My second foreign language: Korean

        In the summer vacation before I became sophomore, I made my heart to learn Korean. As the semester begins, I was quite excited to learn it. Since I had listened to k-pop songs for half and a year and learned alphabets on the Net, it was not difficult for me to dip into learning Korean. Before I start the class, I was always busy remembering many names of idols. Memorizing the alphabets and the pronunciation was a piece of cake for me.

        Time flies, I learned more and more about Korean, but I also faced some difficulties when learning. I was poor at learning grammar, and I found it difficult for me to learn Korean auxiliary verbs. The same word would serve as different usage in different sentences, like past tense used in past sentence and in hypothetical sentence in English. There was a period that I mix all the usages of auxiliary verbs when practicing composing the sentences. Finally, I sorted out all of them and learn them from the beginning again and again. Besides auxiliary verbs, some other grammar rules also made me feel upset when learning. Like English, verbs vary depending on the tense, including past tense, present tense, and future tense. There are also exceptions to grammar rules. Though comparing to grammar rules, vocabulary is much easier for me to learn. I still forgot many words in the class, especially I was called to read the sentence out or even have a short dialogue with the teacher.

        Sometimes I complained when I was doing the homework and studying the grammar, but I still enjoy learning Korean. The first time when I could finally pronounce the name of the idols and remember them systematically instead of forcing myself to memorize them, I was satisfied and happy.  I could learn the pronunciation through the songs after taking the course. After about two months, I could tell some words I had learned in the class in some videos and the lyrics of the songs. After about one semester, I could even understand brief meaning of some idol’s posts with easy words on social media. Many idols share their daily life with their fans, and thus they would not type too many formal words on their posts. After learning Korean for one year, I found that sometimes I could understand brief meaning even if an idol typed several sentences in a post. As a foreign fan of k-pop, I usually wait for other fans’ translation to understand what one had said or the contents of a piece of news. One day when some fans were asking what happened when they see an idol posted a black picture with some typing words, I did not worry for her because she was saying something to the fans as the coming of 5th anniversary of their debut. At that time, I found what I had learned for the past one year. Though sometimes it was tough for me to learn Korean, I still found it interesting to learn because every time when I listen to k-pop songs, I saw the words I had learned in the course. Though I paused to learn Korean this semester, I will join the Korean class again in the next semester, hoping that I could gain more knowledge about Korean!


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