Sometimes My Language Partners Make Me Cry

I <3 my language partners.

I never thought that I would have much to say to two guys who are almost 10 years younger than me, but oddly enough I do.

Having a truly equitable language partner relationship that works effectively for both parties is tricky. It requires a close match not only in terms of skill and ability, but also motivation and personality.  Unfortunately, due to my downright shitty beginner knowledge of Korean, our conversations are considerably more lopsided than I would like.  We definitely speak much more in English than in Korean, although we are trying to speak in Korean practically the whole time, if that makes any sense.

Despite the imbalance in our skill level, things usually go really well.  My language partners are a hoot, despite (and sometimes because of) the language barrier — and yes, I appear quite hilarious to them as well.  I help them with that ever-tricky l-r thing, and they never tire of helping me distinguish between ㄱ, ㄲ, and ㅋ.  I explain to them why they can’t refer to their male friends as their “boyfriends,” and that they have to say “guy friends” or “male friends” instead.  They tell me why I need to be very, very careful when saying the word for “eighteen” (you won’t find that little bit o’ wisdom in a textbook!).

They call me 누나 (nuna, or “older sister”), and I love how Korean that makes me feel.

I ask them what their military service was like, what they want to do after they graduate from college (college tends to end later for Korean males due to the aforementioned military service), and about their girlfriends.  They ask me about my job, about LB, and about life in America.  They are impressed that I listen to “their” music and watch “their” movies, and so we talk about things like the 박재범/2PM scandal and 엽기적인 그녀. We really do manage to have a good time.

And yet occasionally, usually when they are talking about their families or what it was like growing up in Korea, I get these HUGE! MASSIVE! specks of dust (dust, I tell you, DUST!!!) in my eyes that make them red and drippy and I have to excuse myself for a moment to go to the ladies’ 화장실.

Intact Korean families will do that to me every time.

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Alone in the restroom, I try and do the kind of deep breathing that is usually not advisable in public restrooms.  I press a damp paper towel to my eyes and remind myself that I do have gains alongside my losses.  That both my gains and my losses are real — deliciously real, achingly real, but real nonetheless.

That although they are real, they cannot be weighed or counted or pitted against each other.

And then I go back to my waiting language partner, who by now is surely wondering about the dangerous air quality here in America, and…

…we talk some more.

Learning A Language

Learning a language is a very messy and fragile process.  Especially for adults who are electively learning a chosen language for the first time, it is easy to get discouraged and give up — and especially if there aren’t many resources out there to begin with.

For myself, I have found it helpful to do the following:

1)  Expect progress to be slow. I tend to be, by nature, a very impatient person.  Learning Korean for me is sometimes fun, but it is also very frustrating how little I can say (or be understood) after all the time that I have put into it thus far.  If can manage to lower my expectations, then I can usually reduce the frustration, enjoy it more, and (ironically) make more progress.  I’ve used the phrase “language journey” on this blog before, but more specifically, it’s like hiking the Appalachian Trail — not sitting back for a fast zip on the Concorde.

2)  Stop looking for the magic bullet. This is related to the first point, in that it has to do with managing expectations.  As I type this, I have behind me a whole shelf full of Korean language materials.  For a while, each time a new textbook or audio tape came out, I bought it with the hope that it would enable me to achieve perfect fluency in record time.  (Of course, this wasn’t helped by products with titles like “Korean in a Flash!” or that promised “You’ll be speaking Korean in 24 hours!”)  The truth is, there is no magic bullet.  There is no single solution.  I have had much better luck in combining all of these books and products, and piecing together my own kind of textbook that is uniquely suited to my learning needs.  Even still, this little home-made “textbook” is only one piece of my overall learning strategy.

3)  Don’t lose the critical thinking skills. As with other areas of my life, when learning Korean I try to read/communicate widely, think critically about everything, and then decide what I want to believe and do.  I think this is especially important when trying to decide what is the best way to learn something.  It should be fairly obvious that we all learn in different ways and styles, and yet I frequently hear and read assessments of various learning methods that are couched as universal generalizations, rather than individual testimonies.  If something worked (or didn’t work) for you, then fine, explain why it worked (or didn’t work) for you.  But if it worked, don’t promise other people unrealistic results.  If it didn’t work, please be considerate and leave the door open for someone else to give it a try.

Critical thinking is still important during the learning process itself — even when learning from native speakers of your chosen language.  I regularly ask myself all sorts of questions about both the teacher and the content before I let something I’ve been told settle too deeply into my brain.  There are many great resources out there, and include both teachers and other learners.  But it’s always important to think not just about about people’s credentials and experience, but also their priorities, goals, potential biases, and — this is important — their limitations.

4)  Seek out other learners and learning communities. This is probably the hardest thing on the list for me to do, for reasons both situational and personal.  But I’m realizing how important it is when learning a language, especially speaking, and so am trying to figure out how I can do more of it.  Online resources such as mailing lists, forums, social networking sites, chat software, video cams, Skype, etc. are breaking down some of the geographical barriers.  Now I’m mostly working on the personal ones.

As I’ve mentioned before, my motivation and drive to study Korean tends to come and go.  It has picked up again fairly recently, and so hopefully I’ll be blogging about it more in future posts.  (Though as longtime readers will know, the act of writing that statement pretty much guarantees that I won’t say anything more about it for a very long time!)

열심히 공부하세요!

Korean Language FAIL

Last night, LB and I went to a Korean restaurant.  One of the 반찬 (side dishes) was 오이 김치 (cucumber kimchi), which happens to be one of my favorites.  I immediately scarfed down the entire dish, and then realized that LB might like to have some too.

So when the waitress came back, I asked her, in exactly these words: “Can we have some more 오이 김치, please?”

And she gave me the blank “am-I-supposed-to-understand-what-you-just-said?” look that I really should be used to by now.

“오이 김치,” I repeated.  But the blank look continued.

“Cucumber,” LB told her helpfully.

“Ah, cucumber,” she responded.  She smiled, and immediately took away the dish to go get more.

(For the record, I knew she spoke Korean because I had heard her speaking fluent Korean to other staff and customers only a few minutes before.  Nope, this little Korean language FAIL is all due to my ultra-crappy pronunciation.)

*sigh*

The Language Journey of Lex-B

I’m not sure how exactly I found Lex-B’s blog, but when I did find it, there were several posts that resonated with me — some quite deeply.  The blogger, Alexis (Korean name 이윤선), is a Korean adoptee who grew up in Australia.  Currently she is learning Korean, and in her post on the effect of language on identity, she tells this story:

A few weeks ago, I was filling in for a school’s usual Italian teacher. Now, I don’t know any Italian. So I’d just prepared some random literacy lessons to give the kids. Anyway, at recess (while I was on playground duty), a kid came running up to me. He was Asian and I could tell he was at least partly Korean, and I knew he could tell the same for me. His first questions were “do you know any other languages other than Italian?”. I told him I knew no Italian, but I knew a bit of Korean. Well… his face just lit up like a light had gone on inside his head or something. Immediately, he was like “me too! Me too! My Mum’s Korean!!”. Suddenly, we had this little bond… everytime I see him now, he says hello to me in Korean, or if I have his class, he says thankyou to me in Korean when I give out worksheets or something.

This small interaction with a child the exact same age as I was when I began feeling awful about myself, has made me feel something I never really have before. For once, something inside me matches what’s on the outside! Without knowledge of Korean, I usually cringe when people ask me if I’m Korean, because I’m so afraid they’re going to say something to me and I won’t understand, or they’ll ask me to say something and I’ll have to tell them I don’t know anything. And that’s when the influx of old shame and embarrassment comes back to haunt me.

[...]

I know it might seem small, but knowing some Korean has made a huge difference on my life already. I actually like the feeling that part of what’s now inside me matches the outside of me. That I can say to people that I have knowledge of what they can only see of me, instead of wondering, then going home and wishing I was something else entirely. I suppose it’s just a bit sad that it’s come so late in life and I’ve taken this long to stop pretending…

(emphasis added)

Simply put, this is a huge part of the reason why I am trying to learn Korean.  As Alexis points out in the title of her post, language is intricately tied to identity.  And yet, language is frequently ignored or dismissed by adoptive parents as too difficult or unimportant, often in favor of more “fun” things like fan dancing or martial arts.*  Interestingly, on my trips back to Korea, I didn’t walk down a street in Seoul and see people doing fan dances or tae kwon do.  What I did see were lots and lots of people speaking lots and lots of Korean.

As I commented on the original post, my feelings on learning Korean as a Korean adoptee are a mixed bag.  Part of me does feel the connection that she writes about, where what’s inside my head is starting to match my outward appearance.  (This is also helped by a selective but steady diet of K-dramas, K-Pop, and of course, K-food!)

But as Alexis mentioned elsewhere on her blog, Korean adoptees’ interest in Korea goes beyond interest in any random country.  It’s worlds different from people who aren’t Irish but are interested in Ireland and things Irish, or (get ready to gag) manga-obsessed white males who fetishize are fascinated by Japan and all things Japanese.

For us, there is a very real reason to feel connected to Korea:  It’s the country that we would have grown up in save for that tiny detail of being adopted to another country.  Note that this fact is entirely separate from any conversations about the pros/cons of international adoption and whether we should have grown up there or not.  And it is this fact that complicates an already-difficult learning process, should we choose to (try and) learn the language of the country where we were born.

I’m not afraid of hard work, and obviously learning a new language requires plenty of that.  But frequently while studying Korean, I’m reminded that if I had grown up in Korea I would have learned Korean from hearing it spoken to me as I grew up, rather than from books and tapes. Adoption itself challenges the entire concept of birthright, but I still can’t forget that the Korean language is something that could have been mine from birth.  (Of course, I also think about how I would be struggling with English right now if I had grown up in Korea, which is a post by itself.)

Anyway, I’ve written several posts already about my own “language journey,” but Alexis writes in more detail about hers at http://lex-b.blogspot.com.  I encourage folks to check it out!

*Obviously I’m not saying that cultural dances or martial arts aren’t important aspects of culture.  I think they can be, and certainly offer some benefits that language can’t offer.  I just think that when adoptive parents are trying to give their children identity-building tools, they usually ignore (or severely underestimate) the importance of language.

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Cramming

The school that holds the Korean language classes that I’ve been going to is on spring break right now, so there was no Korean class this week. I was actually really disappointed, because in some ways I feel like I’m cramming for a test by trying to learn as much Korean as possible before we leave. I think I know more Korean than when I went last time — but really,

Full Disclosure

Recently I found myself skimming an article that talked about hidden social identities — groups or statuses that we identify with in ways that are not as obvious as gender or belonging to a single race usually are.

The authors talked about people’s ability and decision to “pass” as a member of a different group than the one they usually identify with, and cited the examples of sexual orientation, certain disabilities, and being of mixed race. Although I do think that being adopted is different from (and sometimes additive to) these examples, I’ve been intrigued by

The Language Journey and Adoption

I apologize in advance for the cheesy “journey” cliché.

Recently I’ve been thinking of learning a language as being more like a journey than a finite, concrete goal that I either reach or I don’t. No matter what I set as my proficiency goals, that bar can always go higher. If I think of learning Korean as a journey, I am more likely to look back and see how far I’ve come — not that it’s very far, but I do know more Korean than… well, someone who doesn’t know any. (Yeah, I know I’m resorting to a kind of linguistic downward social comparison here, but only so I don’t give up completely in frustration.)

I’ve already written a bit about my attempts to learn Korean, and regular readers may recall that I set it as one of my goals for 2008. (Incidentally, it’s also the only goal that I am making any kind of progress towards, but oh well.) Although my more recent attempts to learn Korean have involved my working through a Korean textbook on my own, a few nights ago I ventured out of my study (and my comfort zone) to check out a free Korean class that is offered through the Korean Student Association of a nearby university.

This is a completely student-run program, with both undergrads and graduate students volunteering to teach beginning-level Korean classes to the general public. Depending on how much interest there is sometimes they offer classes above the beginning level, and this time they are offering an Intermediate class. Based on the one class I’ve been to so far it seemed closer to an advanced beginner class than a true intermediate one, but it seemed to fit where I was pretty well. I don’t know how consistently people will show up, but of the people that were there the other night there was a wide range of abilities among us, and I was pleased to discover that I wasn’t the farthest behind. I happened to be sitting between two white males, and I think that I knew more than one of them but less than the other. (And it was difficult, but I tried very hard not to assume they were there because their girlfriends were Korean.)

As I said, the classes are free and completely student-run, so everything was really informal and there are no grades. There is no textbook, just handouts, and at the end of the class we watched a few scenes from a Korean movie. As with English, just because someone is a native speaker doesn’t mean that they know how to teach their own language, and on a few occasions the grammar explanations were a bit confusing. Still, I got a little much-needed speaking practice, and even though I was already familiar with most of the expressions that they were teaching that night I did learn several new things. So I do feel like progress was made, even if it was only a few small steps on the long language journey road.

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Of course, for adoptees who are learning the language of their birth country, this journey is much more complex because of the emotional issues that arise repeatedly along the way.

The back row of the class the other night was filled with native Korean speakers, but unlike in my first class, they seemed to be there mainly as reference backups for their friends (the teachers). Occasionally they chimed in to try and clarify things… or when they couldn’t help themselves.

One of the expressions that we were reviewing was “to try doing something” (-어/아 보다), and the example sentence on the handout was “Why don’t you try going to Gyeongju [경주에 가 보세요]“. The teacher asked us to create our own sentences using this expression for a place that we wanted to suggest that someone visit, and White Male #1 responded by suggesting France (which in Korean is pronounced more like puh-ran-suh). I was next, and I suggested visiting Daegu. This was greeted by loud murmurings from the peanut gallery in the back of the room, and when I turned around one of the people exclaimed in a surprised voice, “Daegu is my hometown!”

Before I could think about it I responded “It’s mine too,” and then I promptly spent the next ten minutes thinking about what I really wanted to say:

“Wait, I lied, well not lied exactly, but it’s complicated, I might have been born in Daegu but I’m really not sure, it could have been a surrounding town, and at any rate I didn’t grow up there because I was adopted, and I actually think of my hometown as this small town here in the U.S. that I’m sure you’ve never heard of, and by the way, do you know anyone who might know anything about a newborn baby girl that was brought to the White Lily orphanage in the mid 1970’s?”

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to say that in Korean.

These days, I am…

… not very articulate.

… dreaming of faraway places.

… rooting for Obama.

… struggling to learn Korean.

… (still) watching Delightful Girl Choon Hyang.

… thoroughly sick of this weather.

… trying to kick my daily caffeine habit.

… tired of thinking about adoption.

… jealous of anyone who has the luxury of not thinking about adoption.

… researching digital cameras.

… impatient.

… craving 순두부 찌개.

… full of contemplation.

… frustrated that I can’t get any of my thoughts into a coherent written form.

… resigned to sharing a list of Facebook-like statuses and calling it a blog post.

Korean Language Materials Review – Textbooks

(This post is exactly what the title says, and probably won’t interest that many people. But if you’re trying to learn Korean and are looking for a textbook, I hope it’s at least a little helpful.)

For a long time I was looking for the perfect Korean textbook, thinking that if I just had the right book then the whole process of learning Korean would be easier. Obviously this perfect book does not exist, and I eventually stopped looking. But not before buying several of the books available at the time, a few of which I am reviewing here: