Notre Dame junior Allison Emeott didn’t just study Korean this summer. She was immersed in it.
“You get to use what you learn and talk to people,” she said. “It’s really inspiring because when you’re surrounded by people speaking a language, you want to learn more and you just want to become a part of the community."
Emeott, an applied mathematics and Asian studies major, spent the summer of 2015 intensively studying the Korean language at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters, she received a grant from the Summer Language Abroad program, which provides funding up to $5,500 for individual summer foreign language study abroad.
While in South Korea, she took classes in the morning, going over Korean grammar and sentence structure, then spent her afternoons exploring the city. Emeott loved the campus’s proximity to restaurants and shops, giving her opportunities to practice the language.
“Learning a new language is important because it shows that you are able to think differently," she said, “and leave the world that you live in and are used to.”
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