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I could very much relate to the Culture Shock video because I am also an International student in this university. I mainly have American friends and did not establish relationships with any international students so I was unable to assess if my situation was unique or not. That is why the video was a fresh thing to witness. I learned that I was not the only who had a very difficult time adjusting to this country. I was very shocked when it came to greeting people. I come from India and although we are mainly a collectivist society, we do not greet and ask strangers how they are doing. When I was first asked that by people on campus I found it very strange but little did I realize that they did not ask it out of compassion or care but mainly because it was a normal way of greeting one another. I admit that I was a bit hurt when they walked pass me after asking such a weighted question but I got used to it one day at a time. This is why I can very much relate to them and this is why I never underestimate a person’s mental and emotional strength when they decide to go abroad for any reason.
I think my classmates did a very good job in explaining their assigned culture. I especially loved the presentation on Turkish coffee. It showed the difference between the coffee culture in the US and Turkey. The two presentations on Korean food were well done as well and the presentation on the traditional clothes of Korea, the Hanbok (including the shoes and the beosun) and where they are worn in modern types was a nice way to show how ancient Korean culture is still present today and not forgotten. I only wish that I had done as good of a job as they did when it came to the topic and information collection. It was very hard to find information on academic articles regarding the Korean Pop music industry.
The Korean language has words that resemble classical Chinese that is sometimes written in Chinese characters. The words are not written phonemically and instead are written in a constant form, therefore, even if the pronunciation is correct according to the spelling, the symbol block formations may be wrong. Korean sentence structure typically follows four forms – subject and noun (I am a student), subject and verb (She runs), subject and adjective (He is a student), and subject, object and verb (I water drink). The SOV is the most common type of sentence structure in the Korean language which is very different from the English language.
To start my learning process, I will use the following resources (including a mobile app called -Learn Korean-
https://www.howtostudykorean.com/
http://mangolanguages.com/index.html
https://www.koreanclass101.com/
Almost 2 million people speak Korean in China, mainly in provinces bordering North Korea. There are approximately half a million speakers in Japan and Russia, as well as significant numbers in the United States (over 600,000) with large communities on the west coast and in New York. Other communities are found in Singapore, Thailand, Guam, and Paraguay. The Korean language is one that stresses on respect and honor when it comes to age and status. Koreans use non-verbal language such as bowing as a sign of respect while things that are more affectionate (like kissing and hugging) are less common among people. In my opinion, it seems like a very humbling language. This is because when it comes to expressing things about oneself they do not use terms such as my country or my house or my mother, instead, they use the word ‘our’ to describe. In a way, it seems as if the usage of ‘our’ eliminates the self and discusses the collective. Maybe this reflects the collectivist mindset as opposed to the individualistic mindset.
- Learn how to talk about family
- Ask and answer questions about identity, where you are from, what you do, what we study
- Used Learn Korean App – It has an entire section on ‘Describing yourself’ (It provides full sentences in both questions and answer forms), vocabulary on daily routines, work, family, and school.
- Used Korean class 101 to learn vocabulary on hobbies and introductions.
After listening to my artifact (the recording of me saying my greetings, farewells, and introduction), I realized that I have to work a whole lot harder on my pronunciation. I also should work a lot harder on the fluidity of sentences. I’m very sure a native speaker of Korean would find it hard to understand me because my sentences and words do not flow as smooth as it should. It also made me realize that I should rethink my Learning Plan. I had such high hopes before starting the actual process of learning Korean but now I see how difficult communicating is. If I am struggling this hard with my verbal communication skills, then I am very sure my writing skills will be just as hard if not harder because I would have to remember how each word is spelled. Listening to the artifact was somewhat discouraging but none the less I will keep working at it because the goal of this course is important to me.
I made more progress after week 4 and 5 because of all the worksheets that I had. However, this was another reminder of how high of a level my Learning Plan is. I must return to it and make huge changes. I met with my Korean teacher as well and she showed some surprise when I told her I wanted to write a letter. She did not seem too hopeful when I mentioned it considering my level of learning. However, I have learned how to say a few sentences in Korean and I am able to write better in the script, which is a good amount of learning for me.
Week 4 and week 5 combined
- Read and write Hangul
- Spell and write words out in Hangul
- Get an idea of Korean sentence structure
- Learn how to greet others and say goodbye as well as introduce myself
Resources-
- https://saidnazulfiqar.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/basic-korean-grammar-and-workbook-by-andrew-byon.pdf
- https://www.eps.go.kr/exam/Hanguel.pdf
- Using app called Learn Korean on my phone for both vocabulary and Korean script (hangul)
- Using app called HelloTalk- You can converse (through texting) with real people in Korea in Korean and English. This helps in communication through writing.
- https://www.howtostudykorean.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/HowtoStudyKorean-Unit-1-Lesson-1.pdf
- https://www.howtostudykorean.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/HowtoStudyKorean-Unit-0-PDF.pdf
The goal of this week was to learn the Korean script since I am just a beginner. I planned to look at consonants first and then write them down till I could remember and pair sound to symbol. Then I would move to vowels and do the same. However, it was harder than I imagined. It helped when I met with my Language partner and my Korean teacher because they helped with the pronunciation. My language partner provided us with an article from a website to help learn the script in a much easier way. It made learning the alphabet much easier. I am still struggling with memorizing the sounds but with the help of this article, it has made it much easier.
This was the article from 9gag http://m.9gag.com/gag/3968335/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes
The websites that I have bookmarked are sites that provide both language lessons with worksheets and also provide articles that discuss Korean culture and history. The ‘How to Study Korean’ website, provides lessons based on category, therefore, for each week, they provide a lesson and worksheets that can be used. Lessons on grammar are categorized based on which level you are in – beginner, intermediate, upper-intermediate, lower-advanced and advanced. It provides a list of YouTube channels, listening practice lessons, vocabulary lists, themed lessons, workbooks, short stories and even Hanja lessons. This site also provides worksheets for the tenses. I feel that this would be very good for my study of the Korean language because of its organization, resources, and levels of knowledge. The second website I chose is ‘Learn Korean Language,’ which is a great source for learning about culture because it provides blogs, e-zines, news about Korea, information on Korean war, Taekwando and even information on Korea when you decide to travel Korea. Apart from resources about culture it also provides lessons for grammar. The combination of lessons on grammar in a culture makes it a great website for this course. For some reason, I am having trouble with BYKI so I cannot say much about this website, however, mango languages is a great way to study Korean because of its easy methods. The student does not have to go through the entire website in search of lessons. It’s easily accessible according to levels of knowledge and it also provides assessments at the end of the chapters. This makes it easier because the student does not have to go out of her way to make or find a type of assessment.
The two websites I chose will help me with learning the alphabet, the tenses, learning time and date (along with hanja symbols), vocabulary on everyday life as well as hobbies, family matters and cultural posts. The mango language website will help me reinforce what I have learned by providing assessments. I have started approaching my first task by trying to go over the Korean alphabet as well as looking at greetings (both informal and formal).
My goal of this course is to be able to write a letter to my friend in Korea describing my college experience in the US and asking her about her life in Korea by the end of this semester. Since I am a beginner in Korean, I plan to learn the alphabet first and hopefully this will be done quickly so I can move on to other tasks. I then plan to learn how to identify family members and discuss them and their lives. This is so I can learn vocabulary to help me communicate about my own family and my friend’s family in my letter that is the final task for this course. Next I will learn how to tell time and date because this is necessary for learning any language and culture. I will learn how to form sentences and conjugate verbs in the past and hopefully the future tense. Next I will learn how to discuss my college experience in the US, my field of study and also my daily activities. This will be hard because it is a huge chunk of vocabulary so I hope I will be able to this. I will then learn how to talk about my hobbies and perhaps sports so that I can talk about what I like to do in college when I am not studying. Before my final task I would like to order food from a Korean food place in Richmond to test my vocabulary skills. Finally, I will write a letter to my friend in Korea and use all the vocabulary I will learn throughout this semester. Hopefully the learning task I have in mind is doable in such a short span of time.
I realized that Korean pop music industry was not a good enough topic for my cultural project. After having watched everyone else’s presentation, I realized it did not represent Korean culture as well because K Pop music has not been practiced for as long as my peer’s practices and objects (like food and traditional clothes) to reflect the historical culture of Korea. My peers looked at culture from a more historic point of view whereas I looked at culture in a modern way. I suppose my perception of culture may be a bit off. I decided to change it and focus on classical Korean music instead, specifically musical instruments. I will focus primarily on stringed instruments alone because this subcategory is further divided into plucked, bowed and struck type of string instruments. Through this topic, I hope to understand how they used these instruments in the past and in modern times. I will look at where they were used and how it affected social events. I want to see who were allowed to play these instruments in the past (whether SES and other social factors affected who was allowed to play). I want to then compare the then and now usage and sounds of these instruments.
Korean is one of the older living languages whose origins are not quite clear because this language has similarities to both Chinese and Japanese. The Korean writing system is known as Hangul and on every 9th October, Koreans celebrate its birthday by having a day off work. The script was made from scratch and each alphabet or phoneme is grouped into symbols to represent a syllable and therefore is called a syllabary instead of an alphabet. In the past, the characters were written in columns but nowadays, Hangul is written from left to right. The language has ten vowels and 21 consonants and words are spelled by putting the symbols into blocks similar to Chinese characters. It is interesting to note that Korean is spoken by 2.7 million people in Chinese provinces that border North Korea. The combination of blocks are either consonant-vowel or consonant-vowel-consonant. If a vowel is at the beginning of a syllable then the silent vowel, ‘ㅇ’ is placed in front of it, for example ‘아.’ The Korean language has words that resemble classical Chinese that are sometimes written in Chinese characters. The words are not written phonemically and instead are written in a constant form, therefore, even if the pronunciation is correct according to the spelling, the symbol block formations may be wrong.
Bibliography
Hallen, Cynthia. "The History of Korean Language, The Overview." The History of Korean Language, The Overview. Department of Linguistics, 6 Sept. 1999. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
Martin, Samuel E. "Korean Language." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 01 Mar. 2011. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
Thompson, Irene. "Korean ." About World Languages. About World Languages, 19 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Feb. 2017.
S, S. C. "How Was Hangul Invented?" The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 08 Oct. 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
I chose Korean Pop music as a cultural topic because although it may not be an object used in Korean culture it is a practice that is followed by Koreans. The music as well as the performers’ way of living and dressing influences the music and fashion industry not only for people in Korea but other Asian countries as well like Taiwan, China and Japan. Teenagers (mostly females) are the most influenced group of people; the youngest audience is in China, followed by Taiwan whereas Japan has the oldest audience from the three. I think that it would be interesting to look further into how much the music influences people’s lives. I feel that it does go under practice because music is a form of practice in most if not all cultures in the world. K Pop specifically has its grasp on a huge part of the modern Korean culture as well as around the world. It is a booming business that makes millions and is exported all around the world. Delving deeper into the influence this topic has on Korea would be very interesting.
Formality and informality in the Korean language is a very constricting yet an easy system in my opinion. I say this because how you speak to a person is based on age and status and could thus reflect reflects how well your mannerisms are. It is an easy language because it helps categorize people and inform the speaker how to behave towards the other person they are communicating with. Korean language is a hierarchal language because it lets everyone who is listening know where they fall in terms of age and status (I have yet to find out if this reflects SES or not). From what I have learned so far, I feel that respect is a huge part of the Korean culture. Respect is expected to be given where it is due, that is, the older the person is the more respect they get or if the person is occupying a higher rank then he/she receives more respect than someone who is in a lower position. If not, the person who does not show respect through language is seen as someone who is rude or unruly. This is why it is necessary for people who have just met to ask for each other’s age and/ or job status which would be offensive in some cultures like the US. The emphasis on respect is so heavy that even language reflects respect which I have neither positive or negative remarks for. I can only say that it is very intriguing.
I like learning new scripts because I love being able to read languages even if I cannot understand them. Learning new Korean vocabulary would also be a plus point but mastering the script is my main goal. This may seem futile because if I were to go to Korea I would not be able to communicate if I do not know the meaning of each word but learning foreign scripts and being able to write them in a credible and sophisticated manner is something that has always interested me. That is why for this course, I hope that when I write my letter, I will be able to write it meticulously and neatly (while also understanding what I would be writing of course). Apart from learning the Korean script, I want to be able to communicate with my friend in Korean to show my respect and appreciation for her since she took care of me during the years we attended a boarding school. I feel that learning someone else’s language and cultural is a very good way to show respect for someone.
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.
Reflect on the presentations of your classmates.
From both of the presentations which talks about the way Korean will pay when eating out with friends and Turkish coffee, I can easily tell that these two cultures put a lot of emphasis on the way people treat each other. Like when Korean girls eat out with a Korean guy, the Korean guy is supposed to pay. What's more, if there are two people eat out together, the elder one should pay cause he/she might have higher economic ability. About the Turkish coffee, the bride has to know how to make coffee in order to win the groom's heart. In conclusion, from these two cultural aspects, we can find a lot of interesting backgrounds behind these two cultures, and they focus mainly on the interactions between people.
During these two weeks, our main focus was on the basis of Korean and basic "survival language". These words were simple vocabulary words that help in the everyday situation. Before the classes, I was always confused about certain basic Korean vocabulary and was never clear about them. Things like right turn, left turn were always confusing. Through these classes, I learned words for giving directions like "turn left, turn right, go straight" and words for describing days. These proved useful, because this is everyday language that I use to communicate with my parents. Through this, I learned to communicate more effectively and clearly.
Another topic we learned about was the broader Korean history. We learned about the Japanese rule, but how Korea was divided back in the days. Joora taught us vocabulary words that related to the topic and taught us basic Korean history. This was important for me to know, because I believe that as a Korean, I should know this. During this lesson, we also talked about King Sejong the Great and his accomplishments. Joora taught us that not only did he create the Korean language, but he also made several scientific and national security advancements for South Korea. He also made instruments and was the first person to make a device that measures precipitation. Because of this, I learned the vocabulary words for the specialized vocabulary of each of these topics.
During these two weeks, I learned the Korean language through different short stories and Korean specific cartoons called "webtunes." We read fables and different short stories in Korean to increase our reading level and vocabulary. I learned many interesting vocabulary and it allowed me to focus more on the reading aspect since the vocabulary was not too difficult. However, reading through these stories was not entirely efficient and I did not notice a change in my Korean reading levels. I am aware that reading is one of the hardest parts of learning a language, but I did not notice a change. Also, I did learn many different vocabulary, but most of them did not seem relevant to my life. I learned words like "sympathy, suitor, and unfortunately" which are not used too often in everyday communication. Although other vocabulary seemed more appropriate, those forms of the words were mostly used in writing and not verbal communication.
The next topic we tackled were webtunes. These webtunes are short online comics that is popular in South Korea. Contrary to the short stories we read, I found that these webtunes were effective in learning new vocabulary. Since the webtunes are trending in Korea, the vocabulary used is something that can be conversational. These cartoons barely have any narration and is mostly in conversational tone. This makes it so that the vocabulary used is more relevant to everyday life. Through this, I also learned Korean slang since it is supposed to be casual writing. It was an entertaining way to learn both formal and casual vocabulary through this medium.
