Hi, my name is Julia and today I'm going
to talk to you a bit about Korean
Studies at York St John and the way
that everything works.
So you'll see all the information about the
specific modules themselves on the York
St John website, I myself do Korean
TESOL and Linguistics but in the
upcoming 2020-21 year you'll find two extra choices which are Korean with
Intercultural and Contemporary
Communication and Korean with English
and Linguistics. All three obviously
have the main component of Korean and
then other classes around that. With
myself, we have had classes within
English grammar, understanding English,
key concepts and the way English is
produced, as well as phonetics, obviously they all stand alone but
work in tandem to give us an idea of
obviously language learning and
producing, as well as then language
teaching. In the classes we'll have things
like group discussions, and different
ways of presenting and with class
presentations taking part for formative
work, we also have especially with in
Korean different ways of communicating.
So we will have individual and group
speaking, we'll have writing and with
obviously some of our online classes
we've been doing different types of
things such as writing letters and
emails, doing things in the format of a
podcast and recording small videos.
So I'll take some time now to talk about
our year abroad. The year abroad programme
works with all the variants of Korean
Studies, it happens in our third year
and in order to do so we require an 80
percent attendance level, as well as
obviously a passing grade in the
previous two years. Some of the
universities we have at the moment are
places like Chung-Ang and Konkuk and
Sogang itself, and obviously there's
always more coming on to our main
website with more information about the
exchange programmes available.
So for self-study, it can really be
anything at all that you want to add
into your own time. With our class
schedule it can look quite empty when
you count up the hours of time that
we're physically in a class but the
whole point is that we're meant to add
on at least another 12 hours minimum
just in our own time to keep going and
keep pushing what we can do. Self-study
can come in the form of anything really
that is inputting language into yourself,
so it could be that you are watching
Korean film, Korean TV, listening to music,
there's so many ways that you can get it
into your system. For example, I watched a
lot of Korean TV and because Korean TV
has text nearly all of the time on the
screen, if there's words that I don't
understand, don't know the meaning of I
will literally jot them down and then
go back and check on myself see if I can
apply them into a sentence structure
that I've learned, and these are a little
ways that slowly you're filling up the
vocabulary in your head but you're not
actually feeling pressured into reading
a dictionary ,so that's quite good.
Another way is just simple things like
if you like Korean food, follow recipes
that you find online and look for the
corresponding ingredients in Korean.
When you get Korean ramen packets see if
you can read the instructions in Korean
before you read them in English, there's
so many ways that it just goes into your
head without you even noticing, so it's
always good just to have something that
while it's great to yes, learn through
the books and stick to a study plan,
little things like that can all add up
as well so we shouldn't feel obliged to
a solid sit down study plan.
I actually did not visit York St
John before I applied I just saw what
was an offer and just thought that was
good enough for me.
When I got here obviously so so
happy, the accommodation is amazing,
the facilities of the university
themselves, the friendliness of every
single member of staff. I just think
there's always something going on at the
university and everyone's really happy
to get involved with each other. Our
classes, obviously because we take Korean
as well as the other kind of subsidiary
classes of things like Linguistics and
then into phonetics etc, you meet so many
people on other courses Japanese, English,
Linguistics, British Sign Language and you
all become friends in that way so it's
really close, and people are always
really quick to lend a hand if you're
struggling with presentations, people are
always there to show you a new way to
fix things and I think that's something
that really bodes well for the
university. On top of that, it's an
amazing location, everything is as brand
new as you can get and you wouldn't want
for anything. If there's any
struggles at all the library staff, the
administration staff, everyone is so
eager to help us just to make sure that
we are able to succeed to the best of
our own ability and I think that's
something that you can really see and
the students that come and work and
graduate from here, is the willingness to
help each other which obviously is a big
part of the success.
