(If you came here for pics, don’t bother reading this post.)
I came to Korea more than six months ago, and to be fair I still can’t talk to the locals. I mean – I can, but I can’t really talk to them.
That’s mostly my laziness and my arrogance showing here, but the environment and the people here have contributed to my situation aswell. So let me explain what I actually mean:
I assumed it to be an easy task to study the language up to the level needed for daily life conversations by myself, just as I picked up Romanian by being there on average two weeks per year in summer to see the family. The very first thought included the plan of using the vacation time between the finishing of my Bachelor’s Degree and my flight to Korea to fully acquire the skills necessary for daily life. How naive of me.
By the time I got to Korea, I could read. And I could say “Hello” and “Thank you” reliably; the rest was body language.
But incorrigible me stuck to the plan of skipping language class in the otherwise quite empty first semester, saving valuable money by skillfully exercising home-learning. If I had done much more to actually parctice the language last semester, that wouldn’t have been a fool’s decision.
I realized that I failed myself when I hopped into the plane to Hanoi for my SEAsia adventure. However, as I borrowed some exercise books from my friend and brought one of them with me, I picked up pace, bringing some sort of system into my learning. I bought the precursors to that exercise book and started to systematically learn the vocabulary and the grammar of the first two volumes during the last two weeks – and all that seems to stay in my brain. But somehow the feeling of getting used to using a language just isn’t coming, so what is still going wrong (despite me still not visiting language courses)? Turns out that the Koreans are part of the problem too.
Don’t get me wrong – talking to them is almost always a pleasure and fun, even across language barriers. However, one can definitely notice that the vast majority of peolpe are just not used to folks not speaking Korean as a native language. When initiating a conversation with a native here, in 99,9% of cases, one of the following will happen:
- After initiation in Korean, the person gets the impression that I can handle the language far better than I actually can (seems I’m somewhat talented with the pronounciation). So the person just proceeds to talk as if I were a native speaker, which means talking waaaaaaay too fast and too unclear, such that my ability to even distinguish the used words converges to zero.
- Because I make a mistake when initiating the conversation or just because I look foreign, the person gets the impression that I can not handle the language at all, resulting in either continuation in English, over-simplified Korean fragments/words or just body language. All of these outcomes help me even less with practising the language than the person who moves on with full-speed Korean.
- There are still quite some occasions on which I’m able to do parts of a conversation fully in Korean, however the people simply don’t seem to have enough time to wait while I’m assembling my statement: By the time I have constructed in my head what I’d like to state, the cashier already turned to the next customer, and my Korean friend made the decision to answer me in English, rendering my attempt to commute in Korean a failure.
Summary: I still get better every day just by initiating dialogues in Korean, but not as fast as I’d wanted to. There is still the hope that one day I’ll be fast enough to be able to keep conversations alive in Korean.
State of play: Around 1.000 words memorized, reading at 3 syllables/s, quite good pronounciation if not done too quickly and the usage of grammar like past/future tense and conjunctions for conditions, reasons and progressive actions.
Good thing I still have four months time to get to a level at which I can justify not taking the language courses.