What Is your favorite non-traditional way to learn, and what are you currently learning outside of school? by Kensey

What Is your favorite non-traditional way to learn, and what are you currently learning outside of school? by Kensey - September 2024 Scholarship Essay

My ultimate favorite way to learn is cram exams, as I call it. I learned this method when I started learning Korean outside of school. I do cram exams a lot with my Korean tutor; this actually helps me retain words and grammar faster than most of my actual classes I take at school. My Korean tutor FaceTime’s me around 9 P.M. MST, while it is 12 P.M. KST for her. Which makes the cram exams help me stay awake and really think about what I am doing.
Cram exams are exams that my tutor makes me do to retain the knowledge of every lesson. In the middle of a session, she will tell me that I have two minutes to memorize a set of words or a type of grammar. Then once the two minutes are up, she gives me around 5-10 questions to answer. This is very effective because it makes you think more than you would in an actual class and memorize what you were just learning about. On top of that, my tutoring sessions are at night, so when I go to sleep, the things that I learned are more easily retained.
Learning with cram exams may seem harder to a lot of people, although I believe that it helps memorization. Memorization is a very helpful tool that you can use in everyday life, whether it be numbers, names, or even speeches. Using it to learn Korean, or any language for that matter, can also enhance your knowledge, as well as your communication skills. I even believe they help me learn more effectively than the typical ways to study for regular tests at school. With school tests, you try and study at home every day to retain the knowledge. This way of studying makes me forget easier during the test, because, even though I studied for weeks, I have a hard time retaining the material. I believe this is because I’m not under pressure to remember it. Cram exams put you under that pressure, so that you really remember. This brings me to my favorite thing to study outside of school, which is Korean.
Do you like to learn new, and effective things? I know that I like to find things to learn all the time. Languages are also very useful, you can have better communication skills, along with learning cultures by learning the language. K-dramas and K-pop have started booming around the world, and are becoming more and more popular every day. This is making it so that it is even more useful to learn Korean, so that you can listen to K-dramas and K-pop and know what they are talking about without having to use subtitles at all. Korean is honestly a very good language to learn, at least in my opinion, because I will be able to communicate, and be more patient when talking to people as well.
All in all, cram exams are a very nice and effective way to learn. Especially when learning Korean late at night; it helps me remember everything the next morning. The lesson sits in my head, sinking into my brain just like lotion on your hands. Korean is also a very fun language to learn, and it is nice to be able to learn something new outside of class. This is my favorite non-traditional way to learn, and what I am learning outside of class.