This week I would like to watch the upcoming Champions league in Portugese. I hope that when I watch the game I will not need any clarification as to what the announcers are saying. I hope that through my soccer vocabulary I will to be comprehend the necessary information from each sentence the announcer says.
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When trying to read in Portuguese I feel as though I have progressed a lot. Due to my expansion in vocabulary I feel as though I have gained a much stronger ability to read in Portuguese. Mores specifically I feel I have improved alot when reading about soccer. I have a pretty good sense as to what the article is trying to express. In terms of writing I really cannot write anything in Portuguese as I am still unable to conjugate verbs or formulate sentence structure.
This week, Joora and I learned about the different dialects (satoori) in South Korea. I specifically wanted to learn more about the Busan dialect, because my dad's side of the family lives in Busan, South Korea. This was a really fun lesson because Joora and I watched Youtube videos that compared and contrasted the different accents of different regions in Korea, which to me, sounded awkward and funny (Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCchIPz_pBs; Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPZa-Zge5ak). It was really interesting to see how the same sentence ended up sounding so different. The tones and the speed of the words varied a lot between the different dialects as well. For example, Busan satoori is has more variations between tones and Chungcheong-do satoori spoke very slowly. I grew up hearing the standard Seoul dialect from my parents, but I have noticed that my mom has a slight dialect when she speaks with her family and friends back in Korea. After watching the videos, we read more into the different dialects of Korean online (https://www.dramafever.com/news/the-different-dialects-of-the-korean-language/).
I also learned how to refer days, such as day before yesterday, the day after tomorrow, etc. My parents would always use these words to describe time and events and I always had to ask them which day specifically they were referring to because I would always get them mixed up. This lesson was extremely useful and practical and I think it'll definitely come in handy when I need to schedule something or refer to a specific day/event.
일 월 화 수 목 금 토 일
그끄저께 그저께 어제 오늘 내일 모레 글피 그글피
-3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4
This semester, I worked on a range of topics from writing diary entries to reading Korean myths to applying to jobs. Even though the things i worked on are disconnected, at first glance, they proved to truly build off of one another. The grammar structures I learned along the way could be applied to all of the activities I worked on from reading to writing. Furthermore, I learned a lot of useful vocab along the way, especially vocab related with work. Learning this vocab was essential for reading job opening posts and understanding requirements for applications. Furthermore, learning job related vocab made writing my resume and cover letter much easier.
I wish my semester was not so hectic so I could have devoted more time to daily Korean study. Often, I found myself cramming my study in when I had a few open time blocks on the weekend or evening but I wish I could have studied in a more relaxed way.
Regardless, I feel that I made a lot of progress. I am able to read job listings now with ease and read most things much faster than before. I feel that my reading and pronunciation practice with my language partner has really made it easier for me to put more difficult sounds and sentence structures together. Also, I feel that working my language partner has helped me better identify my weaknesses and problem areas.
Of course, I experienced many difficulties. Being in an intermediate level can feel very frustrating because beginner feels far away but advanced seems impossible. I still required a lot of help in terms of editing my cover letter, resume, and other documents. While I was able to get across my main points, I still need help to come across professional or stylistic in my writing. However, those goals seem far out of my reach. Another problem is that in this level I start to learn grammar points that have the same meaning yet a very nuanced difference. As in, one sounds more "natural" than the other in some situation but the situations are conflicting and hard to really understand. At this level, some grammar stop having an answer to "why" and just become "because." Future learning should revolve around speaking situations and learning what is "natural" in which situation.
Reflect on your learning experiences this semester.
(a) What insights have you gained about yourself as a language learner and cultural explorer? What did you find difficult? What have you enjoyed? How will you continue your learning?
I have learned a few things about myself and my learning style over this past semester. One thing I learned is that I work better when I have a textbook or complete language learning resource. Using an online service was often too little for me and left me having questions and wishing I could cross-reference things but that is often not possible online. Furthermore, using online resources can be distracting due to the ease of accessing a different website and just procrastinating. Also, I can retain information much better when I make time daily to study Korean, however, my schedule this semester has rarely permitted that so I have found that to be frustrating. In the future, I would set aside 30-1 hour a day to just focus on studying. However, I’m not sure how possible that will be once entering the workforce. I would say that this time restrain was the most difficult part of my learning process because I would often have to spend a lot of time refreshing the last lesson before moving forward with a new element. Also, I have felt my speaking get much worse since leaving Korea simply because I don’t use it as often as I used to. In Korea, I would have to practice speaking prompts often so that I could prepare myself for ordering food, asking for something at a store, etc. In terms of culture, this semester I spent a lot of time listening to Korean news and reading Korean cultural articles. I think that this has really helped me understanding Korean life better because these topics simply aren’t discussed in English. I listen to the daily Korean news every evening while doing homework so it has been nice to see the daily progress of new events and be able to discuss these events with my Korean friends. I hope to continue studying this so that I can understand Korean daily life and culture better.
I will continue my learning by continuing with the books I ordered and reading articles in Korean. I often use the app HelloTalk to find new people to practice Korean with, especially people whose English is not so good. It’s nice to speak with a range of people and get exposure to different style of Korean texting and casual speech. Since, I have accepted a job in Korea recently, I hope that will further push me to learn more and I hope to take some night classes while living in Korea.
(b) Which readings and learning activities did you find most useful? What would you like to learn more about?
I found the cultural presentations the most interesting just because they push us to fully flesh out our interests but also because you can learn about things you didn’t consider before. For example, I never really considered the lower school system in Korea but it was nice to learn about it. These types of projects are nice because it is nice to learn about other people’s interests. Furthermore, I enjoyed the readings about dying languages and how to save them. I have never really considered the concept of language preservation and what that entails.
For my presentation, I discussed the goal of my semester which was to find a job. The goal of my presentation was the highlight the differences between the job hunt in Korea and America. Also, I wanted to make people aware of the challenges that native Korean applicants and foreign applicants face when applying for positions in Korea. Often, foreigners have a perception that finding jobs in Korea is easy simply because finding teaching jobs in Korea is easy, however, it is anything but.
I didn't rely heavily on outside sources for this presentation. The presentation highlights a lot of my own experiences while job hunting. These experiences range from attending interviews in Korea to applying to and replying to positions via email.
For my final artifact, I am submitting the document that I worked on to prepare for my interview. This artifact shows my thoughts both in English and Korean and reflects a lot about myself and my ability to express myself in Korean. I ended up passing the interview and receiving the job thanks to my preparations.
This week, I had an unexpected interview come up with a Korean advertising agency. The interview was the final step of my review process and if I passed the interview, then I would be able to join the company first as an intern and then segway into a full-time position. Because of this interview, I refocused my language goal for the week so that I would just focus on preparation for the interview. The interview took place on Wednesday night (Thursday morning KST).
Since I wasn't sure whether this interview would be in Korean or English, I decided to prepare interview answers in both languages. Therefore, I first created a document of possible questions which I came up by asking my Korean friends about the interview questions they typically experience. The purpose of including the questions themselves was to make sure I could recognize the question that should trigger my answer. For example, "Explain your career goals? And how this company relates to your goals?" is roughly "경력 목표를 설명하십시오. 그리고 이 회사는 당신의 목표와 어떻게 관련이 있습니까?" in Korean. From there, I created my English responses and began translating some responses to Korean. I met with my language partner to translate more difficult passages and go over grammar points.
This turned out to be a challenging assignment because I had to imagine the full course of a conversation, the needed formality level, and how to keep the conversation conversational yet still professional.
Learning to read and write in Korean has definitely been challenging. I attribute the challenge to the grammar itself. Often in Korean, you have to read, write, and think backwards (from English). Since sentence structure is SOV, I can go through an entire chain of modifying verbs and adjectives before ever reaching the object of the sentence. One of the activities I've been focusing on with my language partner has been reading texts about 1-2 levels above my current ability to challenge myself. While reading, I look up unfamiliar words and grammar patterns and then discuss my "translation" or my comprehension with my language partner. From this, I've learning new reading techniques where I group words by grammatical function in order to streamline the comprehension process.
Writing and speaking are the two biggest components of my twice weekly Korean group lessons. However, the same issues with reading arise. Often I will write down a few words that I want to use and then rearrange them so they can fit in the grammatical structure correctly. In some cases I can write the sentence down correctly the first time but the rearrangement method is useful when using new grammar points where a reference is not available. Overall, it has been difficult to learn to read and write in Korean because it requires me to do some mental acrobatics. However, I do feel a great improvement compared to my ability at the beginning of the semester.
For this week, I learned basic Korean food vocabularies, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My language partner and I practiced the words by asking “did you eat breakfast/lunch/dinner”. Also, I learned how to say several common foods and drinks such as water, milk, and bread. At the same time, I also studied several traditional Korean foods such as Kimchi and Bibimbap, which are familiar to me because I often eat Korean food. In order to memorize these many words, my language partner and I repeat them by asking “do you like…” Next time I go to a Korean restaurant, I might be able to read the menu in Korean characters. In addition, I learned to say “delicious” and “awful” so that I can make comments on the foods I learned.
In this artifact, I talk about my daily routine from when I wake up to when I go to bed. I talk about my hygiene exercises, my eating schedules, and what I like to do to take a break from school work.
My goals for these past two weeks were to:
- A) Begin Chapter 9: Characteristics of Humans, Animals, and Objects, sourced from the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture;
- B) Continue reading Indonesian comic books, sourced from the internet; and
- C) Continue reading about Indonesia's geopolitical stance in the Pacific -- BBC, Jakarta Post, etc.
- D) Meet with my partner for four hours
Strategies to accomplish these goals:
- A) I am halfway done with Chapter 9: Characteristics of Humans, Animals, and Objects. At the end of each session, I collected the new vocabulary that I learned. In addition, I worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills through the units' activities. I have amassed a large vocabulary pertaining to the topics that will prove useful in daily conversations. The unit's goals are to learn about Human, Animal, and object characteristics; and to give information about colors, shapes, and the location of objects
- B) I continued to read comics whose genres range from comedy to drama to fairytale. Here, this exercise allows me to get a better grasp on the "street" language as these comics use informal speech. It is important for me to not only learn the vocabulary but gain an understanding of the informal sentence structure patterns as well as the culture behind the conversations.
- C) I met with my language learning partner for 4 hours over these past two weeks. During these meetings, we worked on my speaking, writing, reading, and listening skills.
Week 9
Last week, I learned about how to tell time which I found to be challenging but also incredibly helpful for this weeks lesson on numbers and dates. We learned about the calendar in Turkey and how to say the different months: ocak, subat, mart, nisan, mayis, haziran, temmuz, agustos, eylul, ekim, kasim, and aralik. We also learned how to say the days of the week: paar, pazartesi, sali, carsamba, persembe, cuma, cumartesi. Then we learned about the different seasons where winter is: kis, spring is: bahar, summer is yaz, and fall is sonbahar. After learning the vocabulary, we applied this new knowledge to telling the weather where we looked at the forecast of the week at Turkey and we had to say the month, day of the week, season, and whether it was sunny, rainy, or cloudy. I found this exercise to be very useful for understanding numbers and dates and I am excited to see how we continue to build on this new knowledge.
This week we learned about telling time which is such an important part of learning a new language. At first, I found it difficult to grasp because the words are very different from English, but once I caught on to the pattern it was a lot easier to understand. As I memorized the vocabulary and continued to practice with my peers, telling time became fun. In order to ask "What time is it?" we have to say, "Saat kaç?"And in order to respond saying, "It is 11" you say "Saat on bir". I also found it easier to learn this concept since I knew the number system in Turkish. It was also very helpful to play an interactive game to fully grasp telling time and apply what we learned in a fun and exciting way. I look forward to building on this knowledge by learning about the days of the week next class.
I think that the Turkish course is going well so far and I am on track for my learning plan. I am able to have basic conversations with the rest of the class and I am also able to understand simple dialogues. Apart from learning basic greetings and a foundation in the alphabet, numbers, and basic words we are also learning how to ask for directions which is one of my learning goals. And while we have learned about the culture of Turkey, we still have not touched on how the government as much especially how to say government terms in Turkish which I hope to learn by the end of the semester. I look forward to learning about the different seasons and how to tell the weather in Turkish. Also, I am curious about family structures and values in Turkey. I will continue to work on what I've learned by practicing pronunciations, reviewing vocabulary and having conversations outside the classroom in Turkish.
For this week, I reviewed Korean alphabets agains in class through pronouncing a set of Korean dishes. Most of the time I am able to fully say the words and felt more confident at saying them. When I watch some Korean TV shows, I sometimes can identify single words that they spoke, which I feel happy about. I focused on a set of words for my cultural presentation on South Korean's gender equality issue. They are: society -사회, men - 남자, women -여자들, economy -경제, equality - 평등, inequality-불평등. I also learned about K-pop's trainee system and Turkey's women's rights from the cultural presentations. I realized how competitive South Korea's entertainment industry is and the progress Turkey made on women's rights over the decades.
Learning Journal #11
One of my personal goals was to be able to talk about the future in Korean, building on my ability to speak in different tenses. I have been practicing this through my bi weekly calls with my mom. Recently, I have been learning how to say my major and my career path in Korean. It is difficult because I grew up skipping many syllables when speaking Korean with my family members who grew to understand what I meant. Therefore, it is difficult trying to learn a new way of saying many phrases I am used to naturally shortening. I also tend to forget many of the vocabulary words for my major and the correct way to put words together. 저는 심리학와 생물학 공부핼거에요. 조롭할대 저는 대학원갈거에요. Though rife with spelling mistakes and errors, I am trying to memorize and be better at saying what I want to do with my majors when I grow up, The sentence states that “I am going to study psychology and biology. When I graduate I want to go to graduate school.” I hope to build on my vocabulary and be able to say more advanced statements such as the subjects I am considering going to graduate school for and the occupations I am considering.
