Language Class

I've always been good at learning languages, but trying to learn Korean on my own has been frustrating and difficult. I thought maybe it was just because I'm getting older and languages get harder to learn as you get older. I thought I wasn't really learning anything at all here because my language is at a frustratingly low level.

Today I went to my first Korean language class, and discovered I'm not as bad as I thought. I think my linguistic training is paying off, because it is not difficult for me to grasp the different sounds of Korean that other people struggle with. Training in phonetics all those years in college was worth it, even if the degree is rather useless for getting a job.

Another thing that has helped is the alphabet. I know that in order to learn how to pronounce things correctly I couldn't romanize everything and just get by, because the roman alphabet doesn't have characters for all the sounds and that would just make things harder in the end. So I jumped into learning the alphabet a couple of months before I got here. I am glad I did. Knowing the alphabet has been immeasurably useful. Even though I didn't know a word of Korean, I could sound out what the packages at the store said, and there are a lot of English loanwords in Korean. So if it's written in hangul like this "아이스 카푸치노" But I read it out loud and it sounds like "ah-ee-sah ka-pu-chi-no" I can tell that I am looking at an Iced Cappuccino.

So today in the class I was the only new person who didn't get pulled from the beginner class to the baby beginner class for alphabet lessons. I thought maybe I'd made a mistake looking at the dialog we were going to read, but once everybody else started reading I realized they were all about the same as me, some worse some better at reading. We went through it line by line and dissected a brief conversation about what day someone's birthday was. I felt like I learned more in that hour long class than I had studying books by myself for a couple of months. Having someone else there to say things and explain made it feel effortless to absorb the language, the feeling I've always had when studying foreign languages. I don't feel like I've lost the ability to pick things up anymore. So I will definitely return to the class next week.