I realize I haven't updated this blog in quite a while - things got super busy here all of a sudden. I had my writing, listening, and reading midterms last Thursday and Friday, and had my speaking/interview midterm this past Friday. For anyone who is planning on taking Level 5 here at Sogang - when they say that it is much harder than Levels 3 & 4, they mean it. There's significantly more vocab, much much more grammar (remember when you had 2 grammar patterns a lesson in Level 3 & 4? Now there's about 4-7 per lesson), and longer reading passages. And then there's the video class. The 5A video class was actually not that bad - we watched one episode of a drama called 새는 over the course of 4 weeks, and for the most part all of the characters speak clearly and enunciate well. The 5B video class is a different story however. Some of the characters speak a southern dialect, conjugating their verbs differently which makes it very difficult to understand - and there's this one elderly gentleman who mumbles and talks so quickly that I can't understand a word of what he's saying. I'll talk in more detail about the video class later once I finish it, but the main point is that Level 5 is a lot of work (think normal Yale courseload), and if you don't preview before every class, review after every class, or are otherwise not on top of things, it becomes very difficult the days before the exams. Fortunately, the midterms all over, giving me about 3 weeks of relative respite before finals.
Last Sunday was Hangeul Day, a holiday celebrating the formation of the Korean alphabet. Before the formation of Hangeul (the Korean alphabet), Korean was written with Chinese characters. King Sejong invented the alphabet in 1446 to help commoners illiterate in Chinese characters to easily read and write the Korean language. It may seem strange to have a holiday devoted to an alphabet, but it's pretty amazing how logical in a linguistic sense Hangeul is. Sounds made with similar articulations have similar shapes. For example: sounds made with the teeth (ㅅs, ㅈ j, ㅊ ch), sounds made with the lips (ㅂ b, ㅁm, ㅍ p), sounds made by the tongue touching the gum ridge (ㄴ n, ㄷ d, ㅌ t), sounds made by the the tongue touching the soft palate (ㄱ g, ㅋ k), sounds made with the throat (ㅇ ng/no sound, ㅎ h). Also, sounds that are the same but differ only by an aspiration differ only by one stroke (ㄷd and ㅌ t, ㅈj and ㅊ ch, ㅂb and ㅍp, ㄱg and ㅋk). MBN, a newschannel in Seoul, ran a special about the Hangeul alphabet, and decided to film our Korean class. They followed a Russian girl in our class around for a day to discuss her experiences learning the Korean language. They also interviewed me and another American girl in my class, and they put an excerpt of my interview in the documentary and aired it on Hangeul Day. So I'm officially famous now! Sort of. I have mixed feelings about this - this is the first time I've ever appeared on TV (excluding my hometown's community access channels), but it was extremely nerve racking, and the fact that I had to speak in Korean made it harder. The whole interview process was extremely bizarre. They started off asking us questions about how we started learning Korean and what we thought of the Korean language, but it was clear they weren't interested in our responses. It sort of went like this:
Interviewer: So, what do you think of the Korean language?
Me: Well, it's okay. It's fun to learn, but challenging at times....
Interviewer: Challenging? Isn't it really easy to learn? The Hangeul alphabet is so logical....
Me: Well....
Interviewer: Just tell us about how amazing the Hangeul alphabet is.
In the end we basically just told them what they wanted to hear. I'm not sure if that was just them or if most journalists are that way, but I'm guessing that makes sense because they were trying to make a program celebrating the Hangeul alphabet, and probably didn't want students saying how hard it was to learn.
Since I'm pretty sure most of the people following this blog don't speak Korean - here's a link to the video where they interview me. I show up between 3:00 - 3:49, and my class shows up around 1:40. And if you're a Korean speaker, please don't watch! I stutter a lot (because I was nervous) and I'm pretty sure my last sentence doesn't make any sense.
http://mbn.mk.co.kr/pages/vod/programContents.php?progCode=88&menuCode=153&bcastSeqNo=1013915
I haven't posted in a while, so I'm going to try to go on a blogging blitz to make up for it. I took a trip to see a lantern festival in Jinju and a film set in Hapcheon two weeks ago, and I'll try to upload photos from my trip soon!
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| A page from Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음 訓民正音), the document proclaiming the formation of Hangeul (Taken from Wikicommons) |
Last Sunday was Hangeul Day, a holiday celebrating the formation of the Korean alphabet. Before the formation of Hangeul (the Korean alphabet), Korean was written with Chinese characters. King Sejong invented the alphabet in 1446 to help commoners illiterate in Chinese characters to easily read and write the Korean language. It may seem strange to have a holiday devoted to an alphabet, but it's pretty amazing how logical in a linguistic sense Hangeul is. Sounds made with similar articulations have similar shapes. For example: sounds made with the teeth (ㅅs, ㅈ j, ㅊ ch), sounds made with the lips (ㅂ b, ㅁm, ㅍ p), sounds made by the tongue touching the gum ridge (ㄴ n, ㄷ d, ㅌ t), sounds made by the the tongue touching the soft palate (ㄱ g, ㅋ k), sounds made with the throat (ㅇ ng/no sound, ㅎ h). Also, sounds that are the same but differ only by an aspiration differ only by one stroke (ㄷd and ㅌ t, ㅈj and ㅊ ch, ㅂb and ㅍp, ㄱg and ㅋk). MBN, a newschannel in Seoul, ran a special about the Hangeul alphabet, and decided to film our Korean class. They followed a Russian girl in our class around for a day to discuss her experiences learning the Korean language. They also interviewed me and another American girl in my class, and they put an excerpt of my interview in the documentary and aired it on Hangeul Day. So I'm officially famous now! Sort of. I have mixed feelings about this - this is the first time I've ever appeared on TV (excluding my hometown's community access channels), but it was extremely nerve racking, and the fact that I had to speak in Korean made it harder. The whole interview process was extremely bizarre. They started off asking us questions about how we started learning Korean and what we thought of the Korean language, but it was clear they weren't interested in our responses. It sort of went like this:
Interviewer: So, what do you think of the Korean language?
Me: Well, it's okay. It's fun to learn, but challenging at times....
Interviewer: Challenging? Isn't it really easy to learn? The Hangeul alphabet is so logical....
Me: Well....
Interviewer: Just tell us about how amazing the Hangeul alphabet is.
In the end we basically just told them what they wanted to hear. I'm not sure if that was just them or if most journalists are that way, but I'm guessing that makes sense because they were trying to make a program celebrating the Hangeul alphabet, and probably didn't want students saying how hard it was to learn.
Since I'm pretty sure most of the people following this blog don't speak Korean - here's a link to the video where they interview me. I show up between 3:00 - 3:49, and my class shows up around 1:40. And if you're a Korean speaker, please don't watch! I stutter a lot (because I was nervous) and I'm pretty sure my last sentence doesn't make any sense.
http://mbn.mk.co.kr/pages/vod/programContents.php?progCode=88&menuCode=153&bcastSeqNo=1013915
I haven't posted in a while, so I'm going to try to go on a blogging blitz to make up for it. I took a trip to see a lantern festival in Jinju and a film set in Hapcheon two weeks ago, and I'll try to upload photos from my trip soon!
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