안녕하세요!

안녕하세요!

I hope everyone is having a great Friday night (depending on your time zone). Tonight, I chose to work on my Korean. In my city, this is the Asian language that you should learn before Mandarin, Cantonese, or Japanese. There just so happens to be an influx of Koreans here, especially on my old college campus. The ones I've met have been nothing short of respectful and willing to speak to me in Hangul. There were also a bunch of students at the summer camp which I worked who also were Korean and helped me out. In fact, if it weren't for one, I probably would be more lost than I am now, but we'll get into that more later in this post.

Before I started tonight, I thought I was further than I actually was, so I was disappointed, but now I know I have a long way to go. Tonight's lesson was a 30-minute audio lesson, combined with writing the Romanized pronunciation as well as writing in Korean letters. The speaking wasn't too hard at all. Korean is a very smooth language. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish when a word ends and when another begins (to those who don't know any Korean). But while practicing, it actually makes working on it easier because you don't get caught up in hard K, T, or B sounds. I particularly like saying goodbye!

But I ran into an issue tonight, and it was an issue that I expected. As I told you before, my audio course doesn't teach how to write, so of course, I have a resource to back me up. I have the Berlitz Korean Concise Dictionary: Korean-English/English-Korean. It might be the language, or it might be the dictionary, but there were lots of times where I could NOT find the word I was looking for. In fact, there were times where the word would have about eight definitions, and none of which were the one I was looking for. For instance, the pronunciation I learned for "excuse me" is "Sillyhejiman," and that's probably a bad attempt at Romanization, but that's all I can do, lol. There were some similar looking words, but none were the exact one that I needed, so for some words I only was able to spell (in Korean letters) pieces of the word. And it doesn't help that there are some tiny words at the ends of root words like -ga, -ka, -da, etc. that aren't attached to the words in the dictionary.

Luckily one student from the summer camp I worked at said I could send him a list of the words I couldn't get and that he would translate them for me. That kid is a GODSEND.

Material for tonight: asking for directions, you do/don't speak well, addressing a "you" in for formal way, here, there, not here/not there, and some review from before. Pretty easy stuff.

Korean is definitely one of my favorite languages, and I'm excited to get to the next lesson. I just hope I have a better grasp on the country's letters and spelling.

I've still got Thai, Tagalog, and Vietnamese on my radar...Don't worry!

안녕히 계세요,

Your Favorite Polyglot