English is my only language. It is the air I breathe, so to speak, the water I swim in. My three months in Korea is not producing any fluency in Korean. I had hoped for more.
My experience with other languages has always been rocky. The terms strange and alien have always characterized my encounters with foreign languages. Latin in high school, German in college, French in graduate school -- all were and are again mostly Greek to me.
The same is true of the Russian terms we learned in 2004 preparing for our trip to Vladimir. Please, food, toilet, thank you. Hard to pronounce, impossible to remember, funny sounding when I tried to say them, now lost in the odds-and-ends bin of memory. I remember searching for the right word to say as the opportunity for using it passed and coming up with a German word from my college years.
As we prepared to fly to Korea in February, we made a couple of attempts to begin language study. Our home stay kids had given us a handful of terms over the years --annyong-haseyo, kamsa hamnida, bop. But I have had a hard time getting other words to stick in my brain. I have been hard pressed to hear words and to see them.
We know that learning languages is easier, relatively speaking, for the young. Sometimes I envy them for this ability. But I think, too, there must be something in the way the brain is wired that makes language a more natural thing for certain people than for others. My brain seems to be wired to resist language retention. When it comes to absorbing language my brain is duck feathers, teflon.
Or maybe thinking this explanation is just an excuse for not working hard enough at it.
I think that living in a culture is an advantage for learning a language, but it is not foolproof. I have discovered, for example, that it is remarkably easy to get by in Korea without actually learning to read or speak or understand.
That a non-speaker can "get by" is a mixed blessing. When I go to the Post Office, I can make myself understood well enough to mail whatever I want to mail. I buy stamps, I fill out customs forms, I mail postcards and packages, I send them off. Some of what I want is obvious; the rest I can usually convey through pointing, expressive gestures, and occasional mispronounced words. The money system, which looks difficult, is relatively easy to master.
The down side is that I may well be paying for the wrong things, thinking I have sent my letter airmail when in fact it is going by freighter around the Cape of Good Hope. Then too if I can get by without a lot of struggle, where is the motivation for learning the language itself. It is easier to settle for getting by.
Still, I want to learn.
I have been given lots of advice about the business of learning Korean. And books on the subject abound.
One book I found boasts that you can teach yourself Korean in 40 minutes. I have read it twice and done the exercises. It has been helpful, but it would be stretch to say I taught myself Korean.
Still, all is not lost. I have been trying in my own way to absorb Korean. I can hear words now, some of the time, where before talk had sounded like unbroken strings of language. I have discovered the joy of hearing a word or two I recognize in an overheard conversation. Just this week I heard jik-jin in the middle of an otherwise unintelligible conversation.
That is, I think, a step in the right direction. What a thrill!
I have also started practicing the Hangul letters. Amazing what one can do with that little brush. Practicing with the letters has helped me recognize them when I encounter them around me.
These are little things, I grant you, baby steps you might say. But then, that's the point where language learning is most productive, isn't it.
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