kangmi: learning korean

Not so odd, really. Books are available 24 hours a day, no appointment necessary. Books aren’t late. You can carry a book in your backpack. You can read a book on a train or a bus. Books don’t ask questions. Books don’t make you do role plays or correct your pronunciation. If a book is boring, you can quit reading it without any negotiation or repercussions. You can’t have a relationship (not in the classic sense, at least, as I would argue differently in another venue) with a book. Thus, every language learner needs a person.

In Building a Corpus of Comprehensible Text (and other articles at Language Impact), Greg Thomson lays out a method of working with what he calls a Language Resource Person (LRP). An LRP is a native (or perhaps otherwise fluent) speaker of your target language, in my case Korean.

So I’ve got an LRP (Namsuk). I showed up at his house yesterday with 20 photographs I got off Flickr (dropped them into PowerPoint, 4 photos to a slide, then printed). After some orientation, I turned on the voice recorder on my MP3 player and we spent the next 37 minutes talking about them on a fairly basic level. “This is a man.” “The woman is wearing a hat.” (Yes, I stacked the deck with some vocabulary that I already knew.) There was some discussion about yellow versus orange, which word Koreans use these days for cup, Namsuk’s career before he came to the States, and words used to describe snowfall.

When I got home, I did a quick-and-dirty edit of the session with Audacity and ended up with 8 usable minutes. I took out almost all the parts where I was talking, and where Namsuk was writing, and where the conversation wasn’t worth preserving. I listened to it on the way to work this morning. I’ll listen to it again whenever I have a chance. I’ll make another one after our next session. I’ve already added eight new pictures to the set of 20, which will provide us with something new to talk about while giving us time to review the old.

Namsuk wasn’t my first choice. I met him and his wife at Korean church recently. I’d been thinking about getting a language exchange partner, and she seemed like a good choice. Insun acted as a go-between, and Sungmin agreed to the proposal. Later, when we met to discuss the arrangement, Sungmin suggested that I meet with her husband instead. He’s the one in school and needs the language practice; she stays at home with their children (three boys followed by a girl, all of them adorable. I’ll never get tired of the cuteness that is children bowing when they greet me. And the stay-at-home part was one of the reasons I thought she would make a great partner.).

Not only was I feeling insecure about my lagging Korean ability, but I hadn’t had a chance to research best practices for a language exchange. Without some kind of structure, I imagine a language exchange might quickly fall apart, and I want to give it a decent shot at success.

All told, it went well. We spent the first half hour going over some questions he had about “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which he’s studying in one of his English classes. Namsuk spent the next half hour talking to me in Korean, and I spent it not talking at all. It wasn’t that the words fled when I needed them. They weren’t there to begin with.

We’ve got a half-hour session coming up tomorrow night, and I’m going to bring some ideas I picked up at Language Impact. There are a couple I’d like to use in the English part (his English is better than my Korean, so he needs different methods), but there are a lot I’d like to use in the Korean part.

Coming up: More on language exchanges; the full Pimsleur report (thanks to the holidays); and a giveaway I’d like to give away, but should I? Should there be a contest for it? Because I like the idea of a contest, but I haven’t had any wild and crazy ideas about it.

The answer to your question is: Do not use my site to learn a little new Korean every day. I do not even use my site to learn a little new Korean every day. The high-minded part of me hopes that my site will be useful to my readers; the middle-minded parts likes that I have some record of my language-learning journey; the low-minded part knows that a lot of blogging is narcissism for introverts, and thus appreciates “great site!”.

You mentioned that you’ve been in Korea for seven months already and are just now going to learn the language. Kudos to you (and all the rest of you out there like Colin). I like Seth Godin’s recent take on the best time to get started. You’re doing great.

You didn’t mention if you already know how to read hangul. If you don’t, you can find several good resources in the Resources section. Pick one, and have a good weekend.

I’ve already given you more than you’ve asked for, and I’ll stop there. But I’ve recently changed my own focus, and I plan to post more about it in the near future.

Expats have a thousand reasons for not learning Korean. The first post in this series listed just the first twenty, not counting any of the minor stressors listed in the subsequent paragraph or in the comments.

On the record, more than one Korea blogger has recounted their difficulties in learning the language, difficulties that have nothing to do with the language itself. Off the record, there have been perhaps thousands of conversations over the years covering the same territory. They’re all interesting, in their own way.

Far more interesting, however, are your answers to this question: What are you going to do about it?

Is work getting in the way of learning Korean? What are you going to do about it?

Is your social life preventing you from learning Korean? What are you going to do about it?

Koreans won’t speak Korean to you? What are you going to do about it?

Life is stressful? What are you going to do about it?

Those are some answers I’d like to hear.

Read Part 1.

I know the feeling that you get when you walk out the door and the weather is too cold or too hot or too wet or too dreary. On top of that, you can read the signs but you can’t understand everything; you overhear conversations but have no idea what people are talking about, or if they’re talking about you, or if they’re talking about the weather; you wonder how to pay the bills; you wonder if you’re paying them right; you wonder what the fine print says; you wonder if there’s a better way to do it; you wonder what they’re giving you at the hospital; you wonder whether the taxi driver is ripping you off; you wonder where this bus is going; you wonder why you’re coughing so much; you wonder if you’ll ever get married; you wonder why getting married isn’t all it was cracked up to be; you wonder how to find a marriage counselor in a place like this; you make do with the marriage counselors you do find; you wonder why your director hired your co-worker, because he’s a complete idiot and makes work life harder than it has any right to be; you wonder where your roommate is at three o’clock in the morning; you wander around downtown Seoul for a year before defining a route to Kyobo Bookstore; you wonder how to buy a train ticket, the right train ticket, without a friend to handle translation, because you’d like to do it yourself, this once; you wonder where the best place to buy used furniture is; you wonder why there’s corn on the pizza; you wonder what that smell is; someone speaks Korean to you, and you understand what they said, but the words you need are stuck somewhere in your head, and you can’t pry them loose; and all that isn’t even the half of it. Everything seems new, everything seems different, everything seems uncertain, everything seems hard, and on top of that they expect you to learn the language. Some days (weeks, months, years), you’re just trying to keep your head above water.

I’ve learned over the years that in many respects, managing my life here in the States is not that different than managing my (former) life in Korea. Work, family life, exercise, and sleep take up so much of my time that I wonder how I’ll ever accomplish anything else.

I’ve found that simplicity is a key component in creating the space that I need to not only learn Korean but to work on a couple of other projects. How I learned that is a long, boring story, but the results are clear: I say no a lot; I don’t expect perfection from myself or others (oh all right, I’m still working on that one); I know why I’m doing what I’m doing. Routines are essential, but I can handle flexibility, too.

I’ve learned that life seasons come and go. You’ve just had a baby? Maybe now isn’t the right time to apply yourself to Korean studies. Your boss has you teaching an exhausting schedule for the next couple of months? Perhaps ditto, and give yourself another month to recover. You’ve just moved? Take a couple of weeks to get used to the new neighborhood. You’re burned out? Take care of yourself for a while. Life conspires to make it just plain hard? kangmi will be back later to give you a much-needed kick in the pants.

Read Part 2.