Week 2: Korean Lessons

It has only been my second lesson of Korean so far, but so far so good. I'm liking it! This lesson continued to center around the alphabet and learning to join consonants and vowels to produce characters. In the first lesson we just learned how the character would sound with two alphabet letters, now in this lesson we joined three alphabet letters. The characters in red represent words with 받침 (pa-chim) which is the final consonant (usually on the bottom) and creates the ending sound for the character. Interestingly, sometimes the bottom character can shift over to the second character next to it to make it easier to say out loud although the spelling stays the same.

Something, I enjoy about the weekly Korean lessons is that it is not only focused on learning the language itself; however, a cultural portion is also incorporated. This week the cultural portion talked about King Sejong who was the person who invented the Korean language system because South Korea's national Hangeul Day just passed on the 9th of October. According to Soeun, my teacher, she explained that King Sejong sent his scholars to parts of China to learn about how language was built and constructed. That is why originally Korean language had Chinese characters within it. His efforts ended up raising the literacy rates of Korea immensely. As one of Korea's kings who made a great impact, King Sejong is imprinted on the 10,000 Korean won bill.

Funny enough, learning the word 팥 (pat) which means red bean led our teacher to show us mouth watering photos of 팥빙수 (pat-bing-su) which is a dessert in Korea consisting of shaved ice topped with red bean and sometimes a toasted rice cake! How good does that sound! I've eaten bingsu before in Thailand and in Taiwan where they are crazy about desserts. My favorite in the summer time as you might be able to tell is mango bingsu. Its a soft layer of milky ice topped with sweetened condensed milk and large cubes of juicy mango. In Thailand some cafes adapt to our nation famous dessert "Mango and sticky rice" and sneak a layer of coconut infused sticky rice under the ice which makes a pleasant surprise.

Ending on a sweet note, until next time! 

Thank you for reading my blog.

Sincerely, Siree