Week 1, Mr. Kim : Reflections

My Experience of Learning Korean

 

Mom taught me Korean.  Because I had no any symptom of a genius until 6, my parents might think that I would be a fool if they leave me, so they began to taught me Korean as most Korean parents do.  Mom made Korean alphabet cards by herself and read each card with accurate pronunciation and made me repeat after her.  I could not listen carefully.  When I was a baby I was somewhat slow at walking and speaking, so she did not hurry and put those cards around the house — a refrigerator card on the refrigerator and a dining table card on the dining table, etc.  But there was no progress.  One day playing with toy blocks, I said, “Is this ‘Digeut’?”  ‘Dogeut’ is one of the Korean alphabets.  From that time Mom changed her mind to teach Korean with play and I learned Korean with play.  I played a fishing game — fishing letters with a wooden chopstick tying a magnetic.  She clasped cards written Korean alphabet with clips.  I was interested in learning Korean alphabet watching letters sticking to the magnetic.  I learned Korean alphabet and then words.  She said I liked sweet potatoes very much when I was a young, so the first word I learned was ‘goguma’, a sweet potato.  After words I played matching games with pictures and writing and then reading books.  It took one year to learn Korean reading.  I am still learning English so one year is not so long.  Learning Koran with play was the most interesting study in my life, I think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Experience of Learning English

 

There are so many parents making their children study English before finishing learning Korean alphabet these days.  But when I was a child, there was no early-child-education, so naturally I began to learn English alphabet in the middle school.  My father was an English teacher but he did not teach me English until I go to the middle school.  English alphabets were totally new to me, so memorizing them was really Greek to me.  There were tests every day.  I had to memorize 10, 20 or 30 words every day.  It was a big burden to me.  I memorized the words after listening to the teacher’s pronunciation or reading phonetic alphabet written beside the word.  The teacher made us memorize the dialogue and sentences, so learning English was memorizing to me to me.  Leaning Korean was fun but English was not.