Far

My daughter is on a different continent from me. That's never happened before! I carried her inside my body for nine months (plus two weeks, but who's counting), breastfed her for a year or so, and then it only took her another fourteen years to fly off to another continent without me. They grow up fast, these kids. We drove her to the airport on Sunday; she didn't want us to go in with her. We dropped her off and she met up with her school group (I called her an hour later to make sure she met them OK). By now, she's in London, embarking on a week-long London theater trip. They'll be seeing a different play every day, and some days they'll see two.

I never went on a trip like that as a kid, but when I was in high school I spent a couple weeks at a summer debate camp at Wake Forest University. My parents drove me down there from New Hampshire, but when it was time to return home, I took the Greyhound Bus by myself. I had to make a transfer at the Port Authority terminal in New York City in the middle of the night, and I was terrified.

Later, in college, I used to take Amtrak from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Boston, then take Greyhound to my home in New Hampshire. The train schedule was inconvenient, because I had to leave Charlottesville at some godawful hour in the morning and then had a four-hour layover in D.C.. It was so early that nothing much was open, but I'd put my duffelbag in a locker and set out through the still-mostly-empty streets of D.C., and go to the Botanic Garden, the nearest place I could find that was open at that time. I'd spend an hour or so walking through all the different plant habitats, and then make my way to the National Mall, where the museums were opening up.

I hate to think of my 17-year-old self in Port Authority at 2 a.m., and I cringe when I think of my 21-year-old self walking through nearly empty streets during winter mornings in D.C., but I was fine, nothing bad happened...my darling daughter will be fine. She'll love it and she'll grow up and have the memories, better even than the experience itself.

I used to dread the train trip home from Charlottesville. It was such a hassle, especially that long layover in D.C., when I wanted to be heading home. But it gave me a lifelong appreciation for conservatory gardens. I just love walking through those steamy plant-filled rooms, especially in wintertime.

Huh?

Today is cleaning-lady day, so I had to rush home by 2:00 in the afternoon to let them into the apartment. I made it just in the nick of time, let them in to do their thing, and then changed my clothes because the day had turned hot. I figured I would head to a coffee shop to study, because I don't like being in the apartment while they're cleaning. So I had to speak to them to let them know I was leaving and that there was a snack for them in the kitchen. Simple enough, but when I talk to them, I always want to laugh.

I guess what's funny is that there's two of them, and as I speak, they both look at me with exactly the same expression on their faces: mild surprise and consternation.

Their mouths open just a bit, and they squint in concentration. When I finish saying my piece, there's a brief pause while they consider the auditory input, and then, a second or two later, both their faces break out into smiles of relief as they successfully decipher my strange utterances--I'm speaking their language, but barely.

Heading down in the elevator, on my way out of the building, I go over everything I said, identify the errors, and try to say it correctly. Next week, next week I'll say it right.

Masochist

Went to lunch with some of my classmates, lovely people, but I can't keep up with them linguistically and I felt incredible relief when I could finally head home alone.

Even in English, I'm not great at conversing with people I don't know well. In Korean, it's excruciating. I start feeling like I'm all tangled up in string. This metaphor kept coming to me, as I struggled during the conversation to convey even the simplest ideas. It's like I'm trying to walk across a room--a simple feat--but there's string tangled all around me and I can't get through it. I'm not being suffocated, I'm not being attacked, I'm just being tripped up no matter which way I turn. An ordinary pair of scissors and I could cut through the string; a bit more facility in using the language, and I could manage basic situations like this one.

By the end of our meeting, nothing made sense to me, I just wanted out of there. When I'm studying, I never feel overwhelmed, I never feel like it's hard. But when I try to have a conversation I feel like I'm trying to ride a unicycle backwards while juggling plates. It feels impossible.

Back at my apartment building, I got onto the elevator and ran into my French neighbor. She speaks some English, but I'm not sure how comfortable she is with it. We've had a few short conversations with some communication problems, so I don't like to put her on the spot by talking too much. I had an overwhelming urge to talk to her in Korean, though. I have no idea why!! I mean, I had just escaped with barely a shred of self-respect from a painful Korean ordeal, and here I was, ready to subject myself to more of the same. It's a sickness.

Music to My Ears

My daughter is out in the living room right now studying for a Korean test, reading aloud and memorizing a short dialogue. She's not the most enthusiastic language student, and she especially hates memorizing, but she has really good pronunciation. In fact, she constantly criticizes my pronunciation.

I'm not sure what makes someone good at pronunciation of a foreign language, but in her case she also has a lovely singing voice (none of the rest of us can sing at all) and she's a fantastic mimic.

She used to come home from school and mimic a few of her teachers. It wasn't until my first parent-teacher conferences that I fully grasped the extent of her talent--when a couple of her teachers began talking I wanted to burst out laughing. Her impressions were spot on.

I presume her ability to mimic other people's speech patterns is related to her good Korean pronunciation. I've read that you have to be an actor when you're speaking another language, because you really have to lose your inhibitions and inhabit the other language. So far, I've been too self-conscious to do that. When I speak Korean, I can't really let myself go; I'm a bit of a mumbler.

Speaking of accents, it's really interesting when I only speak to certain people in Korean, and then suddenly I hear them speaking in English. One of my classmates is a native Chinese speaker, also fluent in English, but we've only spoken to one another in Korean. One day she said something in English, and it surprised me so much to hear her Chinese-accented English. The big shocker, though, was when an American student spoke in English one day. Previously, we'd only spoken to one another in Korean, and to hear his flat California English was a shock. Like me, he's a mumbler in Korean, but speaks boldly in English.

Goal

Since I've started reading about foreign language learning, one of the recurring themes is the importance of motivation. Learning a second language is hard, and most people don't succeed in becoming fluent, but of those who do, a strong motivation is key.

Motivation seems like quite a mysterious thing. I'm not really sure what motivates me.

In the beginning, I wanted to learn some Korean because I believed it would make my life easier. I imagined being able to speak to shopkeepers, people on the street, repairmen and deliverymen would simplify my life and make me feel less isolated and helpless while living here.

But once I got going in the language, I realized that in order to communicate anything other than the barest essentials would take many months and even years of study. In my first six months of study, when other people asked me why I was studying the language, I always said it was to make my life more convenient.

Within the last couple months, though, I stopped giving that answer, and now I simply say that it's my hobby. My motivation has changed, but the effort I put into learning has not diminished.

I've been very surprised to discover how interesting it is to learn another language. Sometimes, in a spare moment, I flip open the Korean dictionary that I keep on my kitchen table, and just read an entry at random. I love to read about a new word and read the entire entry, which includes all the different translations for the word and gives sample sentences for each meaning. I don't try to memorize the word and its meanings; I just enjoy spending a few moments reading about the word. Later, if I come across the word again, sometimes I can remember its meaning and sometimes I can't. I like this relaxed approach and I resist memorizing. I do memorize a small amount of vocabulary for my class, but in general I don't find memorizing enjoyable.

Deciding that learning Korean is my hobby has helped me move towards a more self-designed learning plan. I find my class incredibly useful. My teacher this term is really great. But I feel more independent as a learner these days, and not as dependent on the class and teacher. I spend a lot of my study time working on other material. Some things that we cover in class are not interesting to me, so I don't try to learn them, but focus instead on learning other things that appeal to me more.

I think this is one of the ways I've maintained my interest and motivation to learn a language which, after all, is not that practical for my situation. Since I have no external motivation--I don't have to function using Korean, and I don't have close relationships with Korean-speaking people--all my motivation is internal. It's my continuing fascination with the language itself, and my growing proficiency that provides me with the will to open up those books and listen to those language CDs every day.

Changing Direction

It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm experiencing indecision about my blogging life, whether or not to continue, etc. I started blogging so I'd have something constructive to do. Now that I'm learning Korean, I find I have less and less to say about my daily life here. I've been here almost five years, and although I still find many aspects of life here charmingly different and novel, I'm not as interested as I used to be in organizing a blog around those cultural *aha!* moments--those moments of surprise and enchantment, when my cultural assumptions and expectations are jolted by the unexpected. I still get a charge out of living here, but there are other things in my life that take up more of my mental energy lately.

Lately, when I get on the internet, I try to find blogs or articles or discussions about language learning, and especially about English-speakers learning Korean. It's not enough to just study the language, I also feel driven to read about other people pursuing the same interest.

I'm a bit bewildered by my interest in this language. Shortly after arriving in Korea, I began learning Korean with a private tutor. I liked the woman who was teaching me, but learning the language was really hard and not that interesting. I liked the idea of learning it, but I didn't like the actual experience of slogging through it. When I look back at my notes from that time, I realize that she was teaching me lots of great stuff, but somehow it just wasn't penetrating, I wasn't absorbing it, and I didn't get anywhere with the language.

Flash forward to last September, when I was finally so bored, isolated, and discouraged by my lackluster existence that I enrolled in an intensive language course just to give myself something to do, and suddenly I was hooked. Is it simply because I had absolutely nothing else going on in my life, or was there something in particular about language learning that I found compelling?

I just find it a bit strange, in my middle age, to suddenly acquire this interest. I do believe I had quite a bit of interest in French when I was younger, but a series of repeated discouraging experiences, combined with perhaps a misapprehension on my part about what language learning requires, conspired to squelch my interest.

Also, in the last couple years, as I floundered around trying to figure out what to do with my life and my energy, two intriguing possibilities tempted me: crosswords and Scrabble. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I actually toyed with the idea of becoming an expert in either of these. The only thing that stopped me was the realization that it would be rather pointless and non-productive. I admire people who are great at doing something--anything--but I just knew that I would constantly be asking myself what good it would do to be good at Scrabble.

Learning Korean is kind of pointless too, especially at my age, and especially because I won't be living here forever and all the Korean people that I know speak fluent English, so my lame Korean isn't very useful.

Even though I'm living in Korea, the more Korean I learn, the more I realize it's a waste of time learning it. You can get by knowing just a smattering of simple conversational Korean, and for anything more complicated, people at my husband's company can help us. My lower-intermediate or high-beginner level Korean is useful from time to time, but considering that I've worked almost full-time for most of a school-year and paid over $4000 to achieve this pitiful proficiency, it's not really a good investment of time and money. I rarely use the language to do anything useful.

And yet.

So, I'll probably write mostly about my language learning from now on. I'm sure I'll write about other things, too, but I'm just going to give myself permission to drone on and on and on about how fun it is to learn Korean. I realized I was avoiding my blog because I'd rather write about language, but I felt obligated to write about Korea and didn't really feel like doing it.

Consider yourself warned.

Think of the Pigs

I've written before about the recycling program here. Household waste is separated and sent for recycling, and recycling is mandatory. In addition to categories such as paper, plastic, cardboard, glass, and metal, we also separate food waste. If you live in a large apartment complex, as I do, there's a bin where you can deposit all your food scraps and wasted food.

For years, I put all my food waste in there, including bones, eggshells, coffee grounds, tea bags, etc. I even put in dead potted plants, along with their soil, since they are organic waste. I assumed that the foodwaste was used for compost. But then, somewhat recently, maybe a year ago, I started to hear that we shouldn't dispose of bones and other non-edibles, because the food waste is used as feed for pigs!

I read something, somewhere, that specifically said not to throw bones and shells into the food waste, but it didn't explain why. Then some longtime residents told me the food waste is fed to pigs.

Ever since then, I have lamented my history of tossing potted plants and bones into the food waste. I don't know for sure whether pigs really eat the food waste, but if they do, I'm sure they didn't appreciate the houseplants.

This idea that the pigs eat the food waste is always in the back of my mind, and I think of the pigs every time I throw something in the food waste container, which I do several times a day.

When I throw (boneless) meat scraps away, I think, yuck, this meat will be rotten by the time it gets to the pigs.

When I make soup or salad and end up with a sink full of vegetable parings, I survey the heaps of bright, colorful vegetable leavings and think with satisfaction: this will be very good for the pigs.

Once I had to throw away half of a bakery cake that nobody wanted to eat, and I thought: ooh, lucky pigs, they'll love this.

When my husband scrapes the dinner plates into the food waste and lets the paper napkins go in there, too, I tell him indignantly: that food is for the pigs! How would you like napkins in your food?

Like everyone else, I end up with a lot of moldy food in containers in the back of the fridge, and when I clean them all out and end up with a bucket full of reeking, gloppy, gross food, I think sadly: poor pigs aren't going to like this too much.

If I ever found out for sure that pigs don't really eat the food waste, I'd probably be a little disappointed. It would almost be like losing a distant pet (not a close pet that you live with, but a distant one that you know about). Every day, when I throw away food, I think of those pigs and wonder how they'll like my food. They eat what I eat; we have some kind of bond.

Things I Don't Know

In an effort to make language learning relevant and interesting, our teacher endeavors to draw us into conversations to practice speaking.

Some recent topics:

In your country, what time do the banks open and close?
What's the best brand of cars manufactured in your country?
What's the best bank in Korea?
Which colors are most popular/unpopular in your culture? Why?
When your child is sick, can you wash him?
What does your/ your child's name mean?
How do people in your culture wish someone luck on a college entrance test?
Which college would you like your child to attend?

Can you see my problem?

Believe me, I have plenty of trouble with the language--trying to figure out what everyone else is saying, and then trying to formulate an answer takes every one of my brain cells.

But these questions...I can't answer them even in English.

There are so many things we talk about in class that don't make any sense to me because of cultural differences. When the teacher asked me whether I ever washed my child when he was sick, I thought I wasn't understanding the question. She had to repeat the question for me a few times and she later explained that in Korea, one shouldn't wash a sick child. I had no idea, and because of my ignorance on this point, I couldn't comprehend the question.

The first question, about bank opening and closing times, was another one that stumped me. Everyone was talking about opening and closing times for banks, and I couldn't get the gist of the conversation because I kept wondering which bank they were talking about. Turns out, in each of the Asian countries represented by my teacher and classmates, within each country, all banks open and close at exactly the same time. Since this central fact eluded me, the conversation didn't make sense.

I find myself repeatedly answering "I don't know," or "In America, we don't do that." Gets a little old. Today, in answer to the question about which colors are preferred in our home countries, I tried to say that Americans don't like bright green. I was feeling apologetic about not having good answers to so many questions, and decided to take the plunge and put my country down as bright-green-haters. I sort of feel that it's generally an unpopular color, am I right on that?

Claiming that Americans don't like bright green seemed sort of like a lie, but I felt like I had to say something to do my part for classroom cohesion. Unfortunately, the teacher's next question was predictable: "Why?" To which I was forced to give my stock answer, "Mol-la-yo" ("I don't know").

Lame Update

Hmm, it's been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy studying, I guess.

Strangely, it seems I have room for only one thing at a time in my life. Since I started studying Korean, I've stopped doing anything else--haven't been reading, haven't been corresponding regularly with family or friends back home, haven't been maintaining friendships here, and haven't been doing anything much on weekends.

I have a long history of short-term obsessions which usually fizzle out within months. Hence, I am somewhat bemused to find myself still going strong with Korean after eight months. I wouldn't have predicted I'd stick with it this long.

Having devoted so much energy to studying this language for more than half a year, one might expect that I'd be pretty good at it by now. But no. It's different enough from English that progress is very slow.

The U.S. Foreign Service, which trains linguists for foreign service posts all over the world, rates Korean, along with Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, as one of the languages that takes the longest for English speakers to learn to proficiency.

According to that chart, achieving professional proficiency is estimated to take about 2200 class hours--and that's for a person who has already mastered other languages and has been identified as having good aptitude for language instruction and is enrolled in a state-of-the-art language program. They're not talking about people like me who couldn't even handle high school French and keeps flitting around from one language program to the next, never satisfied with what's being offered.

So far I've had about 360 hours of classroom instruction, so if you have a piece of scrap paper handy, you could roughly calculate that I'd spend approximately the rest of my life pursuing professional proficiency. Fortunately, however, I'm only aiming for non-professional semi-competency, so that puts me a bit closer.

One of the things I'm able to do now is read through a page of a kids' early reader, skipping the words I don't know, and getting the gist of the story. Just a few months ago, reading was a word-by-word struggle. Now I can make a bit of headway before I have to resort to the dictionary.

But I went hiking last weekend with my husband and I couldn't read any of the notices posted along the trail: too much unfamiliary vocabulary. If only they would post notices about cars, stores, and traffic--that's the kind of stuff we talk about in class, and it comes in handy everywhere except on hiking trails.