I speak Korean

This summer while in Korea, I was sad that I couldn’t talk to people and that I lacked basic conversational phrases, but I also realized that I am progressing. There were times that a word or phrase that I knew was helpful when I was with my foreign friends. I also heard words and sometimes could follow conversation based on the context and random words I heard. Also, my simple vocab also helped in understanding my second camp group that spoke almost no English. I made an effort to read signs as often as possible to practice my reading, and I was always excited when I understood the words or they were English words written in Hangul. Even though I know I have a long way to go, it was nice to see my growth since last summer’s experience.

Since January I have been using my commute to work to study Korean vocabulary. My stack of cards is piling up! But I know so many words that at this point are fairly useless to me! (SH was impressed that I knew “donkey”) So this past week I’ve been focusing on my book from my korean class in order to learn some useful conversational korean. I also have been listening to the dialogs from the book while on the subway and walking to my job. Also, not to say my vocab acquisition isnt a good thing! I was quite pleasantly suprized when I found a nice site with a large amount of audio recordings of basic words…and as i went through the list, I realized I knew most of the words in the list! Its a long road…but Im happy Im moving towards my goal everyday.

So since Ive been studying, I sometimes want to write little things in korean while chatting with korean friends, but I despise rominization!!! So I finally changed to a korean keyboard and ordered hangul stickers for my keys, once i get them, I can type out a quick hello or good bye etc. So exciting!

I’m excited that lately I’ve been working towards this goal. i use my commute to study Korean vocab, and my pile of flashcards is growing and growing. I’ve been saying some random things in Korean with my boyfriend and I’ve found some sites with korean vocab games.

Now that I have a 2 hour total commute to work, I am using the time on the train to study my Korean flashcards. My sweetheart in Korea made me audio recordings of the words and his sweet gift has really inspired me to study more also.

I have been studying my flashcards on the bus ride home from school. It’s something, but need to add some new words too.

Oh how I wish I had studied harder before going to Korea!!! It just seemed like a waste of time since I knew there was no way I could become fluent anytime soon..that’s where my mindstate was with it. It felt too impossible. And spending hours and hours of my life learning a few travel phrases seemed pretty pointless, since I had my English speaking Korean friends to support and guide me while I was there. But being there I saw that any word I knew was so important. Even just the simple fact of being able to READ Hangul won me endless cool points with my students :-) Many times ONE single word meant the difference between absolute confusion and (some type) of communication. I don’t want to waste time and opportunity again. Now that I know that Korea is likely going to be a major part of my life…I have commited to learning this language for the long haul. My goal for Korean was never fluency, but I think that has really shifted for me now. Yeah, in the grand scheme of life choosing Korean as a language to speak isnt probably the wisest use of my time, but somehow, it seems like its use for me is far greater than one of the more common widespread “useful” languages. So from now on I’m going to really make it a life goal to learn Korean fluently!

Ive started studying some travel phrases on my own.

added a learn korean cd to my ipod for the walk home from work!