By Leanne Zheng, staff writer
2015 was the year I became a huge fan of kpop which later exposed me to Korean dramas, Korean shows, Korean beauty, and Korean food. Since then it has always been one of my top goals to learn the Korean language. Learning a new language is nothing new to me as I have taken language classes at school but it doesn’t make it any easier as each language is different in many ways and has its own difficulties in trying to learn it.
Over the years I had picked up Korean words and phrases from shows, songs, and dramas but I’m no expert at it. After hours of research on the best websites, tools, apps, and from where to start learning; my Korean learning journey began. To help me better learn and understand, I purchased 5 Korean beginner workbooks and started a notebook to take note of everything that I learned so I can later refer back to it. Many sources state that it is best to start by learning the Korean alphabet also known as hangul. The Korean alphabet consists of 24 basic letters including 10 vowels and 14 consonants.
While waiting on the workbooks, I went ahead and began learning the alphabet by watching videos from the youtube channel, Learn Korean with KoreanClass101.com. Each video consisted of learning 3-5 characters and lasted less than 10 minutes. I watched 2-3 videos each day while taking notes in my notebook. In a span of 3 days I was able to finish watching all 7 videos in the series. At the same time, my Korean workbooks from amazon had arrived so I was able to use my workbook and complete exercises along with the videos.
After getting the alphabet down, the next part was to learn some basic vocabulary which I was able to do through google. Actually being able to go to Korea in 2022 has been my ultimate goal for the past 4 years and so I searched up essential phrases for traveling to Korea and came across this website by 90 day Korean: Korean Phrases – Common Expressions for Travel & Everyday Life with Audio. Throughout the week I copied down 2-3 sections each day onto index cards and kept them in a small box so that I could later test and review the vocabulary.
Each night before bed I would take 10-15 minutes to read through my “Talk to Me in Korean, Level 1” book and would take notes in my notebook and mark down any important points with a post-it. Since I did not want to write in the workbooks itself as I wanted to practice the problems over and over again, I copied the question down and would answer the questions in my notebook.
Eventually, I realized that I needed a lot more practice writing the characters on paper. So I went surfing through the internet again and found a website by Key to Korean. The website provides writing, grammar, and vocabulary worksheets for beginners, intermediate, and advanced level learners. Each day had up to 15 vocabulary words that had to be written 10 times and at the end of the week/lesson, there would be a quiz that was also printable for learners to take.
Another thing I did to help practice my grammar, writing and vocabulary was copying down song lyrics from my favorite Korean artists and copying paragraphs written fully in Korean from google. The system I have created was to copy down either the lyrics or the paragraph and highlight any words or phrases that I didn’t understand and define it at the end of the writing. Then after a few days, I would go back and rewrite the paragraph and highlight the words that I still struggled with.
My favorite part of learning korean had to be watching korean dramas and shows. I read online that by watching korean dramas and shows you are able to catch onto more phrases and learn the grammar. There are multiple free streaming services for watching korean dramas and shows which I do use but for this period of time, I decided to use Viki, a website and app that has many asian shows and dramas that is available to watch for free with ads but many dramas are only available to subscribers and conveniently my friend had just renewed her subscription. The special thing about viki that puts it apart from other streaming services is that allows viewers to turn on a function called learning mode which has both Korean and english (or your preferred language) subtitles so you can read along and see the Korean translations. Another feature is that they allow you to click onto unfamiliar phrases in the subtitles with learning mode and it gives you the definition of the phrase. Reading aloud the phrases while watching also helps with learning new words and phrases.
After a week of learning Korean, I’m able to recognize basic words and phrases in Korean and am able to pronounce quite fluently, because of how I repeated after the Korean dramas. My progress on the Korean alphabet is moving quickly and at the moment, I would say I am around 50-75% there. This is just the beginning of a very long journey and overall, I really enjoyed this experience and am so glad that I was able to finally start my Korean learning journey.
In the future, I plan to continue learning the Korean language up until the day where I can go to Korea on vacation and be able to communicate and read signs. Some things that I would like to incorporate into my experience would be using social media to communicate with native speakers who are learning english through an app called Hello Talk. Hello Talk is a platform that allows language learners to chat with native speakers who are learning their native language. Another thing that I would like to do is to start practicing reading Korean without romanization which is like pinyin but for Korean.
