So far I would say that I have learned about 100 new words in Spanish, mostly from using flashcards. I focus on the vocabulary that will be most relevant to me while in Spain this summer, such as dining, navigation, and entertainment so that my time is spent efficiently. I hope to learn about 100 more words before the end of the year, which I think is realistic. I know I won't improve my vocabulary drastically overnight, but with consistent practice I think I should be able to achieve my goal.
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My goal for this week is to write a very short story. I want to write a story about one of my experiences in New York during the spring break. This time I didn't find any resource first because I think that the best way to write a good story is by practicing. Thus, I just started to write by myself. During my writing, I found the most challenging part of this task is to express my feelings or to describe the views I saw. I could only write some very simple words to express my feelings and always write them repeatedly. So, I turned to the internet to search some useful words for expressing some emotions I will write in my story, and thus learned a few new words that could decorate my writings a little bit. In the end, I finished my writing. Since my story only told about one of my experiences from my trip, so it ended up for around 300 Korean words in total.
Create a learning activity to teach someone else something you have learned in your language; outline this activity in your learning journal; teach someone using this activity; reflect upon the effectiveness of the activity
I want to create an activity about counting numbers in Korean. In Korean, there are two different systems in counting numbers. One of them is basically from Chinese numbers, when the language learner wants to talk about the Months they have to use this system. However, when talking about the ages, the numbers of animals, and population, we have to use another system which is invented by Korean themselves. So, I will design this activity by showing some pictures to the students, and ask them to express what they see in those pictures. Pictures include animals, people, calendars and clocks. To be more exciting, I will also ask them to compete in 5 minutes and see who can speak more and correctly. I think by this activity, it will be very helpful for the students to really understand how to use these two counting systems correctly.
Reflect on your language learning so far and the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language. What do you need to improve your communicative competence?
My language learning so far puts more emphasis on readings and writings. However, I think it is not enough for me as a language learner because the most essential thing about learning a language is to be able to communicate with other people and also be able to understand what other people talk about in the target language. Thus, as I wrote in several previous learning journals, I want to practice my speaking more.
I think the relationship between understanding the target culture and the target language is very tight and strong. By understanding the target culture, language learners can understand how the people react to each other, and what kind of expressions they will make while encounter certain situations. By watching Korean dramas and making local friends, I have learned and experience a lot of their cultures, and through understanding their cultures I can know how to use my target language adequately for certain situations. For examples, Korean people always put “being polite” in the first place when they meet a new friend. In Korea, they really take people’s ages seriously. Once someone is elder than another person, the younger one should always be respectful to the elder one, no matter in a family or in the working place. Thus, when the younger person talks to the elder one, he or she must use formal and respectful formats unless their relationship is very close. Also, when Korean people meet each other for the first time, a formal format is required. If someone use improper format, the one he or she is talking to will feel they are offended and think the person is acting really rude. Thus, Korean language learners should know this culture first before they begin to learn the language. Another culture aspect is that the Korean people would call each other as “brother” or “sister” even they are not really related. It is because that Korea is a country that emphasizes on the concept of “union”, so they think all the Korean people in the country are like their family. Thus, if they want to call each other they will use these kinds of words to show that the person they are chatting with is very close with them like their family. Thus, if a Korean language learner doesn’t understand their cultures before talking to the local people, there might be a big chance that the Koreans they are talking to will find this person not being polite.
To improve my communicative competence, I need to talk to the natives in Korean to improve my speaking and also practice my listening by watching Korean dramas or listening to their songs. I think by these two methods, I can improve my speaking and listening a lot and learn it correctly. Thus, I will also focus on practicing my communicative ability by the above two methods, and hope that I can have progress in this field at the end of this semester.
Learning Journal 8
For this week, I reviewed all the words I learned so far and I checked my pronunciations with my Korean friend. Also, I continued to watch a video teaching Korean grammar. In that video, the girl used a trendy k-pop lyrics to illustrate how future tense is expressed. In this case, further tense is applied by adding "ye yo" at the end of the sentence. In addition, we continued to learn dialogue during my meeting with language partner. We learned about asking people if they have time, including "do you have time today", "do you have time tomorrow" , and "when do you have time" and how to answer these questions. We also reviewed Hangul and had contest on quickly pronouncing words. From all of the learning activities, I find words review to be the most effective.
My learning goal for this week is to understand a poem. Fortunately, the teacher in the class taught us one poem in the class as well. I found it quite difficult to understand the meaning of a poem because the way of expressing the author's feelings is very different from writing a book or composing a song, which are more directly most of the time. In order to practice more, I found out that there are some poets will post their poems on the instagram, and most of their posts are very short and not too difficult to understand. Thus, I read several poems on the instagram, and tried to explain them by myself. From this process, I not only learned a lot of new vocabularies but also learned a little bit of the structure of Korean short poems. Also, I really found the ways the Korean poets express about their feelings are very beautiful, and also are quite different from the poems I have read before, which is quite interesting for me.
My goal for this week is to understand the instruction on the airplane. I chose this goal is because that I have taken Korean Air for several times, but I still cannot understand some of the words the flight attendance talk in the short broadcasting on the airplane. So, I wrote down some words that the flight attendance might use during the flight, and then used the Korean dictionary to help me translate these words. After I learned about most of the vocabularies I wrote and translated, I went to Youtube to find some clips about it. Fortunately, there were some clips on the website, and I found most of them are very similar, which was a very good news for me. Then, I evaluate myself by writing down the dialogues of the films in Korean, and then translated the meaning of them by myself. After translating, I then went back to the films and then compared my writings with the English subtitles below the films.
Reflect upon your progress to date, consider the effectiveness of your learning plan and activities, and discuss what changes--if any--you will make to finish the semester.
The progress I had so far is pretty good although I found a lot of difficulties accomplishing it well, but I still learned a lot from these process during the last few weeks. I think the effectiveness of my learning plan so far is not very effective because I put too many emphasize on trying to understand what other people say, especially the News. However, the dialogues like News will be very fast because they are for the native people. So, I think I will make some changes for my learning plan, such as understanding the instruction on the airplane, which the speed of talking might be slower than the News, or turn my goals to emphasize more about communication or writing. By making the changes, I think I can slower down my tempos and do better on my basic skills like writing or reading.
VivianLeeLearningPlanUpdated.docx
Above is my updated learning plan. I didn't adjust much, but added one additional task (task 8), because I wanted to work on my texting skills in Korean. So far, my language partner and I have worked on most of the tasks I wanted to accomplish this semester. I've learned a lot of idioms as well as Korean slangs.
This week, Joora and I talked about impeachment of the South Korean president, Park Geun Hye. We read an article in Korean together and learned that Park Geun Hye was the daughter of a previous president, Park Chung Hee. I knew she was the first female president of South Korea, but did not know much about the scandal regarding Choi Soon Sil and the whole impeachment process. According to the article, President Park’s friend Choi had a lot of influence, politically and spiritually, on Park. This led millions of Korean citizens to protest for Park Geun Hye’s impeachment. On March 10, 2017 the constitutional court in South Korea upheld Park’s impeachment. Until the new presidential election, which is in about 2 months, Prime minister Hwang Kyo ahn would act as the president of the country. While reading the article, I learned new political vocabulary words in Korean:
(탄핵) = impeachment
판결 = verdict
청와대 = Blue House (President’s House) comparable to White House in the U.S.
헌법재판소 = Constitutional Court
만장일치의 = Unanimous Decision
선거 = presidential election
I have been wanting to read Korean books and comic books (manhwa) for a while, so this week, Joora and I read three chapters of a Korean Webtoon, which are digital comic books online. Reading has been always difficult for me because of my limited knowledge of vocabulary words, but because Webtoons have pictures/comics, it was a bit easier for me to follow. However, reading Webtoons was still very difficult and I had to stop every couple of pages or so to ask Joora to help translate. It was frustrating, but I definitely picked up a lot of new words and having pictures/graphics to use as context clues helped me understand what I was reading. I might resort to watching Korean cartoons on Youtube to learn more basic vocabulary words before I continue reading Webtoons again.
When language dies, Johnson argues that it is not just the alphabet, writing style, and grammar that dies, but it is a vital part of humanity and a vital part of culture that dies with it. I think it makes sense though. If a language is isolated to such a small population, in order for them to survive in the economy of wherever they are, they will have to learn to become bilingual to survive economically. In turn, over time, there will be a decline in the amount of speakers who can also read and write it. With a lack of literature and a lack of recorded history that can be read and interpreted in present day, a language will naturally die off. With that, a culture is lost, which is tragic to the globalizing society in which we live. But it is also somewhat of a natural extension of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory because obviously there was a reason that the language did not thrive. I can imagine a world one day where mostly everyone speaks the same language. That is solely because it is easier. Now, that is also a sad society in my mind. I think that one of the most beautiful things about a new culture is rooted in its language. The sing-songy nature of Chinese has always intrigued me and when I go to China, the language somehow makes sense with the architecture, way of life, and style of the country.
I know the numbers. I can effectively count and do basic addition.
We are beginning to go over the seasons, months, days of the week, and weather.
I have updated my blog as prescribed.
Journal 7: Reflect upon your progress to date, consider the effectiveness of your learning plan and activities, and discuss what changes--if any--you will make to finish the semester.
So far, I have learned all Korean Alphabets/ Hangul, the technique of pronuncing words, accumulated some commonly used words/phrases, and some dialogues. I am pretty happy with my progress since I have no previous exposure to any Korean. I would say that the most effective time I spent learning Korean is the time I spent with my language partner and classmates, as well as watching some Korean-teaching videos that related grammar/words with popular culture. I found my pace of learning new words is little very fast so that I moved to the next set of words before did not fully get the previous set. In the future, I need to devote more time to review what I have learned. Also, I need to understand the grammar and sentence structure of the sentences in the dialogue.
My third artifact is about asking about my family. It includes questions and answers.
The conversation goes like this:
Q: How many people are there in your family?
A: Three. My dad, mom, and me.
Q: Where do your parents live?
A: They live in China.
Q: Where do your siblings live?
A: I do not have any sibling.
My goal for this week is to understand the news on the TV. However, I found it very hard again like my second goal, which is to understand weather reports. So this time, instead of watching the news clips on the KBS website first, I went to find some resources about the vocabularies that will use for the broadcast that talking about the celebrities. The reason why I want to learn about the words for the news about the celebrities is because that I think it will be more interesting to learn and also I can know more about the Kpop stars at the same time. And, I did! Yet, it was still very hard to understand all the stuffs the News told about. However, I still had learned a lot through this process.
Post (a) an evaluation of your First Artifact conversation, and (b) an assessment of how well you met your learning goals for weeks 4 and 5.
The first artifact is greetings and short introduction of myself. Since I have learned Korean for 2 years and the teacher would always ask us to introduce ourselves, so I found it not very difficult to write. However, I think I might need to practice more and challenge myself to write more difficult contents.
For week 4 and 5 goals, I practiced " how to introduce a place for traveling" and " how to buy cloth at a clothing store" respectively. Luckily, we practiced the first one in the class. The teacher asked us to recommend a place to each other. I recommended a place in Taiwan which is called 象山( elephant mountain) in the class. From this process, I have learned how to describe the way to go there, why it is good, and how long should I take to go there, etc. The second goal, I practiced it by reading one of the articles in my textbook. From the textbook, I learned many Korean words of different kinds of cloth, and also learned how to ask the clerk if I want a bigger size, etc. In short, I really learned a lot of useful and practical skills from these two goals, and I think there will be a good chance that I will use them one day in Korea.
Yuchi’s presentation on Kimchi was very interesting. Kimchi is the most well-known Korean dish and people eat it daily. It is made of cabbage. A typical Korean will eat 60 pounds of it each year. It tastes spicy and crunchy, and it’s very rich in flavor. Winter is long and cold in Korea. During ancient time, there was no access to fresh vegetables during wintertime in Korea. Therefore, they made lots of Kimchi before winter so that they would have vegetables to eat during winter. Each family even has designed refrigerator to store it. The presentation on Turkish coffee tells the difference between Turkish and American coffee. For Turkish coffee, people leave the coffee grounds in the cup while people filter the grounds in American coffee. People also use Turkish coffee fortune telling. It was very interesting to see that food has huge impact on culture.
- Post your third bi-weekly report on your language-learning activities.
We reviewed the Korean alphabet and continued with learning more dialogues. The first one we learned was greetings and a small talk you can have with people as beginners. This was a lot easier for me because it was a review from last year when I had Korean 110. I was able to catch on and remember some of the phrases that we learned. Also, we learned how to say what we liked and ask people about their drink preference.
It is sad and shocking to hear that a language dies every day, because once a language dies it is very hard for it to recover. Since language and culture go hand in hand, losing a language also means that a a big part of the culture is lost as well, thus making the world a less diverse place. Language reveals a lot about the people who speak it, so those who speak languages that are no longer spoken must feel as if they lose a part of themselves. I can't sympathize with this feeling because English and Spanish are both very widely spoken, but it is still sad to hear nonetheless.
Learning Journal 6: State your learning goals for this week and how you went about accomplishing these goals.
For this week, I practiced dialogue with my classmates regarding family members. We first write the English translation for the conversation so we understand the meaning. For every learning session, we have handout that we can fill out the sentences and create conversations. The conversation goes like the following:
How many family members do you have?
Where do your parents live?
Where do your siblings live right now?
and we will answer depending on our own circumstances.
I found conversation practices to be effective way to learn basic spoken Korean. I also looked at videos that reproduce scenes and teach conversations but they are not as effective as talking to my peers. In addition, we learned a set of words on directions, including right/left, south/north/east/west, and other positional words.
