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Reflecting on my first few weeks of school, I was very eager to start improving my Korean once more. Before my first meeting with my learning partner, I wanted to brainstorm different ideas about what I want to work on this semester and how I can approach these goals. After some thought, I narrowed down what my current language skills lack the most. Some of these were writing, vocabulary, and reading. Writing seems to be one of the more problematic skill since I rarely get a chance to practice writing. I often get to speak and listen to other Korean speakers, but writing is something I do not get to do very often. Because of this, writing at a higher level and spelling can often be an issue for me. To practice learning, I wanted to start with diary entries. Since it is for a diary, the content should be very informal and easy to write about. I then want to move onto writing letters to others. Since letters should be more formal depending on the recipient, it should help me practice more formal writing. To work on vocabulary, I think the best way to practice is just memorization. I hope to utilize flash cards and other memorization methods to start memorizing harder vocabulary that are not used often enough for me to know well. In addition, I want to practice vocabulary so I can read the Bible in Korean more proficiently. I have recently started a Bible study with other Korean speakers. Since we all read and discuss in Korean, I run into a lot of vocabularies that are unfamiliar to me and have to look up the definitions. I want to take these words and memorize them as well so that my reading comprehension will improve. Bible reading will also help with my reading skills. Since much of the Bible is in more formal text, it can help me improve my vocabulary as well as my reading speed and comprehension. I found myself to be struggling to read at a quick pace and was misreading words quite often. I want to get more practice reading Korean so that I can read more difficult texts such as the Bible, newspaper, or technical writing.
On my first meeting with my language partner, we discussed went over some goals I had brainstormed in advance. We agreed that these goals were reasonable and within my skill level. In addition to the skills mentioned previously. I discussed that I wanted to learn more about culture. Unlike my previous self directed learning experiences, I wanted to devote some lesson times to learning more about Korean culture. Since culture is a very broad topic, I would think about an aspect of Korean culture I wanted to learn more about and discuss with my language partner in advance. My language partner and I can research about the topic and take time during the meetings to discuss the topic. Doing more research on culture in advance can also be helpful for the cultural presentation at the end the semester.
I have decided that I will not be taking the full unit until the spring semester so that has taken some of the pressure I was feeling off and given me more time to since back and think about what I actually wanted and how I was going to go about achieving it. I plan to block out a time like I would any other class in my schedule and make that Hebrew time. While it was exhausting at time I do think I would follow the drill model and maybe set aside 30 minutes a day to review and learn new words. This will also be ideal because I plan to use resources like Drops and Duolingo. This fits in much better because I already assume that I will have a really busy schedule. So far I have learned prayers along with what can only be considered the very basic/ bare bones of the Hebrew language. I have a short running list of textbooks and other resources (the textbooks are on amazon ) that I think would be helpful especially with alphabet learning but I don’t think that I will purchase them, or ask for it to be purchased until next semester. My interest was piqued with my conversion process and since I want things to happen on the same time line it makes sense for me to push forward with the language component as my conversion process comes to an end. Both Chester and Esmee thought that my learning plan was well fleshed out but I do plan on asking Chester for some advice since we have the same target language while also listing some definite goals that will make tracking my progress easier.
I have structured my learning plan to a more achievable and more realistic form that will help me and challenge myself in the process of learning a new Language. I have decided to first start speaking the language, and in order to do that I will first improve my listening. Through watching more Korean television series and dramas, I hope to pick up their speech pattern and also learn some one the most simple phrases and most commonly used words. I will then practice pronunciation and learn the basic grammatical structure with my language partner to harden my skills. I will also be writing down all the things I have learn and constantly review them to enhance my writing.
I have had my first Korean lesson with my language partner Brenda this week. In the first lesson Ive learnt how to introduce myself: my name, age, birthday, major, family member, etc. We have discussed what our basic learning schedule will be in order to achieve our goals. We have agreed on the use of some additional resources such as textbooks and videos that we will watch that will help us learn the fastest, and we will also be having some cultural based lessons, such as exploring the Korean food and music culture, maybe through visiting a Korean Market in Richmond or by listening to Korean Pop Music.
Figuring Foreigners Out was an intriguing article depicting the different communication methods and how it differs across different cultures. The reading showed me how different other cultures could be. For example, nonverbal communication gestures could be totally different things in different countries because of culture. The reading goes into defining different groups of words. Surprisingly, it was very difficult for me to choose one ideology more than the other. I thought that I agreed with both perspectives more often than not.
The first group of words was individualism vs collectivism. From reading the differences in definition for each word, I was able to agree upon having a more individualistic ideology rather than a collective one. This could be due to my love for being independent.
The next words were monochronic vs polychronic. The first ideology said that time is limited while polychronic is the belief that time is limitless and you will always have time in the day to do more stuff. I agree to both sides, but I think that time is limited ensures maximum efficiency of your time. I agree more with the monochronic view.
The next group of words was internal vs external—where internal meant that the future is largely dependent on your effort and your individual mindset, while external meant that the future is largely dependent on external factors, where your life is already predetermined. I 100% believe with the internal view, where if you set a goal, you can do anything you set your mind to do.
The last group of words were indirect vs direct communication—one using inferences and context/body language while direct communication is more actively speaking and confronting others verbally.
In conclusion, I think that the two words in each group are dependent on each other. Both ideals are crucial in culture and language. Without individualism, collectivism would not be possible. I think this reading can be easily connected to my SDLC course, in that Korean culture and language is very different from American culture and language. I should be wary of that when learning the language and be able to see the language in different perspectives to prevent any confusion or unintentionally dissecting the Korean culture.
I have a couple objectives and goals in my learning plan. I think it is important to have set goals for a self directed learning language class because one could easily get off task in the subject of language.
There are two main reasons behind my learning objectives. Firstly, my grandmother only speaks in Korean, and I want to preserve my Korean language ability in order to continue communicating with her in the future. Secondly, I want to be proficient enough to past the comm2 Korean test so I can test out of it during college. I want to do this so I will be able to take more classes at UofR my senior year. I have always wanted to take a business class or a music class. In order for me to do this without having such a huge workload, I would have to test out of COMM2.
My first goal is to be able to read and write Korean at a proficient level. I want to be able to write letters, read sentences quickly in Korean, and be able to understand reading comprehension.
My second goal is to be able to speak Korean in a formal way, so when I talk to Korean adults in the future, I will be talking in a respectful manner.
My third goal is to be able to pass the COMM2 test in Korean here at UofR.
My last goal is to be able to understand a whole song in Korean and be able to write my own song.
These are my tentative goals for the semester and I hope to hit all or almost all of them at the end of the semester. I can take the COMM2 test next fall if I wanted so if I am not ready, I will be able to take another semester of SDLC next semester to further expand my Korean language skills. I will be meeting with my student teacher once a week for 2 hours and listening to Korean sports broadcasts and watching Korean TV shows.
I’ve organized my self-directed learning plan based on the foundational pieces of learning a language. First, I start by learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet. From there, I will be able to form and pronounce words properly. After learning a decent amount of words, I will then be able to form sentences. Each task is building the foundation for learning the next task. As I progress in my learning, I will constantly have to draw from past tasks, which will further reinforce my learning and solidify my knowledge.
So far, I’ve learned some Hangul and can recognize certain letters. I’ve also learned to say really basic words like “hello” and “thank you”. Within the next few weeks I hope to be able to recognize all the letters and plan to practice some reading and writing. I also hope to learn some more basic words and phrases.
I have found some resources to promote my task-based objectives. One resource I found was howtostudykorean.com. I was looking online for ways to learn Korean over the summer and this was a website I stumbled upon. After further research, the reviews were really good, so I plan to use it in my learning. Another website I found was talktomeinkorean.com. This is a very popular website and I think I could learn a lot from this website as well. In terms of textbooks, I’m not too sure if I will get textbooks because the online resources might be able to replace them. I’m definitely open to textbook suggestions if anyone has any. There are also apps that can help with vocabulary like Drops and Memrise that I will also try to incorporate in my learning. Using Quizlet to study vocabulary will also be helpful.
I think I will investigate Korean language and culture more deeply by going to cultural events. Tomorrow I will be attending the Korean Thanksgiving at the Hagwon school. By attending events like these I will expose myself to Korean culture. In the future, as I learn how to say different things in Korean, I can try practicing with fluent Korean speakers that attend these cultural events too. I think practicing with native speakers will be great practice and will help me practice my pronunciation and listening skills. Getting involved in the cultural events will greatly enrich my learning of both language and culture.
My interest in Korean was prompted by the fact that I have many Korean American friends. They occasionally speak Korean and I am never able to understand what they say. I’ve always heard that Korean is one of the easier Asian languages to learn, and after studying Chinese for a few years, I figured I could give Korean a shot. I hope this semester I will be able to learn a lot about Korean as a language, but also the cultural aspect of it. I look forward to practicing what I learn with other people and seeing the progress I make.
I have always wanted to learn Korean, not only because my favorite stars are Korean, but also because I like Korean culture very much. Before implementing the plan, I first sorted out the Korean language I have mastered and my future goals. Now I can count to ten in Korean and recognize some Korean characters. I can understand some common expressions when watching Korean variety and TV programs.
My learning goal in this semester is to be able to conduct daily conversations in Korean at the end of the semester. Because I really want to travel to South Korea and attend the meeting of my favorite stars, I wish at that time, I can communicate with them well and no longer need to often use the dictionary and look at the English translation on the screen. When watching video in Korean, I can understand it basically without relying on subtitles. At the same time, I hope to have an in-depth understanding of Korean culture, so that I can have a profound understanding of important festivals and the stories behind them at the end of the semester.
When I thinking about learning tools, for textbooks, I will choose Yonsei Korean textbooks, because its knowledge point is very meticulous and very suitable for beginners. In addition, there is a Korean TV series like Friends, called 1988. It tells the story of five families who lived in Seoul in 1988. It depicts the warm kinship and traditional love and friendship between neighbors and neighbors. The dialogue is very close to life, really suitable for learning Korean common language and familiar with the native Korean pronunciation.
My weekly study plan is mainly to follow the progress of textbooks and memorize 50 words per week. Watch at least 5 Korean video videos a week, which can be news, interviews, or TV series. Do dictation while watching videos. Usually try to use Korean to contact with Korean friends.
This week I worked on my language learning plan. I filled out my assessment checklist first and then listed out my goals. At the current stage, for interpersonal communication, I can say hello and goodbye to different groups of people and make some simple statements in a conversation. I need a little bit of help when I’m introducing myself or ask and answer simple questions, but I can understand many simple phrases by listening. For interpretive listening and reading, I can understand courtesy phrases as well as some basic information. I can also recognize some celebrity’s names, simple phrases, and menu items.
For presentational speaking, I can count 1 to 10 and the day of the week. I can introduce myself in simple and short sentences without too much detail about myself. I want to learn more about self-introduction including personal information, my likes and dislikes, and my daily activities or interests. For presentational writing, I can write out the alphabet and the characters or words I’m learning. I do need hints when I’m writing out simple sentences such as “happy birthday.” I also know how to say and write really simple words in Korean such as “chair” and “car”, and I do want to learn more words this semester.
I’m interested in Korean tv shows, dramas, as well as K-pop songs, so I want to use them as parts of my learning resources. I want to be able to recognize short sentences or phrases posted on Instagram by Korean celebs. I also want to be able to understand the major part of a Korean tv show. I’ve been thinking about using Korean tv shows or films I love to practice my listening and reading. In the end, if it is possible, I want to learn a Korean song. This requires me to be very familiar with the words and phrases people used in the show or the lyrics, so I put these as my future goals. I want to start from relatively simple parts to be more familiar with the language first.
For this semester, at the very beginning, I want to be able to communicate some basic information about my daily life as well as my interests. I also want to learn more about words around food, animals, colors, and time. I’ve been thinking about using pictures and specific examples to practice vocabulary or phrases. It usually takes me some time to recognize or write out the phrases I know, so I’d like to do more practice on that too. Recognizing items labeled in a supermarket and writing out a shopping list or to-do list can be an exercise for my reading and writing. I’ll use YouTube videos and textbooks as my main resources, but I believe practicing with my language partner or fellow partner will help a lot too. I’ll go through my tasks in the descending order of confidence so that I can be more familiar with some vocabulary and be more confident in my listening and speaking.
It’s really interesting to think about that collocations differ greatly between languages, which was mentioned in Crystal’s article. And I believe it is also a difficulty for people studying a brand-new language. Because when I was studying English, I found lots of words couldn’t be interpreted in Chinese way. For example, in Chinese (my native language), we say “I made a dream”, but in English, we say “I had a dream”. So, this difference pushed you to think differently when you saying a new language. But even now, sometimes I would say English in “Chinese way”, which could be understood but was not correct. And we call this kind of mistake as “Chinglish” (I think?). So this means even though you know a number of words in a new language but sometimes you may still use them in a wrong way because the collocations are different. This reminded me that I need to learn language in really native and flexible ways but not just focused on remembering vocabulary and grammar. For example, I should listen some Turkish local radio or watch local TV shows. And I should often communicate with my language partner so that I can learn their language customs. Also, we can even intentionally compare the collocations in Chinese and in Turkish so that I can be aware of the difference in advance.
Also, I believe language is a purely biological phenomenon. Sometimes if you find you can’t learn a language well, this may be because your method is wrong or your brain can’t “absorb” this kind of language system. Because I have a friend who was not good at studying English. She felt that learning English was the hardest thing ever and she could never make it. So her English grades were really bad and she thought she didn’t have the capability of studying languages at all. But recently, she was preparing to go to Korea for a master degree and she began to study Korean. It turned out that she only used four months to speak Korean very fluently and after she moved to Korea, her Korean became even more perfect. Right now she doesn’t think that she can’t learn a new language anymore.
The first reading discussed the composition of the brain, and the biology of language learning. The article analyzed the characteristics of specific parts of the brain, and how each individual parts contribute in forming our language learning abilities. Though human’s biological nature do shape our ability to comprehend speech, our ability to acquire more knowledge and learn more languages are defined by neurology. In the section “Localization,” the work of neurologists Paul Pierre Broca and Carl Wernicke only suggested that “damage to specific areas of the cortex correlated with the loss of certain kind of linguistic ability in their patients.” (Crystal, 174) Physical defects could affect one’s ability, but there is no evidence suggesting that some people are physically more capable in language learning than others. Like the TED talk we heard from Benny Lewis, language is not a purely biological phenomenon, and anyone can learn more languages with the right method.
While reading the second assigned article “How we mean,” the section on the necessity of studying both the “sense” and the “reference” of different languages, in order to understand their distinctions, reminded me of one discussion session during my HIST299 ST: Human Rights Course. During our seminar, we were studying the meaning of “Human Rights” and how it had evolved during time, and I noticed that in Mandarin Chinese, Human Rights is 人权, which is also a word of word translation of the phrase. What was interesting is that 权also means power and authority in Mandarin. The difference in the sense and reference of this phrase could imply larger cultural and social differences between the Chinese and Western Civilization, and this further indicates the significance of analyzing the distinctions between “sense” and “reference”.
This week I’ve been working on my language learning plan with the hope of devising a plan which is the best suited to my learning style. To start developing that I wanted to dive deeper into my motivations for choosing to learn Korean and what I want to get out of this course. I am really interested in learning more about the Korean culture and how people interact in their everyday lives. I want to be able to understand what ‘adding honorifics’ means, I want to know more about the fun games that kids used to play in middle school, I want to be able to truly understand the emotion behind a Korean song, I want to have a favourite Korean dish and be able to cook it, and I want to be able to form meaningful connections with people in Korean the way I could in Hindi and Telugu and a huge part of that again goes back to the culture and food. So, my main goals for this semester are to be good with conversational Korean and to get a deep understanding of the Korean culture, values, and food.
From the survey I learnt that I’m a tactile and visual learner. So I think my learning process would be ost efficient if I include activities which require those senses to be engaged. I unintentionally picked up some conversational Japanese from watching a lot of anime, so I think that watching k-dramas would be a good way for me to get used to the pronunciations and for me to see how people interact. Building my vocabulary by going through the object around me and labelling them in Korean would also be a good example of an activity that works with my learning style.
I also learned that my top few intelligences are logic, social, self, and spatial. I can incorporate activities in my learning plan which focus on these strengths to make it easier for me to learn new things. I can expand my vocabulary by diving into the etymology of the words and studying common root words. I can learn sentence structure by working with scrambled sentences. I love doing sudokus, word searches, and crossword puzzels, so I could do them in Korean to get a better grasp of Hangul and to expand my vocabulary. I have few friends who speak Korean so I can try to keep conversing with then in Korean whenever possible. Reading dialogues or reciting lyrics would also be super fun and helpful. I could read one inspirational/ motivational quote in Korean everyday. All these activities utilize my strengths and interests to keep me motivated and engaged in my language learning journey.
Above all, I want to make sure that I stay flexible with my language learning plan. I want to set goals and I want to assess how I chose to reach them and how effective my plan was. Then I want to look into my next goal and adjust the plan to accommodate more of what worked best and less of what didn’t work.
I believe that through this process of using my strengths and reflecting on how I’m responding to each activity, I can achieve my language learning goals.
I am Korean American, but I do not know how to speak Korean. Growing up, I was always hearing Korean being spoken, as I attended a large Korean American church. However, my parents did not speak Korean at home, so I was not forced to learn it. This semester, I hope to become conversational in Korean. My main motivation for learning Korean is to be able to converse with my grandmother, who speaks only Korean. My other motivations include being able to talk with members of my church, as well as my international friends from Korea. By the end of the semester, I hope to be able to have short conversations in Korean.
To begin, I want to learn general greetings and farewells in Korean. I also want to be able to introduce myself, so I hope to learn how to describe my school, my fields of study, my interests, hobbies, schedule, and daily activities. I hope that learning the terms to describe my life will help me recognize them when I hear other people describe themselves. I think that learning religious terms is also important because the setting I find myself surrounded by Korean speakers the most is church. Finally, I want to become more comfortable with ordering food at a restaurant and describing food, because food is an essential part of Korean culture.
Last semester, I listened to the Talk To Me In Korean podcasts infrequently. I think these lessons are good to listen to while I am doing something else, but I did not retain much information from them. Over the summer, I started learning Korean using a cell phone app called Eggbun. I thought it was very helpful because it simplified concepts into small, easy-to-understand bits of information. What I focused on was learning borrowed words: Korean terms that are basically English words but pronounced differently. I was able to learn a few Korean letters through this exercise, because I knew what the sounds were supposed to be. I also started watching Sky Castle, which is a Korean drama about the Korean education system. This is a topic that I am very interested in, as I may possibly want to work in it in the future. I think that watching dramas and videos in Korean helps me become more familiar with recognizing the sounds that are unique to the Korean language. I hope to be able to watch and understand more Korean content without having to rely solely on subtitles.
The place I am most excited to travel to one day is Korea, as I have never been there. The main reason is that I want to learn more about Korean culture. I know very little about the current events, politics, and popular culture of Korea. I want to explore the identity that has always been a part of me, but I have never delved into before.
This semester, I expect to feel embarrassment as I learn Korean. I am very unfamiliar with the sounds that are unique to Korean. It is also challenging because people may assume that I understand the language because of my ethnicity. When I am in a setting where the majority of the people are Korean, people assume that I understand Korean. It is awkward when I do not know what to say when someone is speaking Korean to me. It also makes me feel different when people are shocked to hear that I do not speak any Korean, and that my parents are more comfortable speaking English than Korean.
What I am most looking forward to this semester is the community engagement opportunity through the SDLAP. I believe that immersion is the most effective way to learn and practice a new language. I studied Spanish in the classroom for eight years, but I also traveled to Peru in the summers of 2016, 2017, and 2018, each for a week. Each week I spent in Peru taught me about a year’s worth of classroom instruction. It is a completely different experience speaking with native speakers. I hope that routine interaction with native Korean speakers will force me to break out of my comfort zone and give me many opportunities to practice Korean.
