saw a Korean minor did a half-bow to an elder to express an respected good-bye.
I appreciate cultural presentations given by each classmate in whom I learned a lot about what people wear and do differently in different cultures. One of the presentation intrigued me was about the different spending habits between Pakistanis and Americans. Pravass pointed out that most Pakistanis are willing to spend more of their monthly salary on cellphone service, which suggests that Pakistan is a collectivist country where Pakistanis like to be connected with everyone. I think another aspect might also contribute to the differences between a two-year contract cellular plan in the US and a pre-paid based cell phone service in Pakistan is how business environments differ in two countries. The American companies, or companies in the west, tend to think long-term and secure businesses ahead of time for a longer period, whereas the Pakistan companies, or companies in many Asian countries, tend to make short-term business plan and in result business demand could be unstable.
After starting learning Korean this semester, I have already known a lot of basic sentences and vocabularies, such as how to greet people, how to introduce myself to others, how to order food in restaurant and the vocabularies of families and basic vegetables, fruit, dishes and Korean food. My process over this half semester is quite amazing and wonderful. My first language is Mandarin, and I started learning English since primary school. With the different extents of learning English and Korean, I found how the brain handles the task of learning languages.
Starting a new language means learning new words, so it is vital to memory these vocabularies that learner partner gave us on class. After class, I also explored more words that I interested daily on Korean learning website, such as Mango Language, and using color-flashcards help me remember these vocabularies. Vocabularies are the raw material for forming the whole sentences, but I need to get involved in the environment of target language. Talking with Korean and knowing about Korean culture gives me motivation to study my target language, because when I talked with them, I will use simple words or sentences that I learned. So far, Sun Yoon and us watched Korean movie together and cooked the traditional Korean food on Friday night. These activities make me feel more interested in learning my target language. The accent is obvious when you start to learn a new language, and through talking with native speaker I can work on sounding more native. In order to pronounce correctly, Sun Yoon recorded the words and sentence that she taught us on class so that we can listen and repeat anytime. Knowing about the correct pronunciations at the beginning of starting a language is really important, which could build the foundation for the future learning. Even though sometimes it is difficult to identify the subtle difference between two similar words, only because I still do not get used to the skills of Korean pronunciation.
Learning language requires an explicit awareness and understanding, during this process I found some vocabularies I studies sounds like English, such as juice—jusee, waffle---waple, and ice cream---ice klim. Due to the long-term American and Chinese presence in South Korean, many Koreans are used to seeing and hearing English on a daily basis. Korean has also borrowed some words directly from English and Chinese. Generally language and culture are closely related. Language is a mirror of culture, and Korean also reflects many unique aspects of Korean cultures. So far, through watching the drama, I find one of the most noticeable characteristics of Korean is that Koreans use the word “our” a lot more often than “my.” Some English phrase like “my home,” “my school,” and “my country” would be translated into “our home,” “our school,” and “our country” in Korean, even though you are talking about yourself without others. Because Korean culture is more collective than western cultures, Korean’s way of thinking that a group in which an individual is involved is more important than the individual itself. under this kind of culture, the tendency to regard a group’s profit is more valuable than personal’s profit, which help Korean society grow to economically. Another noticeable point of Korean is its polite forms. Different from Japanese and Chinese, Korean possesses several different expressions for the same word. People have to choose different expression whom they are talking with. For example, we could say “Bab(meal)” to our friends, but we have to say “Jin-ji(meal)” to my father or grandfather. The more academic knowledge I learned, the more Korean culture I will understand.
My language learning experience thus far has been fun yet challenging. I have a basis in Indian languages because of my background in Tamil; however, I am quickly learning that Hindi is much different and requires lots of practice. It takes a lot of time when one’s environment does not immerse them in that language. It has been difficult to learn Hindi mainly because I am not around it all the time but also because to learn basic vocabulary words takes lots of practice and effort and repetition. Because I do not have a basic vocabulary set down, it has been hard to form sentences and go into more complex grammar issues such as different tenses. I have slowly realized the importance of learning vocabulary because learning the basics will eventually lead to you learning the language better. Only then will I be able to put together words together and can start to understand the sentence structure of Hindi, also very different than the sentence structure of English. I am currently learning different tenses of verbs and slowly starting to put together sentences that I would need if I am ever speaking to a Hindi speaker. I realized it is important to get Hindi speaking help from different sources, so one of the main goals for my Spring Break is to buy some Hindi textbooks from Barnes and Noble to keep learning consistently. This will allow me to come back to the University with an understanding of sentence structure and more vocabulary knowledge in Hindi. In the future, I am going to be using these books to fulfill my language goals and use my language partner to clarify the pronunciation of words and to speak with me to get a grasp on speaking more.
I have some HIndi speaking friends at the University of Richmond and back home in Chicago, so speaking to them will help me better understand the language. However, I already have a very good understanding of communicative competence because I am Indian and I have visited India many times. This allows me to understand body language and to show respect through signals and how I act. However, while speaking Hindi, I am interested in understanding how Hindi speakers show respect to each other with words like “aap” instead of “tum”. Seemingly, there is a hierarchy of authority in how Hindi speakers speak amongst themselves. For example, between two people of similar age and gender who use the lowest form of respect when speaking to each other usually implies the same gender or close familiarity. However, with elders, there seems to be a more sense of authority then is given to elders in English. This relates to Indian culture, where respect is very important because families are really close and its a collectivist culture. I have understood that notion first-hand, as both my parents are from India, and my family seems to be more collectivist than that of my friends. However, proper application of respect and gender is the most important thing while learning communicative competence in Hindi.
So far my self-directed learning experience has taught me a lot about how to effectively learn a language when one’s environment does not immerse them in the language. I have learned three other languages besides my primary language, but for all three of these I learned at least the introductory level in a classroom with a syllabus set by the professor. Trying to figure out what works best for me has been difficult not just because effective language learning is complicated and in many ways subject to the learner, but also because at times it can be difficult to differentiate between the ways I like learning and the most effective ways for me to learn. I find memorizing vocabulary and sentence structure rules tiring and monotonous, and for two of the three languages I have learned I was able to be immersed in the language as well. This immersion meant I was constantly hearing commonly used words and subconsciously taking in different sentence structures/becoming familiar with how whole sentences should sound – I was able to learn without having to intentionally memorize much besides verb conjugations for different tenses. Learning Urdu has been different because although I have many Urdu speaking friends at the University of Richmond they are not constantly speaking Urdu nor am I constantly around them. As a result I have seen how important it is to intentionally memorize vocabulary/grammar rules when one is not immersed in the language. Though I still believe it is easy to place excessive emphasis on this type of memorization, my approach to learning Urdu so far has not incorporated enough of it (I am most fluent in Spanish besides English and I never did much intentional memorization of vocabulary and sentence structure- but I was in primarily Spanish speaking environments for over a year!) I realized this last week as there were many things I felt I should know how to say when talking with my language partner, but I either messed up the ordering of words or did not know vocabulary that I should have.
The most important aspect of cultural understanding which has helped my communicative competence is the proper application of respect and gender while speaking. Urdu, like many languages, has a “hierarchy” of respect/authority and gender in the language. In Urdu both verb conjugations and morphology of nouns and adjectives are subject to these factors. The three levels of respect in the second person have allowed me to better understand not only what is being said, but also understand implications to the relationship between the speaker and the person being spoken to. For example, between two people of similar age and gender who use the lowest form of respect when speaking to each other usually implies the same gender and either disrespect (or some sort of antagonism) or very close familiarity/friendship. In a similar situation where the middle level of respect is being used one can infer that the two are not very close/not even friends at all or of a different gender even if they are very close.
It is normal to experience culture shock, which is the personal disorientation a person feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable to get involved the surrounding. For me, living in the different culture is not easy because of many reasons. When I arrived US from China, I found there are a lot of things that I cannot accept or be accepted. For example, first talking and communication with people speaking English is tough and inconvenient. Once I joined a group of people, there were talking about something and laughing. After they stopped laughing, I start laughing. However, I am not supposed to laugh. This made me ashamed. Or when people here were talking about some traditional festival, such as St. Patrick Day, I had no idea why people wear in green because of lacking of investigating and knowing about American history. Even though Korea and China have the similar culture, there are still culture shocks. Taking course 105 is the efficient way to understand different culture from each backgrounds.
These cultural presentations from all my classmates give me a lot of information about diverse cultural background. Before this cultural presentation, I literally knew nothing about Urdo, which is one of the two official languages of Pakistan, along with English. I find the interesting point of Urdu is the writing system, which is written right-to-left in an extension of Persian alphabet. It is really different with other language written system, such as Chinese and English. There were also two students introduced Hindi, which is the official language of India and Fiji.
Korean has a subject-object-verb word order, and the Korean alphabet is called Hangul. Hangul consists of 14 simple consonants and 6 simple vowels. As I known Korean grammar is heavily influenced by honorifics. Mengdong recommend me some online classes on two websites, which are How to study Korean and Hillslearning. Reference grammar will be a good option for me, because I can study the symmetrical grammar there. When I prepare the tests, TOEFL and SAT, reference grammar give me the guidance to form the sentence and read articles.
Korean culture is represented as hierarchical, collective and harmony-oriented. Politeness and hierarchy is very important to Koreans, and the hierarchy is explicit in the Korean language. Different language systems needed to be used, when you are talking with various persons. Usually, the older person, the more social status they have. There are a lot of emphasis places on sharing drinks and meals, although some of the older traditions have relaxed in recent years. The young need to wait for the oldest person to sit down before the young take a seat at the table. Before eating, especially at someone’s home, it is polite to say that you are looking forward to the meal. In Korean, people say Jalmukesumneda. (I will eat well) At the beginning of meal, the young also need to wait for the oldest person to lift their spoon or chopsticks first before you start eating.
No doubt, we assume the physical basis of language in the lips, the tongue, and the ear. In fact, language is kind of brain stuff, and the language organ is the mind. The brain’s hemispheres have its own role. Generally the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body. The natural ability for acquiring language normally diminished rapidly with aging. Handling one language is self-monitored. The information received from the ear other people’s movement of mouth, and internal sensation generated by different organs of the body. For improving the skills of learning language, I will combine listening, writing and speaking together. For example, when I try to remember or the vocabulary, I will speak the words or sentences to my self in order to strength memory.
