At the beginning of every class, Prof. Sumi Kim always asks us a bunch of questions such as ‘how have you been’, ‘what did you do yesterday’, ‘what did you do last week’, ‘what day is it today’, ‘what are your plans for this week’, et cetera. All the questions that she ask always draw on the materials that we covered in the previous classes and make me work on giving proper responses. At first I wasn’t very good at it, but after she did this for a few classes, I actually got a pretty good sense of how to structure the responses. Plus, I find these questions especially helpful because they make sure that I’m using words related to the activities that I’m often participating in which really helps me remember the vocabulary that I am most likely to use and betters my conversational Korean. Words and phrases like ‘study’, ‘sleep’, ‘dorm’, ‘project’, ‘meeting friends’, ‘dancing’, et cetera. are well registered in my head because of the consistent repetition. I can clearly see that the conversations that I have with my friends for practice have been getting a lot better thanks to a better vocabulary suited to my needs which I’ve developed because of Prof. Sumi Kim and the K-drama Cheese in the Trap.
In class these past two week we started learning Korean adjectives like good, bad, big, small, et cetera and the appropriate particles to be used with them along with new vocabulary . We also learned that based on what noun you are counting, the counting unit used can vary. I mean that saying 5 people, and saying 5 books is basically the same in English but in Korean after you say the number you attach a ‘counting unit’ to it and then mention the object, and the counting unit varies from object to object. This is an extremely new concept to me, and honestly it is a little hard to remember which counting unit relates to which noun, but Prof. Sumi Kim asked us a lot of questions to help us get used to using the correct counting unit. It is still hard to remember all of them because there are so many, so I am going to focus on the ones that are more commonly used like the one for cup/glass/bottle, the one for people, the one for book, et cetera.
So far I think my language learning journey is going pretty well and I am able to grasp things faster than when I first started, and though there always seem to be new things that seem really hard, we have been able to learn them. I am definitely retaining information much better too because of the new approach that Prof. Sumi Kim came up with which involves asking and answering a lot of questions. Plus, I think laying the groundwork was the toughest part, but adding to it has been getting better and better as I keep learning new things. I am still trying to figure out a good way to practice my pronunciations and speaking more.
