Studying Korean in this semester is a very interesting and challenging experience since it is an autonomous self-directed language learning process. I set up the language-learning goal and planned the learning process by myself. At the beginning, it was hard to start since I didn’t know how to learn a new language by myself so that I began with watching Korean TV shows and dramas to get the language sense of Korean. After one class in the Studio Center, we know there is a lot of resources could be used for studying such as Korean textbooks, Voki radio, Youtube teaching lectures and so forth. They are very useful and helpful for the future study. So I utilized those resources for practicing speaking and listening and gradually improved my Korean.
The experience is not only limited in the study of Korean language. It also provides a good chance to learn other cultures. I did develop my skills as an observer of other cultures, especially from preparing the presentations in the semester. Researching the history and background information about the language is beneficial to understand the development of the language and how it shaped until today. I enjoyed the culture presentation. My culture presentation is about the Korean traditional wedding. From research, I know the main idea of the traditional wedding was derived from traditional Confucian values. But nowadays, western modern wedding are more popular for young people. I find this is interesting that the Confucian values encountered the western Christian values. It is actually a culture development and collision. So my culture presentation is like a bridge connecting the previous traditional culture and the new values in Korea.
It is also interesting to know the language families and language structures in the world. We talked about it in the class for Indo-European language tree that showed those languages are highly related to each other. For Korean, it was hard to find a language tree for it but we know from several students’ presentation, the formation of Korean is related to traditional Chinese and also some influences from Japanese. The countries that most of people speak Korean should be definitely South Korea and North Korea. And some of Chinese speak Korean as their mother tongue in China since they are a special minority. Therefore, it is hard to have a language tree for Korean language since the history of Korean is that long and involved some other countries.
As a language learner and culture explorer, I gain the ability to study a new language while understanding its culture at the same time. I enjoyed this process and it helps to build my ability of understanding, analysis and imagination. In the whole process, I think the most difficult part is to read and write. Because we don’t have instructors who really teaches the language, sometimes it is hard to ask native speakers about questions when I did reading. It is challenging but interesting. In the future, I will keep studying Korean and travel to South Korea sometimes and have a further expression about the culture.
