Korean Language Class: Beginner Students Giving Our Speeches

This is everyone giving their speeches in front of the room - except Tara, whose speech I video recorded. 

This morning, each of us gave our speeches. I fell asleep trying to memorize mine last night, but fortunately woke up early enough to do some more memorizing. Mine was 16 lines long, and contained a self-introduction and a description of what I did last weekend. It was a practice on using the past and present tense, and would constitute a portion of our Final Exam grade.

I'm proud of everyone in my class. We went from struggling to sound out the vowels and consonants on Day 1 to giving a speech not more than five weeks later!

My goal was not to look at my notes during my speech, but midway through I got too nervous and looked down instead of just pausing to remember.

Major work needs to be done in the intonation department here, folks. There are certain words that I know how to say in a "Korean-sounding" way, but it's all over when it comes to uttering whole sentences in Korean. It sounds silly in my ear, and, while practicing, all I can think about is how no one I have met so far sound the way I sound when practicing. I know that the instructors might be asking us to exaggerate a little though so I just need to go for it, no matter how ridiculous I currently sound.

Our instructor sat behind me and assessed our speeches. She was also taking photos of everyone. I turned around and snapped a couple of shots of her. This series of photos captured her reactions. Very camera-shy!

Our class has many funny characters. I love this shot of Christina Ssi's reaction to Brendan's speech! This guy knows how to entertain :)

 

Rachael, Tara, my roommate!, and Patrick attentively listening to someone's speech. 

Pretty soon, I won't have this class, or these other ETAs around me to encourage me to keep learning Korean. In a week or so I will have to take an honest assessment of how much Korean I want to learn by the end of the year, and create a plan that will help me meet that goal.