My Capstone Project: An Origin Story

Languages connect people, and that is what makes them worth learning to me. I like to think I have a good ear for things like accents and tones. That part of language-learning and speaking really excites me. Linguistic concepts seem to come quickly to me, and I like to embrace language-learning as an art form instead of looking at it with a more scientific approach. I am a musician, and I see both music and language in a similar artistic light. Both are very fun and satisfying ways of learning new things. I always thought I was drawn to language-learning because I thought I was good at it. I can’t lie, it strokes my ego a little bit to be able to pick up these concepts well and fast. It makes me feel good about myself, but I’ve recently learned that the attraction is more than that.

I’m drawn to languages because of moments like seeing my friends, giggling excitedly, trying to recall long forgotten Mandarin words with each other. I love how languages can connect people across cultures and the whole Earth. More than anything, I love the literal sparkles of excitement in my friend’s eyes when I expressed my interest in (trying) to learn to speak in his native tongue. That look of surprise and excitement sums up one of the driving forces behind my passion for learning Korean right now. I hardly know any Korean-speakers, but the language and culture are so beautiful and complex. I have become shockingly passionate about making others more aware of it! For my senior capstone project, I have decided to take my language-learning hobby and turn it into something much more meaningful and hard-core. This project will allow me to express that internal passion and hopefully motivate me to stick with learning Korean after high school.

Learning a language like Korean right now is definitely the type of challenge I need. The Foreign Service Institute placed Korean in the fifth and most difficult category for English-speakers to learn. I always want to challenge myself and learn new things-if I had picked a language a lot closer to English I wouldn’t really feel fulfilled and I’d honestly get bored and quit halfway through the project. We really can’t have that happening, especially since I also have some career goals tied to the success of this project. I want to be an interpreter or translator after college, so it is really important to me to have this head-start on beginning to understand how I best learn languages. I want to squeeze as much Korean knowledge out of this year as possible, and I am going to measure my progress by taking the TOPIK at the end of this project. The TOPIK is the standard Korean fluency test and it has 6 levels of fluency. I took the test once for a baseline measurement before I began really diving into my studies: I barely passed the first level on the listening test and didn’t even get close on the reading. I hope by the end of the year I will be able to pass at least the beginner-intermediate level (2), but if I really buckle down I think I can make it even higher.

In order to achieve this goal, I really need to work on making a more solid study plan. I recently completed a Korean I class at a local college and I feel like I’ve already learned so much! The problem is my schedule; I can’t keep taking college Korean classes because they interfere with my high school attendance. I have been emailing back and forth with my professor and she has given me a contact to arrange for tutoring, and I am planning to get in contact with the Korean Student Association to try and facilitate more real conversations, so I should be able to have a more structured learning environment soon.

In the meantime, I have just ordered the next textbook in the series and I am working on translating songs from Korean into English. That practice has actually been really helpful in expanding my vocabulary and seeing how new words work in sentences. It is a really calming and simple process too: I write down all the Korean lyrics and then chug through my bilingual dictionary to find all the words I don’t understand. The fun part is weaving all the words into a ‘good’ translation-essentially just one that flows like it was originally written for the language you’re translating into. I could talk about this part of literary translation for hours on end, but I think I’d probably lose some of you, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Other than these translations, though, I have not really been good about keeping up with my Korean lately. I need to start having conversations with my few Korean friends and watching more Korean television and variety shows. I’m hoping this blog will help keep me motivated, accountable, and moving forward in my learning. I am really excited to see where this project will take me!