3.09.2014

Helping children learn Korean

We are plugging along on our Korean language here. I'm in my second semester of Korean at the local university. It was really easy to learn to read. And from there, super easy to memorize lots of words (animals, colors, things, etc.). But after that, putting together sentences....not so easy!

Little Man, however, is soaking up things at the rate of a dry sponge in a pool. I can't believe how fast he memorizes words. He's constantly asking me how to say things in Korean and keeping me on my toes!

Our recent Korea trip reaffirmed my belief that it's really important to help our children learn to speak Korean. Little Man's foster family was overjoyed that he was learning Korean, and people were delighted when he said please, thank you or good-bye in his native tongue. He has many more words than that, but he's a bit shy about talking to strangers.

I found this great blog where another family is working bringing more language into their home as well, and she had a great idea of using Korean words in familiar texts. Eric Carle books are among Little Man's favorites and this blogger has replaced words he knows with the Korean translations. Awesome!

Be sure to check it out and download the free .pdf to get started on your books!

http://keeperofthepark.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/korean-school-resources/

2 comments:

  1. May I ask how old your children are? Our son is 3.5, and is in some speech therapy for English. We do want him to learn Hangeul, but want to wait until he has mastered English first (we were told by the speech therapists that trying to learn two languages at once would lead to overload).

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    Replies
    1. Hi there. My oldest is 3.8 years old and youngest is 16-months. By all means, do what your speech therapists advise! But if you are interested in having him learn Hangul and don't want to wait, perhaps you could print out some of the letters to let him color so he can become familiar with them visually.

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