During my trip to Toronto I stayed in Chinatown and decided to look for an authentic Korean restaurant that is not too westernized. I wanted to try authentic Korean food to get to know Korean culture better. I ended up going to a restaurant called Biwon, or 비원, which means “taste of secret garden”. It was very authentic and run by Koreans, soley speaking Hangul with each other. I received six plates with small portions of various side dishes, called Banchan, as well as a pot of Korean tea, Boricha, upon ordering the food. The side dishes included Kimchi, Sukjunamul, Kkadugi, Japchae, Mu Saenghae, and Gaji namul. As a main course, I ordered Dduk Bokki and Bulgogi, or marinated sirloin beef and rice cakes. The person accompanying me on my trip to Toronto ordered Bokeum Bap, stir fried rice with chicken. It was a great to experience an authentic Korean meal, including Banchan and Boricha, to get in touch with the culture related to my target language through this experience, and to hear people speak Korean in a natural setting.
All Posts (9261)
Sort by
I watched a documentary this week about Anglo-Indians and I would like to talk a little bit about that. The film is called "A Calcutta Christmas" and was produced in 1998. Some of the information may be a bit dated.
India was ruled by the British since the mid-20th century, and Anglo-Indians are remnants of that rule. They are the descendants of British-Indian marriages, and were meant to bring alliances between the two counties closer (and help business/British rule). While Anglo-Indians used to be mostly upper-class and lived a very privileged and separated life in India, they have now become a sort of half-way race between the cultures, not fitting into either. The British do not fully accept them, and India does not fully accept them.
According to the documentary, most of the wealthier Anglo-Indians have since moved to Britain or Australia. In fact, when India first gained independence, there was a large migration of Anglo-Indians moving to what they considered their "home country". However, many of the less affluent Anglo-Indians remained in India, serving as remnants of a previous era. This documentary in particular was about a group of destitute older people who lived in an old-age home called ". Some of them live in an old-age home called "Tollygunge Homes" in Kolkata.
Watching the film was a unique experience because to felt like stepping into a former time - one where Indian customs, mannerisms, and language sounds blended with British. Many of the mannerisms of the residents of Tollygunge Homes were very British - a particular way of the folding the hands, listening to Pavarotti, or dressing in suits and vintage British clothes. And yet other aspects were definitely from Indian culture - a certain way of eating rice with the fingers or the uniquely thick and musical Indian-English accent.
Some of the more salient parts of the film were the descriptions of racism and prejudice between Anglo-Indians and "pure" Indians. There was one Anglo-Indian man that was relatively darker skinned, and his wife felt the need to defend her decision to marry him. She said she didn't pay any thought to the color of his skin (even though his whole life he was mistreated for it) but she married him because he was a "very, very, very nice man". She said, in context of how people mistreated his for his color,
"What is the difference? He is a human being - he has as much feelings as anybody else has. They even told it to my face in this place, 'What did you see enough to marry him?' I saw something you all could not have seen. I don't look for the complexion or the features. I look for the nature of the person. And I have never regretted one day having married my husband. Never. And if I had to do it again, I would do it again and again. Because, honestly I'm not saying it because he's [here], but he's a very, very, very nice man." [Below is a photo of the couple.]
There is certainly a lot of animosity between differently perceived groups in the world, and India is no exception, but it takes one decision at a time like marrying a "very, very, very nice man" or helping those different from you, to make the world a better place.
While I am currently not learning Turkish, the discussion posed in class about each individual’s learning plans illuminated some of the aspects of my own learning plan that may not work very well in practice. Many students mentioned how parceling out specific times for specific activities can be detrimental to the flow of a conversation or learning opportunity. I do not do this in my learning plan, but I do limit my learning to specific topics, with a new topic being introduced along a regular time frame. I feel that in order to create a more organic discussion-based learning opportunity (especially when learning with a language-learning mentor), these topics can act more as guidelines or preparation for a discussion. For example, if I prepare by learning vocabulary on a certain topic, it is very likely I will want to speak about that topic. However, if the conversation is naturally steered into another direction, this discussion is still very useful to my pursuit of Turkish. Another thing I learned from current Turkish language learners is that their language-learning mentor allows them to make mistakes, and then, instead of correcting them, tries to have them identify and fix those mistakes. While I am unable to make a claim about Turkish culture in general (it is dangerous to make one person representative of a whole culture), it seems this may be evidence that the language-learning mentor (Mervé ?) places some value in independence (allowing one to solve his/her own problems).
It seems possible—and potentially harmful towards later language learning—that the main aspect of communicative competence that I will be learning is only linguistic competence. While this will provide some benefit in that I know vocabulary and methods of connecting that vocabulary into sentences and phrases, this will not be enough to provide me with communicative competence, as I am missing out on the sociolinguistic, strategic, and discourse competences that are encompassed within communicative competence. While to a small extent, language can be separated from culture (as seen by someone exhibiting purely linguistic competence), obviously one cannot communicate effectively without some cultural knowledge as well (whether this be idioms, patterns of speech, or even when to speak or tone of voice). Luckily, my learning plan seems to deal a little bit with these other aspects of communicative competence, including strategic competence, as I aim to reduce any communication breakdown errors by learning how to ask what certain words mean as well as how to say a certain word in the target language. While I will be addressing discourse competence by speaking weekly with a language mentor, I feel I should add a writing aspect to my learning plan so that I become more comfortable portraying coherent thoughts both orally and through writing. Sociolinguistic competence seems the most challenging of all the competences, and I feel I will only gradually learn this by asking questions of my language learning mentor as well as observing her own speaking interactions with others. Of course, the best way to gain sociolinguistic competence (as well as communicative competence in general) would probably be to go abroad.
The Chinese community is going crazy over a new Korean drama show called "Touch Your Heart" (진심이 닿다). I have recently started watching the show and it have been very funny and different from the past drama shows. The show is played by two very famous actor/actress, Yoo In-na and Lee Dong-wook, who have, in the past, played as a couple in the show Guardian: The Lonely and Great God. Their performance is also very good in this show. The drama is about a top actress who is experiencing her downfall due to a scandal and meets a lawyer, and the ensuing romance between them.
I have been practicing Korean with my classmate Amber Shen, we use Korean keyboard to practice some basic greeting sentences such as how are you, and my name is .... This helps us reinforce our knowledge and practice even when we are not in class.
My love for Korean food grows everyday, yesterday I visited New Grand Mart again for a combination bowl of 탕수육 (sweet and sour pork) and 자장면 (a noodle dish with a sauce of pork, chunjang and vegetables)
It has been a challenge learning Korean without a teacher or language partner. After all, the purpose of language is to communicate with other people. I have deviated from my learning plan to account for this. Instead of learning vocabulary terms for specific topics, I have been learning more general phrases that are used in everyday conversation. This is because my goal is to converse in Korean. Rewatching my presentation also reminded me that learning a language can be fun! A lot of people learn a different language by watching TV shows or listening to music. I may need someone to teach me the technical aspects of Korean, but I can watch Korean videos/listen to Korean music on my own. I won’t understand all of the words, but it will help me become familiar with Korean sounds.
The in-class discussions about sound have been helpful in learning how to pronounce Korean words. The Korean language contains many sounds that are not used in the English language, so learning about how different sounds are produced is helpful. However, overall, I feel like there are several areas in which I have not seen the connection between what we have discussed in class and my efforts learning Korean. Similar to music, I hope to see how studying theory and playing an instrument relate to each other. I want to focus more on discovering and developing learning strategies. I think this will be very useful in connecting the abstract aspects of language and the practical language learning we do outside of class.
I have learned that language and culture have a closer relationship than I previously thought. There are many areas in the Korean language that are dependent on the speaker’s age in relation to the listener. This reflects the cultural value of respecting one’s elders. This also relates to the connection between language and culture in Spanish, which uses masculine and feminine words. Lately, people have been using neutral-gendered words instead. For example, the term “Latinx” arose as a gender-neutral alternative of Latino or Latina. Therefore, learning about Korean culture in addition to the language will help me improve my communicative competence.
I am focused on improving my basic interpersonal communicative skills because there are people in my life who only speak Korean who I wish to communicate with. I have learned the hard and embarrassing way that my grammar does not need to be absolutely perfect in order to be understood. (When I was in Peru, I made a very silly and amateur grammar mistake. The person I was talking to laughed at me but was still able to understand me.) Hence, discourse competence is emphasized in my learning plan, but sociolinguistic competence is also important, particularly for Korean. My goal in learning Korean is simply to be able to converse with Korean speakers, so that I may have more meaningful relationships with them.
Recently visited Gogi Bibimbap in Richmond. The food was really good and I prefer the bibimbap here because they allow me to choose my own vegetables and meat in the bowl. As most Korean restaurants I visited put kimchi or onions in the bowl, which I don't like eating as much, this option of putting my own choice is much better.
Some taboos in Korean culture are:
- Do not wear your shoes in places of worship or peoples’ homes
- Do not put your feet on furniture
- Do not eat or drink in public places while walking
- Do not place your thumb between your middle and index finger while making a fist as this an obscene gesture
- Do not use red ink. This is a symbol of death and is reserved only for writing the names of the deceased. It is considered unlucky and suggests you wish death to the recipient
- Do not use the number four if at all possible – if giving gifts, do not give four of something. It is considered unlucky due to the similarity between the Korean word for death and the pronunciation of the word ‘four’
- Do not stand too close to people you are meeting for the first time – keep an arms length between you
Some of these taboos are the same as Chinese culture, such as using red ink and using the number four. The number four taboo, I would consider to be the most important. I know that in some Chinese buildings, they avoid putting a fourth floor just to avoid the number. I don't know if the number four is to be avoided as much in Korea.
I have been reading about the proper etiquettes to follow when entering a Korean family home. There are some restrictions that are very different from Western culture. First, it is always the case to remove your shoes when entering someone else's home. Being invited to a Korean's home is an honor and politeness and respect is expected highly. Some ways of demonstrating this respect is to never pour your own drinks as the host will do so for you, and to bring a small gift as expression of your gratitude. Some of these restrictions are unsurprising because it is generally universal to treat the host with politeness and respect.
In class, my learning partner Evelyn gave me a Korean name that has similar meaning to my chinese name 경태 (gyeong tae), means admiration and sunlight. Like many other Asian culture, the Korean naming convention goes in the order of Family name first, and then given name. I recently read an article that states it is generally considered impolite to refer to people by his or her given name. Instead, they should be referred to by their professional titles, such as Mr, Mrs, Ms. etc, until permission is given otherwise. I think the extent to which this is true is another extension of the strict formality in Korean culture.
After I watched my presentation, most parts of my plan are on the pace and I am satisfied with the progress. The issue deviated most is that we did not have a non-English language environment in class since I am still in the beginning level and my teaching partner need to explain almost everything in English. We have finished learning Korean alphabet in two weeks and I used the methods of recording me and Seonghye reading Hangul to compare, correct my own pronunciation, and imitate her.
I like the idea about the relationship between different languages, and I gain the benefit in my process of learning Korean. Since more than half of the Korean language is made up of borrowings from Chinese, the learning is not so difficult for me personally. Take the word ‘library’ as an example. In Korean it is written as 도서관 and read almost same as 图书馆 in Chinese. After I can use Hangul to read Korean vocabularies, we can keep going to learn daily greeting and basic conversation in specific situation such as to order food in restaurant, to ask direction and to check in in the airport. My learning plan is emphasized on the practical usage of Korean in daily life.
The sometimes burdensome formalities in Korean culture is largely influenced the strong ethics codes set out in Confucianism. Confucianism is one of the formal religions practices in Korea, among these major religions also consist of Buddhism and Christianity. But Confucian thinking influenced ancient Korean culture the most and therefore the fundamental values of Confucianism, such as filial piety, ancestor worship, and humanness, are most reflected in Korean culture. The formalities system, expressed through language and greetings, reflect these values. It is interesting to see a culture so dependent on Confucianism as guiding philosophy in politics and social live.
In my opinion, my Korean class is going really well so far and in general, I follow my learning plan. I learned and improved a lot during these 8 weeks. In these 8 weeks, there were a lot of change happening including I can read Korean alphabet smoothly now. Moreover, I learned grammar in the class. Now I know how to ask questions such as “What did you do?”,”What will you do today?” in Korean using past tense and future tense.
At the same time, the materials used in class also were really helpful. My language partner sometimes will give us worksheets which have a great number of new words on it. We need to remember every word before the class so that we can understand the class material better.
Also, my language partner will always use videos to help us understand Korean culture. For example, on March 1st, she showed us a picture of a status and told us that day was a really important day for Korean people. And she told us the history about that day. This made learning process more interesting and also help me know more about Korean culture.
I believe the language structure is important to understand.I am still trying to find a way to apply what we learned in SDLC105 like language structure and language family to help me understand the target language and culture. But since I knew Korean was created basing on Chinese, as a Chinese, I feel like I can learn Korean more easily. And I find my best way to learn language efficiently.
I currently am not in SDLC 110, but I have thought about my learning plan and have made some changes to it. The overall change I have made to my learning plan is just to be more detailed. I think my goals have remained the same. I still plan to follow all 10 of the steps I had in my learning plan, but I now have more things to think about and have specific resources I want to use. Instead of vaguely saying "Youtube videos" I have identified a few channels/online resources for Turkish language such as nur77akaltun (Youtube Channel), Learn Turkish Online, Turkish Basics, Turkish Language Class, and İngilizce Türkçe Hikayeler. With our class discussions and the videos we watched in class from TEDtalks, have given me ideas to expand my learning even further. For example, the video from Benny Lewis and readings about linguistic families encouraged me to look up Turkish-English cognates, since that will provide me hundreds of words that are already in my own vocabulary. Some words such as cigarette - sigara, ironic - ironik, million - milyon, music - müzik, surprise - sürpriz, vision - vizyon, to name a few. These just a handful of the many other words that exist in the language that overlap with ours. In finding familiar words like these, I am already much better off, even though I may not be needing these words for many situations, having them in my vocabulary is already benefiting me.
I think relationships between language and culture is very important to understand. There often are many norms in language that non-native speakers may not understand/recognize until we are put in certain situations. In improving my communicative competence, I hope to grow a better understanding of the norms and meanings in words/sayings/grammar in Turkish, in order for me to better grasp the language and also communicate effectively with other individuals. My Learning Plan incorporates grammatical competence in a sense where I hope to learn all pronouns and all the cases in Turkish, since language is not language without grammar, rather it would just be words. My Learning Plan does not involve discourse competence yet, since I do not think I will have ability for me to construct more than 3 sentences at a time. I have not reached the level of competence or proficiency in Turkish for me to be able to think more than using a handful of sayings in the right grammatical form. Sociolinguistic competence is something I hope to learn more about through interactions with the culture and native speakers since I will be better able to understand things such as power distance in language/behavior/culture.
Reflect on your language learning so far. How would you describe the relationship between language and culture? What do you need to do to improve your communicative competence? Based on the readings by H.D. Brown, what kinds of competence are emphasized in your learning plan?
My language learning process has been going pretty well. I have worked on all four goals that were mentioned in my learning plan: improve listening skills in the northern dialect, be able to fully comprehend tonal marks, increase comfort level in speaking, and expand my vocabulary. As stated in my learning plan, I starting off with learning the tonal marks and have increased my vocabulary through learning a new set of vocabulary each class. I also am doing the free-talk which has helped with improving my speech flow and vocal competency. I haven't worked on improving listening skills in the northern dialect as much as the other goals however. Additionally, in my lesson plan I mentioned that my language partner and I would meet 2-3 times a week, but it's been mostly just 2 times as we are both very busy. Furthermore, we aren't sticking so closely to the timeline I provided in my lesson plan for every class period. For example, sometimes our lesson practice would take longer than expected so our free-talk would be cut short. Other than that I think I've learnt a lot and have made immense progress.
In terms of incorporating SDLC 105 material into my language learning efforts, I've used materials on what type of learner I am to make my learning plan. I also personally found the research of language families informative. For example, that certain sounds in Vietnamese is only used in borrowed words from French. Besides that I haven't really incorporated much of the materials into my language learning as most of it is more theoretical.
I think that language and culture is closely interrelated. Language is used to convey and maintain various elements of culture including ideas and thinking and culture helps shape and mold language. For example, how one refers to themselves differs depending on their age in comparison to who they're speaking with, demonstrate the age hierarchy prevalent in Vietnamese culture.
To improve my communicative competence, I need to expand my communication pool; I need to simulate various situations where I would use the language. Since I only speak to my language partner, I am very used to a more relaxed speaking style. To improve I would need to practice speaking to someone who is a stranger, in a professional setting, to the elderly, to young children, etc. Based on the reading, my learning plan emphasizes discourse and sociolinguistic competence (from most to least in the order listed). It doesn't include though, grammatical or strategic competence. For grammatical, it is because I am at the advanced level in speaking so I didn't feel it necessary to go through the grammar structure of Vietnamese. For strategic competence, it isn't explicitly included, but can be practiced through the free-talk sessions in my lesson plan.
