How I'm Learning Korean

I plan on teaching English in Korea after I graduate college next December. I've been taking Korean at my college for a year a half, and have fulfilled my school's language requirement. But what now? I want to continue learning the language, because I would love to be fluent. So what now?

I watch a lot of Korean dramas, which helps me catch on to more conversational Korean (as well as the most dramatic, love-struck Korean you can imagine.) I also listen to kpop...all the time. I listen to it in the car, in the shower, at work. All the time. Jackie Chan said he learned English by listening to Elvis Presley, so I feel like listening to kpop should help me out too. I listen for words that I know and try to figure out the point of a song. If I hear a word or phrase I don't understand I look it up.

Another method that I have to learn Korean is to go to Ellicott city and read signs. There are a lot of Korean restaurants and grocery stores in Ellicott city so there are always signs to read. I'll look for words I already know, and try to figure out what new words mean. Especially in grocery stores. This helps me build vocabulary.

I keep debating about whether I should try rosetta stone...but then I think about people like Megan Bowen, aka chonunmigooksaram, the YouTube personality, who learned Korean mostly from just jumping into the culture. That makes me not want to spend almost $400 on some software. By the way, her Korean is almost as awesome as her YouTube channel. She's hilarious, I do recommend you watch her videos, whether you want to go to Korea or not.

Anyway, these were a few techniques that I'm using to learn Korean. If you have any more that may be helpful, or if you've tried Rosetta Stone, let me know!

Where Have You Been?!

Is it just me, or is college the killer of everything creative, fun, happy, and great? Okay, I'm probably exaggerating quite a bit, and it's probably a severe case of senioritis, but I just can't wait to graduate. The excitement of being a freshman is long gone, replaced by a sense of dread to wake up three days a week, get dressed, and commute 45 minutes to 1 hour in (sometimes heavy) traffic to a school that has done not much of anything for me but stifle my desire to create! In other words, I've been trudging myself to school and to work and therefore have had no motivation to write...anything. Those 12 page papers I've been cranking out like clockwork this semester have in no way quenched my thirst to express myself. After spending the last (almost) 4 years writing to satisfy teachers pen's, I just don't know what direction my own creativity is meant to go.

I feel like without a deadline I can't come up with anything, and even then, something just doesn't feel right about what I regurgitate onto my word processor. My boyfriend says I need to take it back to the good ol' days of pen on paper, but um, it's 2013.

Well, this is my attempt to get back into the flow of writing. I need to push myself, challenge myself, and just do it. When I lay in my bed, I get hit with a lot of good ideas, but I don't know what keeps me from actually writing them down. Of course, by the next morning they're gone, along with my hopes of becoming that bestselling author.

Well, anyway, the moral of the story is...I'm back. I have one class and two finals keeping me from Winter break, and I am making a promise to myself to get started on this novel.