I know this was supposed to be a Kdrama review blog, but I wanted to also record my own personal journey on the Hallyu Wave! I've gone and done a thing! Two and a half years after I entered Korean Drama Land, I have decided to level up my watching. I enrolled in Korean 101 at a local community college and just finished Week 1! I'm super excited about this class! I forgot how much I enjoyed college and learning. I think I could be a full-time student for life if it weren't for the fact that I actually need to work to make a salary to live and eat!

My main reason for wanting to learn Korean is that I really would like to be able to multitask a little better when watching dramas, so that I don't have to rewind or pause if I even want to glance at my phone to see who texted me! Secondary, is that I'm starting to appreciate the language and culture a lot more, so I wanted to at least be able to pick up some basics of the language. I don't have a desire to be fluent or move to South Korea or anything. But it's kind of fun to be able to understand a language at a deeper level. I also remember feeling really bad when I visited South Korea 9 years ago. It was a last-minute whim of a trip. Seriously, my friend and I booked it 5 days before we left because tickets dropped to $450 round trip when it's usually like $1100! South Korea wasn't on my radar to go to back then, so I felt a little bad when I went there and didn't know much about the culture, the food or the language other than what I picked up casually from a few Korean friends or from media. So, I would like to go back to South Korea one day and do that country with a little more justice and knowledge. Third, the pandemic is still raring in the world. It's been 18 months of living in an isolated and socially distant world. I am trying my best to keep my sanity and mental health upbeat. I have been stagnant in my personal/social life for so long and I don't know what to do about it. But I do have control in other areas of my life. I am trying to do things like take better care of my body by eating better and exercising more, make advancements in my career and use my mind to learn a new language like Korean. So hopefully when this pandemic finally comes to an end, I can say I came out of it a little better of a person.

The class is asynchronous and online, so it fit with my work schedule. There are 8 class zoom sessions, the first one is tomorrow.  The class also uses Voicethread which is like mash up of powerpoint and youtube. The professor posts slides with videos of her embeded  teaching us. Then we click on the next slide and have to post a video of ourselves repeating and practicing speaking. On the Voicethread, we can see everyone else's videos. It's kind of neat how high tech education has come from back when I was in college! We had to all post an introductory video, so I can confirm that I am the Ajumma of the class! But it's okay, I was expecting that and I am trying to embrace it!

The first week was pretty much what you would expect. We learned to say:

Hello: 안녕하세요  (An nyeong ha se yo)

My name is Julia: 저는 Julia 입니다  (Jeo neun Julia im ni da.)

Nice to meet you: 반갑습니다 (Ban gap seum ni da)

Picture of the King Sejong statue I took when I was in Seoul in 2012.

We also are learning to memorize the Korean alphabet or Hangul. I learned a little about Hangul when I visited Korea. There is a big statue of King Sejong in the main area of Seoul in front of the palace. He is actually every where in Seoul, they really love him. Before Hangul, Chinese characters were used which is a lot more complicated. King Sejong wanted the lower class to become literate and developed a simple writing system based on your mouth and tongue placement.

It is also based on 3 combining three symbols: Heaven, Earth and Man.

PC: OrganicKorean.com

I watched a bunch of you tube vidoes and tried learning Hangul about a month ago, so I'm pretty okay with the basic consonants and vowels. But when it gets to the more complex ones, I'm still struggling a little because of things like this:

ㅐ and ㅔ both sound like "eh" but the teacher said you say the first one with a bigger open mouth and the second one with a smaller open mouth!

I went to the Korean market today and I was trying to practice reading the Hangul on everything, I was super excited I could mostly read everything, albeit it pretty slowly. No clue what most of the words meant, but it is exciting when I came across a word or two that I did recognize - yay for kimchi 김치!

Here is a Hangul chart from Cloris Creates on pinterest. Anyone want to learn with me?

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