Progress with Korean

As my last post indicated, the efforts with Korean for the Learn a Language in Six Weeks are a struggle. But thanks to the wonderful world of blogs, things are going much better. For the first three days, all I could learn was annyeong haseyo. Everything else dropped as fast as it was learned. There were two problems:

My attitude.

My approach.

First, attitude. I came across this post from The Linguist about boatbuilding and motivation, which quoted one of my favorite authors, Saint-Exupéry:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

It was time to stop buying books and looking at them and start getting motivated. I made up a little story in my head. Two spies were leaving the airport in Seoul. One was there to facilitate secret negotiations between the US and an opposition faction. The other was there to stop her. They left the airport and got into cabs, him trying to figure out where she was going and her how to give the slip. Both communicating with cabbies in Korean. Both of them had to settle for speaking a broken Korean to which I can still only aspire, but with a phrasebook and plotpoints I had a vision of what to do with the language that kept me looking at Korean, instead of my watch. Though it would be better if Grisham would just write a novel about someone in Korea, like he did with Italy and The Broker.

Second, approach. Korean is unlike any language I've learned, or at least as far as I can tell. The same has been true of Latin, German, Turkish and Mandarin at different times, so that's fine. But the resources for Korean, let's be candid, aren't very good. So I was delighted when I got to Aspiring Polyglot and found this link to 10,000 sentences (at AllJapaneseAlltheTime.com) I needed a better sense of how Korean works, and everything I find wants to tell me enough verb forms to illustrate the politeness thing, but not enough to get a comprehensive picture. Or to give enough vocabulary that you can't keep track of it, but not enough to make those creative sentences that stick with you. So instead I've been making my own sentence guide. I'm up to twenty-five sentences that I can read aloud from Korean script (all copied from Making out in Korean), and while I'm no closer to suddenly speaking fluently, I've got that all important content floating around in my mind. Hopefully, by the end of the weekend, I'll be closer to 100 sentences and a real basis for starting to do something with this language. I'm much more optimistic about the learnability of Korean, then, than I was the last time I posted.

One important point: While I'm glad for the entries at The Linguist, Aspiring Polyglot and AllJapaneseAlltheTime, I didn't exactly follow the advice or recommendations of any of them. Instead, I modified it a bit to fit my current goals and circumstances. Remember that the best method for learning languages is the one that works for you. So follow the advice of the systems and the pros and your fellow language buffs - there's good advice out there - but remember that you're not trying to test a language system, you're trying to learn a language. If something isn't working for you, it isn't you, it's a clash between you and the system that means it's time to try something new or at least a new variation.