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For the past few months, I learned a lot of new words in Korean. I especially focused on learning new trendy words that a lot of the youth and young adults use in Korea. Unlike in America, where "trendy" words can be seen as slangs, in Korea, these words are utilized in so many ways and are sometimes preferred over other words that may describe the same meaning. 

I learned these words through researching online and looking at forums on popular Korean websites. Because I can read Korean, I know when I see a strange word that I have never seen before. When this happens, I look for the definition or meaning of the "trendy vocab". One goal that I have in learning these words is to use them when I study abroad in Korea next semester. This way, I can understand what the Korean natives are talking about and relate to the context of their conversations.

Languages usually "die" when countries conquer other countries. Additionally, languages can go extinct when a prominent language is simply more useful than a particular country's original language (for example, Mandarin and English is used globally now). One country that continues to preserve its original language is Korea.

Korea has been victim to multiple invasions by neighboring countries for hundreds, if not, thousands of years. In fact, the Chinese language has a huge influence on the Korean language but after King Sejong created the Korean alphabet, it started to sway away from Chinese origins of writing. And in the 1900's, Korea was invaded by Japan, a country that was trying to turn Korea into a Japanese speaking nation. Even my grandparents have Japanese names and were taught Japanese in elementary school until they surrendered in WWII. Although Mandarin has been increasing its influence all over the globe, I don't believe that the Korean language will "die" anytime soon.

The Korean language has a very interesting history behind it. Although Koreans spoke in Korean for a long time, the writings were in Chinese characters. For example, this is similar to a hypothetical case of English speaking countries writing in another language, yet speaking in English. The Korean alphabet was created by King Sejong in 1444. Since then, there have been a lot of improvements and it is known as one of the easiest languages to learn.

Knowing this history of the relationship of the Chinese characters in the Korean language can help anyone learn Korean faster. There are a lot of difficult vocabulary words that are based off of Chinese words. These words are called "han-ja". Knowing some of these Chinese characters will help understand these words better. 

Although I am not an international student, I experienced a culture shock when my family and I first immigrated to the United States from South Korea. The biggest culture shock for me was getting used to a new language and food. Even though my parents cooked a lot of Korean food at home, in school, I had to get used to new "American" foods like traditional American breakfast and strange dishes like mozzarella sticks. Food is a huge part of any culture and getting used to American food was not easy in the beginning.

Before coming to the US, I did not know a lot of English. I took English in an academy my parents put me through but nothing stuck with me when I immigrated to the states. I had to learn a whole new language just by going through the motions in elementary school and every day life. Thankfully, the elementary school I attended had a great ESL program and there were a lot of Korean-Americans who helped me get to the place I am now.

Turkish words is quite different English one, and Korean of course. When I memorize some English words and Chinese words, I used some relatedness to make my memorize easy. But Turkish, I cannot find any common things with Korean or English, so I just got the words and kept forgetting about it. I just learned about basic expression and number or color things it is quite confusing sometimes. So I just used media to improve my memorizing skills. In youtube there are bunch or videos teaching and repeating some basic Turkish things. Actually I think that is for baby, but still it works good on me. When I memorize English words in high school, I tried to use all of my sense organ. So I keep saying the word, write down the word, and seeing the word at the same time. And I made my own test for words and tried to answer that. If I got wrong, I just focused on the wrong one. By doing this, I could prolong my memory of the words. The best way is just to use and speak more. Although it is quite hard, I will just keep practicing. It will be helpful. 

Language is major part of a country's culture. I think if a country loose their language they are also loosing their big parts of culture. According to video, a lot of languages disappear right now. There are rare people use that language so that's the major reason language disappear. Because of using another language with their original language, they just get used to use another languages like English, sometimes, they are forgetting their original language slowly. Using language like English is more convenient and they think they do not have to use the language any more. I think the starting point of language extinction is using their original language with another more international languages. Luckily or not, Korea is using official language Korean, and everybody just used that when they first learn how to speak. In Korea history Japan force for Korean people not to use Korean and to speak Japanese, but they failed. If they made it Korea still could be one of Japan's colony. 

Learning language alone is quite boring. History could help them learning and memorizing the language well. Actually language just changes by time. Therefore by knowing about the history, we also could get some knowledge that history influence some language facts. For example if we learn about Korea history, we could easily know that Korean is influenced by Chinese, Korean use some words which is made up by Chinese Character. About Turkish, their character changed a lot. By learning Turkish, I learned there are lots of words influenced by Arabic. They do not use Arabic letter now, but some words sounds like Arab language. In Turkish history, in ottoman empire, they conquer really wide area including Persia, some Arab country. At that time they just used Turkish letter which is quite similar with Arabic character. Now they just using Latin alphabet, but some parts Arabic still exists in their language. Like this if some language learner also get some history about the country, they could understand more about the language. 

I just start my US life as a traveler. Me and my friend drove from San francisco to New york. While traveling I felt some culture shock. Actually it was not that shocked but it is quite different though. Compared to Korea, for me American people seems like they have some kind of obsession for holding the door. It was first culture shock to me. They always tried to keep the door but Korean does not care about the door that much. I thought it is kind of express their kindness but now I am thinking that they just do not like to make other people upset. They are quite defensive each other that is my opinion about holding the doors. Second thing is the time chnage. When I travel to Arizona to Utah or Nevada, I want to go Entelope Canyon and participate in guide tour(Acutually participating in tour is the only way to see Entelope canyon). We drove to Arizona to Utah and tried to make reservation for the tour, but the time just changed we did not calculate the time change, so we missed the prime tour and had to wait for next tour. Korea is kind of small country compared to US so we do not have time change so it was my first experience to have time change in my life. It is quite new and interesting that in same country they have several different time. Giving tips to server is another one. We also do not have tips in Korea, so at the first time we just forgot to give them, so they just grab us to go out, and we should pay the tips and said sorry for that. About turkey, I am not sure that it is proper things but really culture shock is man shaving their armpit hair. 

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So far this semester, I have been able to significantly improve my pronunciation and my reading abilities. I am comfortable using three cases, and I know how to match the subject of a sentence with the proper case, number and gender. The only major change I will make to my learning plan is to start incorporating the Pimsleur Ukrainian CD for more of my lessons. This CD is very helpful for me because it allows me to focus on speaking and listening skills more than just simply focusing on grammar all the time.  

For this week, I wanted to continue to improve my vocabulary and familiarize myself with professional writing.

Once again, I read articles from naver.com's economy news section. I learned about the current economical issues in Korea. In doing so, I also learned new vocabulary and familiarized myself with how professional writers write. I have been getting comments from my parents that my korean writing has gotten better (I write to them via electronic letter) so it is seemingly obvious to me that I am getting better and better every week. I am happy with where I am and happy to see how good I get at writing and how much of an expansion in vocabulary I will have by the end of the semester.

My learning goals for this week remained consistent. I am going to read a few more articles on Korean or global economy (written in Korean) in order to learn more professional words and learn how to write professionally by reading professional work.

I attended my weekly classes and read a few articles on the economy. In doing so, I learned a lot of new words and familiarized myself with the academic writing furthermore. By this point, professional economical terms that only educated adults would understand make sense to me thanks to reading so many of these articles on the economy. I am consistently getting better and am happy with the results.

So far, my learning plan has been effective. Instead of reading a book, I've been consistently reading articles in Korean. These articles cover topics that range from academics to global economy (most of them are about the economy as I felt like that is a useful knowledge to have). I've been learning a lot of professional words and how to write professionally as seen on the articles. The classes I've been attending have been helpful as well in putting into practice Korean. I think I can stick with the plan as is and ride out the year and see awesome improvements as I have been all semester long.

Attitudes about time in Korea as I know it is interesting. This really ties in with the formality system in Korea. Remember how in Korea, elders are supremely respected while the younger people are sometimes looked down upon. This holds true in thinking about time. If you are late to a meeting with an elder or someone hierarchically higher than you, you are being extremely disrespectful. On the other hand, someone older or hierarchically higher than you can stand you up for a quite a while without coming off "rude" because of the whole formality/ respect the elder culture in Korea. Younger people don't really have the right to fault the elders for being late while the reverse is easily done.

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Looking back at my progress in Korean, I believe that I did improve a noticeable amount. When I was talking to my parents in Korean over the phone, she noticed an increase in the level of my Korean. I also believe that I increased my skills in writing Korean. I can now listen to what is being dictated to me and I can write it down with fairly good accuracy. I also have more knowledge in colloquialism that is used in Korea, thanks to my language partner. I believe the switch from learning formal Korean to learning about Korea along with its language through individual presentations helped in relating the Korean we use to real situations. Forcing me to do this presentations increased my skills in presentational speaking and my Korean accent. With a combination of learning formal Korean and its colloquialism, I believe that I will be able to increase my knowledge in Korean by a significant amount by the end of the semester.

For this week, I would like to learn more about the culture of South Korea and integrating that into my study of Korean. As I learn more about the culture, I want to be able to speak eloquently and be more informed about the latest news in Korea and how it affects the language. I also want to be able to speak like a native and learn more of the colloquialism that is used in Korea. Since this is not something I can find easily on the internet, I will utilize my language partner. We also started doing presentations on different aspects of Korean such as colloquialism, media, and news. This will help me keep in touch with the latest Korean and help me to be able to speak it more fluently. 

When languages are lost, the whole culture in it of itself is lost. I believe that language is the primary source of culture and is of great importance when talking about culture. Reading this article made me realize that there are cases in today's world where languages are actually becoming extinct.

The article mentions the use of an online dictionary. Although this peaked a little interest in other people for support of the language, it was nowhere enough to keep the language at a stable rate. Even if the language stabilizes for now, it is only temporary and there are always fear of extinction. Also, watching the interview with K. David Harrison, I was shocked to learn that there are 7,000 languages and that half of that will go extinct by the end of the century. 

After researching briefly about this topic, I learned that there are lots of languages but only a very few are stable enough to keep living on. The more important aspect of this loss is the loss of culture. When a language becomes extinct, not only does the language disappear, but also the culture that is relative to that language. Relating this back to Korean, Korean and its founder, King Sejong the Great, play a major role in the Korean history and culture. If Korean became extinct, the possibility of the importance of King Sejong the Great is also very high.

        The reading basically helps me to figure out what should I pay attention to when I express and absorb/analyze the message when learning a target language. First, the view of the relationship between words and things influences how I express and absorb the language during the learning process. I could use a more of naturalist view to learn the basic meaning of new vocabulary at the beginning: to connect words to certain things in the real life. Later, however, I need to pay attention to the sense and the reference of the words I learn, because reference, such as connecting words with physical things, would not work well when the word has different meanings in different circumstances. Because words have synonymy, hyponymy, and antonymy,   it is critical for the learner to precisely sub-divide the meanings of the words. Reference can be vague and not specific enough. Sense in this case, by explaining words by words based on different language concept, can help me to distinguish the word better. Also, a lot of times, a word in the target language might not be directly translated to a single word in my native tongue, instead, it might be translated as a concept, a series of words, etc. Thus, it is also very important to be aware of that, and pay attention to the collocations words of the target language.